José Clemente Orozco, Call to Revolution and Table of Universal Brotherhood (Struggle in the Orient), 1930–31 (detail). Photo by Fernanda Kock/Galo Studios. Courtesy of The New School Art Collection.
José Clemente Orozco’s first experience in the United States was colored by Jim Crow–era violence. At the border entrypoint of Laredo, Texas, guards burned 60 of the young artist’s drawings. This was 1917; it could have been worse. At least 124 people of Mexican descent were lynched in Texas between 1911 and 1920. Orozco, once allowed entry, made for the relative safety of San Francisco and New York, where he eked out a destitute existence for three years.
By the time he was commissioned to paint a series of murals at the New School for Social Research, in December 1930, Orozco had become a leading figure in what we know today as the Mexican Muralist movement. The movement had flourished in the wake of the country’s revolution with vital support from the new Obregón administration, and won global fame for painters like Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Reflecting later on the New School commission, Alvin Johnson, the university’s first president, recalled, “What could have been my feeling when Orozco, the greatest mural painter of our time, proposed to contribute a mural. All I could say was, ‘God bless you. Paint me the picture. Paint as you must. I assure you freedom!’”
Orozco would have been acutely aware of the racial politics of the United States at the time. At home, Mexican newspapers reported extensively on the Jim Crow lynchings of Black and brown Americans; and by now he’d lived in the country, experiencing its racism firsthand. Orozco must have seen the New School commission as a unique opportunity to speak directly to the urgency of different races of humanity coming together, as suggested by the section of the New School fresco he titled “Call to Revolution and Table of Universal Brotherhood.”
The men at the table—Black, white, yellow, red and brown—sitting side by side, elbow to elbow, present a tableau of interracial solidarity. At the head of the table sit an Indigenous Mexican, an African American, and Zionist painter Reuven Rubin (as identified by art historian Diane Milliotes). On the left side of the table are a Chinese man, a Tartar, and a Sikh—identities telegraphed by their dress—as well as two recognizable white Americans: art critic Lloyd Goodrich and the Dutch American poet Leonard Charles Noppen. On the right side of the table sit an African man, the French philosopher Paul Richard, and another Asian man. On the table is an open book, its blank pages ready to receive the written proclamations of all those present.
The table is depicted in an angular space that looks quite similar to the modernist room where the mural itself is installed. This near–trompe l’oeil effect may be a tribute to the utopian possibilities of modernism itself, as exemplified by the university’s new home in Joseph Urban’s stark International Style building on 12th Street.
No doubt aware that his vision of disparate races gathered in brotherhood in a large-scale public mural would unsettle American audiences, Orozco offset his progressive vision of race with a more conventional image of peace and beauty: a rainbow, located in the foyer in front of the mural room. In my mind, it was intended as a form of sweetness—known in Spanish as una dulzura—a conciliatory gift of tenderness, intended to make the radical imagery on the other side of the foyer’s wall more palatable, easier to digest.
Orozco’s rainbow reminds me of the colors found in the mural of Tepantitla, located in the pre-Hispanic mega-city Teotihuacan (“City of the Gods,” as the Aztecs called it). The site is just a 30-minute bus ride from today’s Mexico City. Painted around 500 CE, the Tepantitla mural depicts a “Great Goddess,” possibly the patron goddess of the ancient city itself. The mural is enormous—24 feet high by 9 feet wide—and painted in a rainbow of colors: reds, greens, blues, and turquoises.
These colors were native to the Americas. The reds were created courtesy of the cochineal insect, which feeds on prickly pear cacti and produces red carminic acid to ward off predators; Indigenous people in Puebla, Tlaxcala and Oaxaca discovered that when boiled, dried, and ground, the body of the insect would produce a deep red powder—perfect for paints and dyes. The blues, known today as “Maya Blue,” were made with dye from the leaves of the anil plant; the greens were made from the rich-green malachite stones; the turquoises from the iridescent azurite. After the Spanish conquest in 1521, these quintessentially American hues were imported to the Old World. Cochineal was more vibrant than any red dye in the Old World, and became a major source of wealth for the Spanish Crown and the Mesoamerican region’s most valued export after silver. The color particularly delighted the Catholic Church: Finally, the elaborate vestments of cardinals could be bathed in potent, unequivocal red.
In his rainbow, Orozco takes part in the legacy of Indigenous art in the Americas. The artist may not have visited the Great Goddess before he painted the New School mural (Tepantitla wasn’t excavated until the 1940s), but he had been deeply engaged with Mexican artistic traditions since his studies at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City, where his teacher Gerardo Murillo, also known as Dr. Atl, encouraged him to focus on Mexican subject matter and culture. The rainbow is a flash of creative vibrance against the earth tones of most of the mural, which allude to the endless labor of the land itself.
The rainbow is the only area in Orozco’s mural to feature such intense, assertive color, and it initially may strike a viewer as incongruent with the mural’s more strident imagery. Yet adding una dulzura at the entry point of the artwork was a critical decision, one that foregrounds human creativity within Orozco’s celebration of revolutionary politics. It’s hard to imagine “The Table of Universal Brotherhood” without it.
This essay is part of a series of interdisciplinary responses to Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco’s 1931 mural cycle A Call to Revolution and Table of Universal Brotherhood. The mural, one of The New School’s earliest commissioned artworks and the only surviving permanently installed public example of classic Mexican fresco painting in New York City, is currently the subject of a multi-year conservation project that will see its surface restored and environmental conditions stabilized for years to come. While conservators prepare to gently treat the efflorescence clouding Orozco’s imagery, Public Seminar has invited scholars from across The New School to look at the artwork with fresh eyes.
The preservation effort has been made possible by funding from the Mellon Foundation, Frankenthaler Climate Initiative, and the Terra Foundation for American Art.
