El requiem

José Clemente Orozco was one of the greats of Mexican muralism. This series of lithographs, printed in the late 1920s, is based on a set of drawings that Orozco was commissioned to make in 1926 as illustrations for a book about the Mexican Revolution, to be published in the United States. The brutality of Orozco’s compositions shows his dark and tragic vision of the revolution, which led to the series becoming known as “Horrores de la Revolución (Horrors of the Revolution).” The artist selected four of the less violent drawings to be printed as lithographs. Orozco’s Mexico is not a triumphant, unified nation after the revolution; rather, it is a land of people struggling to survive in the shadow of violence and oppression.