Jose Clemente Orozco
Mexican, (1883-1949)
Basurero (Scavengers), 1935
lithograph, ed. 83/100
signed and numbered in pencil lower margin, framed.

Together with Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, Jose Clemente Orozco was part of the early 20th c. trio of Mexican Mural Renaissance painters who made literally massive works portraying the human condition on enormous walls across Mexico City and elsewhere. Of these three major painters, Orozco was the most complex, and he preferred to promote the poor, various workers and various types of peasants.

This dramatic black and white lithograph features a dozen or so scavengers in a wide variety of different positions. One crawls across the foreground in search of something small, one sits nearby watching him and next to what might become a fire pit, and an elderly woman is seen laying down within a makeshift tent--and her weary face looks the most desperate of the crowd. The middle ground features another nine figures: a large woman stands in the center of a group who are mostly facing us, and two children and an adult man from that circle have their backs to us. The background and back middle ground include more figures: a man who has been successful in his hunt for twigs or firewood that he carries on his back, another man who bends over gathering something, and a third man in overalls looks out over a valley and toward some dismal plateaus. All of these people represent the Mexican poor who might have been forced back into Mexico during the Mexican Repatriation (Repatriación mexicana) reflecting the Great Depression in the North. Folks are out scavenging a field in desperate search of food remains after a harvest. The scene includes three makeshift tents (or hovels). The human faces in view appear weathered and exhausted as reflections of life in rural Mexico in the 1930s.
13 1/2 x 17 inches (visible)