War has inspired artists since Homer. It is also true that warfare has been destroying art ever since.
The history of artworks lost to plunder and intentional destruction is a long and sorry tale. From the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, the demolition of the Temple during the Siege of Jerusalem through the vandalizing of cathedrals during the Protestant Reformation and the bombing campaigns of World War II, the list of great art lost in war goes on and on.
Colonial conquest has usually involved pillaging and destroying the art monuments of the losers. In 1562, Bishop Diego de Landa casually reports the burning of great libraries of Mayan illustrated book treasures in Yucatán: “Hallamosles grande numero de libros destas sus letras, y porque no tenian cosa en que no uviesse supersticion y falsedades del demonio se les quemamos todos.” [“…as they did not contain anything in which there was not superstition and falsehoods of the devil, we burned them all.”] In the twenty-first century, the Taliban dynamited the Buddhas of Bamyan in Afghanistan, and ISIS demolished the Roman temple of Palmyra because they were ‘idols.’
Although not on the scale of the bombing of Dresden and Tokyo during World War II, the Mexican Revolution also destroyed art and lives.
One crime against Mexican art occurred in the U.S. Customs office on the Laredo end of the International Bridge. It was 1917, and the Mexican Revolution was just winding down.
José Clemente Orozco
A young artist, José Clemente Orozco, had decided that Mexico City would not be the safest place for someone who had supported the defeated Carranza faction. He’d already lost his left hand, his hearing, and much of his vision to an accidental fireworks explosion and realized that he might preserve what he had left of life and limb outside a civil war zone.
Orozco was thirty-four and had already made a name for himself as an illustrator and painter. Inspired by the maestro Guadalupe Posada, whose calaveras he’d watched being created as a boy, Orozco was famous for his anti-government political engravings printed in La Vanguardia.
His mentor, Gerardo Murillo “Doctor Atl,” had helped promote his work as a painter, and Orozco’s early Casa de Lágrimas bordello scenes had appeared in shows. In 1916 he’d had a one-man show at the Librería Biblos. As with many artists whose work is ahead of contemporary taste, the professional art establishment had nothing good to say about these paintings.
Joaquín Piña, a journalist Orozco had worked with on the magazine El Ahuizote, had seen which way the wind was blowing for artists on the wrong side of the revolution and escaped to San Francisco to write for the Spanish language newspaper La Crónica. Piña wrote to his old colleague and friend suggesting that Orozco move to San Francisco, too. They could sell his paintings and there would be plenty of work for him as an illustrator.
Prudently, Orozco shut down the studio in Mexico City and packed up a hundred paintings in crates to take with him to the United States. They were to be his grubstake for what he hoped would be prospecting in a California gold mine.
Imagine the near-sighted artist in wire-rims crossing the old iron bridge (the one that washed out in 1932) clutching documents in his one good hand. How many maleteros or burros or carts would it have taken to get all his baggage, those large crates of paintings across town from the Nuevo Laredo train station and then over the old bridge? It must have looked like a safari caravan.
Perhaps officials were on the alert for faccionalistas coming over to conspire to invade of northern Mexico from South Texas. Agents watching the bridge had heard the battle of Nuevo Laredo just two years before and watched the retreating army set fire to the city. No one would have forgotten the violent threat to Anglos recently promulgated in the hair-raising Plan de San Diego.
There were German agents as well as American draft-dodgers with second thoughts looking to sneak back home.
Maybe an agent was just having a bad day.
In 1917 Laredo bridge watchers were used to seeing unusual human spectacles. Exiles from Mexico had been streaming north and crossing the bridge carrying children in one arm and whatever possessions could be bundled together in the other. There were wealthy caciques with their extended families, clients, and servants, priests and nuns, wounded soldiers, and contrabandista agents.
But the artist with a shock of jet-black hair standing straight up above his face’s intense look caught their attention. As Octavio Paz remarked, “Orozco never smiled in his life.”
When he dictated his memoirs to his wife Margarita in 1942, published first serialized in the newspaper Excelsior, Orozco still remembered the events in Laredo with bitterness. Here is his versión of what happened:
“En 1917, no encontrando en México un ambiente favorable para los artistas y deseando conocer los Estados Unidos, resolví salir con rumbo al país del norte. Hice un paquete con las pinturas que me quedaban del estudio de Illescas, unas cien, y emprendí el viaje.
