Paisaje mexicana (Mexican Landscape)

Orozco temporarily left Mexico for the United States in 1927 as the post-revolutionary climate turned increasingly chaotic. Militantly conservative sectors reacting against the government's anticlerical measures ignited the Cristero Rebellion (1926-29), while some of Orozco's friends faced official persecution for their leftist labor politics. Whereas Diego Rivera depicted scenes of expectant peasants glowing with the promise of the revolution, Orozco saw victims of relentless warfare facing a bleak future. As in many of his other lithographs, here Orozco merges the Mexican people with their surrounding environment, going so far as to make of both a single "Mexican Landscape."