Into the Blue

José Clemente Orozco had labored five months on his new mural—and never laid a brush on it. The owlish Mexican master spent his evenings hunched in a kitchen chair in his studio, under a single powerful lamp, drawing pictures. Mornings he would go out to the brand-new government normal school to work, by remote control, on the painting itself.

The mural, on a concave wall in the school's open-air theater, covered a thousand square feet. Standing on the stage in front of it and flailing his arms like an orchestra conductor, Orozco "painted" by means of shouted instructions to half a dozen agile young artists in bosun's chairs. At last, one morning, he spread his arms wide; the mural was finished and the perspiring painters were free to come down and look at what Orozco had done.

They saw no skeletons, wicked priests, musclebound heroes, firing squads or snarling prostitutes—none of the familiar Orozco trademarks. The mural looked more like a blueprint for a distillery than social propaganda. Orozco had gone abstract with a vengeance, using red streaks and dashes to represent strife, black for death, white for purity and blue for triumph. An eagle and a snake, which also appear in Mexico's flag, dimly inhabited the bright chaos. Struggling up past them into the blue was a pair of lonely human legs. To reflect the sunlight, Orozco had embedded bits of glass into the concrete wall, and added strips of bronze and stainless steel to accent his lines.

Belittling the plastic experiments of his fellow Mexican muralists, Orozco once remarked that he could paint with anything, even mud. But Orozco had been mighty particular about the materials for this picture, brazenly borrowing his method from the men he had once criticized. Mixed with ethyl silicate (a chemical binder used in making industrial plaster molds), his paints were more durable than car enamel. Rain splashed down on the mural every day last week, but failed to wash anything away.