José Clemente Orozco (Mexican 1883-1949)

Although paintings like The City (lot 54) explored themes of social welfare, other works from Orozco's New York series abstracted further from the city, reflecting more philosophically on the lived experience of modernity. "One of Orozco's masterpieces from this series is Subway Post, which translates precisionist contrast into a dense chiaroscuro," Dawn Ades has observed. "The dramatically lit surface of the concrete post makes this vertical slab into a mysterious object, which invests the 'solid plastic structure of great intricacy' with a metaphysical dimension."(1) A haunting, almost sinister image of the city's elevated train tracks, Subway Post mediates the artist's emotional response to New York's modern structures. Orozco often grumbled about the train, decrying it as blight on the landscape, but he was nevertheless fascinated by its technology, painting over and over again its modern lines. A collective reflection of the artist's ambivalence toward the city, the New York paintings stand on their own as a moving testament to the turbulent beginnings of the modern movement. "If his oil paintings of the New York period are but a footnote to his great achievements as a mural painter," Ades concludes, "they are nonetheless among the most living examples of modern (easel) painting."(2)

1) D. Ades, "Orozco and Modern (Easel) Painting: New York, 1927-34," in José Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927-1934, Hanover, N.H., Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 2002, 248.
2) Ibid., 259.