Artists You Should Know: José Clemente Orozco

My friend Rose, who recently checked in to see if I was still breathing, mentioned that the Mexican Muralists were "underrepresented" at the site. Rose is so polite that way. None of them were profiled, as she well knew. So I asked her who she'd choose to go first. "Oh, anyone," she said (raising my hopes for Diego Rivera), "except Diego Rivera. Rivera's expected. Rivera's too obvious. Do somebody else." All right, then. "Orozco" comes before "Siqueiros", whether we're talking about left-wing artists or the phone directory.

In any case, Orozco interests me in his approach to being left-wing. He wrote often and intelligently, and read widely on the struggles for human rights in other cultures. He was, perhaps due to his physical handicaps, a man who kept to himself - yet his works tend to smack a person in the eyes and demand attention. And I really enjoyed learning that, in his 60s, he participated in an artistic "raid" to restore a Diego Rivera mural that had had parts of it painted over by right-wing types. We could probably all hope to be that energized, about something, in our Golden Years. Hey - thanks, Rose.