Al pasar por Laredo, Texas, fui detenido en la aduana americana y mi equipaje fue inspeccionado. Las pinturas que llevaba fueron desparramadas por toda la oficina en una exposición ‘oficial’ y examinadas cuidadosamente por los aduaneros. Después del examen fueron separadas y hechas pedazos unas sesenta. Se me dijo que una ley prohibía introducir a los Estados Unidos estampas inmorales. Las pinturas estaban muy lejos de serlo, no había nada procaz, ni siquiera desnudos, pero ellos quedaron en la creencia de que cumplían con su deber de impedir que se manchara la pureza y castidad de Norteamérica, o bien que ya había demasiada concupiscencia dentro para aumentarla con la de afuera. La sorpresa me dejó mudo los primeros momentos, y depués, protesté con energía, aunque vanamente, y seguí mi camino muy triste rumbo a San Francisco.” (English translation below.)
A sad trip to San Francisco, indeed.
There would be no income from selling the smashed paintings left behind in Laredo. The title of the series of paintings, Casa de Lágrimas, proved to be prophetic.
Having just walked among all the gringos furtively shopping for guilty pleasures in Nuevo Laredo’s old red-light district on his way to the bridge, Orozco can be forgiven the sarcastic jab at the suggestion that his innocent paintings would put a stain of sin on American purity and chastity.
Mujeres Bailando – José Clemente Orozco
The sequence of misfortunes didn’t end in Laredo. America had an additional unhappy surprise waiting for Orozco in San Francisco.
When he arrived, Piña connected him with Fernando Galván, owner of La Crónica. Galván enthusiastically offered to serve as dealer and sell the forty surviving paintings for Orozco.
When they opened the crates and examined the paintings, Galván’s eager expression disappeared. Knowing first-hand the San Francisco art market of the day, Galván informed the hopeful Orozco that they had absolutely zero commercial value. The forty non-pornographic pictures that had escaped destruction in Laredo went with all their innocence intact into the 1917 equivalent of a dumpster.
Of the one hundred paintings Orozco brought from his studio in Mexico City, none survived. Philistine or prudish or cranky Customs Agents destroyed sixty of them in Laredo. A philistine, prudish taste for conventional art in San Francisco took care of the rest.
Orozco ended up painting large posters to hang on the façades of movie theaters. Painting 40-foot long canvases illustrating silent film stars like Mary Pickford in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Theda Bara in Cleopatra, and Douglas Fairbanks The Clouds Go Rolling By turned out to be an apprenticeship for the master muralist Orozco would become after his return to Mexico.
The Crime Against Art perpetrated that day at the bridge in Laredo was not as terrible as many others.
But it wasn’t one of our finest hours either, was it?
Source:
José Clemente Orozco, Autobiografía (Mexico, Ediciones Era) 1970.
English translation:
In 1917, finding the atmosphere in Mexico unfavorable to art and wishing to become acquainted with the United States, I decided to go to the country up north. I made a bundle of whatever paintings were left in my studio in Illescas, some hundred in all, and set out.
In Laredo, Texas, I was detained by Customs and my baggage was inspected. My pictures, scattered through the office in an “official” showing, were minutely examined by the Customs officials. After the examination, some sixty of them were set aside and smashed into pieces. I was given to understand that it was against the law to bring immoral prints into the United States. My paintings were far from immoral, there was nothing salacious about them, there weren’t even any nudes, but the officials were firm in the conviction that they were protecting the purity and chastity of North America from stain, or else that domestic lust was in sufficient supply, without any need to be augmented from abroad. At first, the surprise had me speechless, then I did protest furiously but it was in vain, and I continued in great sadness on my way to San Francisco.
Thank you, Mr. Clouse. Your narrative is historical narrative is quite informative and stimulating. It brought to mind other similar destructive and humiliating instances of man’s cruelty and lack of knowledge and uncaring vandalism, among which were the iconoclastic groups of Christian sects that destroyed paintings, statuary, mosaic and mural depictions and churches (classic, irreplaceable architecture) during past epochs of European and Levantine history, the burning, marring and destruction of Spanish churches and religious icons during their Civil War (1936 – 1939) by some of the dictator Franco’s anarchist foes, plus, the memories of humiliation as told by my grandparents, of the stripping down and delousing of Mexican men and women fleeing the Revolution at Laredo and other border crossings about the time Mr. Orozco suffered his hurtful experience at the hands of Laredo’s “art connoisseur” immigration authorities.
Excuse the grammatical errors of my preceding comments.