Jose Orozco is one of the greatest Mexican avant-garde painters. He studied at the San Carlos Academy in Mexico City, and since he was very young, he was a plastic interpreter of the revolution; as we can see in the political and social topics developed in great mural compositions.
             He gave these ideas a heroic style, based on realism with an expressionist character, consciously linked to the old Mexican artistic traditions, violently dynamic and widely manufactured. He was born in Ciudad Guzmán (Zapotlán el Grande), Jalisco, in 1883; he died in Mexico City in 1949. Together with his family, he moved to Guadalajara and then to the country's capital, arriving in 1890. Still being a child, he met José Guadalupe Posadas, and his pictures were what made Orozco take interest in painting.
             He attended some drawing classes at the Academy. He studied agriculture (3 years in San Jacinto) and high school. He finally came back to San Carlos and stayed there from 1906 to 1910. From this year to 1916 (when he presented his first individual exhibition at the Biblos Bookstore) he drew caricatures for El Hijo del Ahuizote; he was part of the illustrator staff of La Vanguardia (Orizaba, 1914); he painted watercolor and oil pictures reproducing, in a synthetic way "the stinking shadows of closed rooms", after his own expression; a series of drawings with scenes of the revolution, and his first painting of large dimensions: "The last Spaniard forces honorably evacuating the San Juan de Ulúa Castle" (1915).
             In 1917, he traveled to the United States, and when he came back, he worked on some pictures, especially "Soldier women", "Combat", and the portrait of his mother.
             When the renaissance of the mural painting began in 1922, Orozco reserved for himself the walls of the large patio at the National High School, a former jesuitic college, San Ildelfonso. His first compositions were: "Elements", "Man fighting against nature", "Man falling", "Chri...