By locating the production of this mural within a particular moment in postrevolutionary Mexico and attending to the political significance of its venue, the essay suggests that Orozco's image might best be understood as a critique of academic allegory in general, and more specifically, a critique of the renewal of Porfirian civic rhetoric with the completion of the Palace of Fine Arts.
By interrogating Orozco's gendered iconography in this way, I argue we are better able to understand how female allegory, public art, and the nation-state were being articulated in postrevolutionary Mexico, thereby enabling an appreciation of both the insights and limits of Orozco's gendered iconography. Within the scholarship on Orozco there exists a tacit consensus about the artist's misogyny. So apparent is this attribute of his oeuvre that it barely requires argumentation, so obvious, it merits no real interrogation, so accepted, it can be tossed off as an aside en route to more important analytic pursuits.
Leaving aside for the moment that one could query with equal criticality the alternative visions of woman one finds in the work of Siqueiros and Rivera, I want to interrogate this consensus one that I am implicated in asboth a scholar and a teacher.
With this question in mind, I begin with one of the most vivid examples of Orozco's purported misogyny, his fresco Catharsis. Commissioned by the Mexican government for the newly completed Palace of Fine Arts, this mural monumentalizes some of the most repulsive images of women within the Western canon. Catharsis was Orozco's first public fresco after his return to Mexico from the US, and it represents the culmination of much of what he had accomplished there.
Formally it benefits from the experiments in scale, technique, and composition he was able to undertake at Pomona College, the New School, and Dartmouth College, respectively. Thematically, it elaborates motifs that first appeared and evolved in that work as well. Most significantly, the articulation of sexuality and technology in Catharsis is indebted to his encounter with the cultural effects of industrial modernity in depression-era New York.
