A Painting Puzzle with More Than One Solution

Of the leading muralists of post-Revolutionary Mexico, José Clemente Orozco was the most suspicious of ideologies and utopias. Unlike his colleague and rival Diego Rivera, he had witnessed the horrific violence of the Revolution firsthand, and for the rest of his career, turned again and again to the theme of war, and its brutalizing impact on ordinary citizens, from the post-Columbian invasion of the American continent to the rise and apogee of fascism and totalitarianism in the 1930s and ’40s. This is evident in his drawings and easel paintings as well as in his greatest fresco cycles, including the vast projects he completed in the National Preparatory School in Mexico City (1923–26), at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire (1932–34), and in the Government Palace and Cabañas Orphanage in Guadalajara (1937–39).

In May 1940, Orozco came to New York, commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art to create a portable fresco in conjunction with Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art, a major exhibition set to open that June. His subject resonated with current anxieties: inspired by the Nazi blitzkrieg then moving through Western Europe, Orozco created a fearsome allegory of modern technology symbolized by the fragmented remains resulting from the collision between two powerful instruments of war referenced by the title.¹ He completed the mural over 10 days in early June, working from preparatory sketches but without a full-scale cartoon. To bring the process of fresco painting directly to the museum’s audience, a temporary studio was built in the lobby, where he could paint in full public view. Unlike most of the works in the exhibition, Orozco’s mural was neither folkloric nor timeless; it violated viewer expectations about the “Mexican” content of Mexican art, and rejected the idea that art might serve as an entertaining diversion from current events.

In its original configuration, the roughly pyramidal composition of Dive Bomber and Tank, painted with broad expressionist brushstrokes across six separate vertical panels, shows a heap of loosely abstracted machine and human forms, rendered in a reduced palette of grays, blues, and rusty browns. Tank treads, chains, a bomb-like projectile, and more obscure metal fragments twist along a horizontal axis, while the airplane’s tail section looms in the center, highlighted in red. Three human legs, three monumental sculptural heads, and a curious snake-like form appear in the wreckage. Although Orozco never fully discussed these details, and in fact rejected extensive explanations of his work in general, he conceded that his general theme was “the subjugation of man by the machines of modern warfare.”²

The mural can be considered antifascist, but Orozco shows neither victors nor victims, nor any signs of political affiliation. Instead, unlike so much war art of the time, his message is ambiguous, a strategy that disarms the mural of any propagandistic function beyond a generalized condemnation of war. In fact, Orozco’s (almost) omission of the human figure and his lack of historical references distinguish Dive Bomber and Tank from two other major paintings about contemporary aerial bombardments then hanging in MoMA: the screaming faces in both Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) and David Alfaro Siqueiros’s Echo of a Scream (1937) force the viewer to empathize with the anguished victims of specific fascist attacks. Even Rufino Tamayo’s Animals (1941) includes howling dogs as angst-ridden metaphors for the consequences of war. Orozco leaves us with no one to feel sorry for.

Orozco reduced his palette to chilling, lifeless tones and emphasized the interpenetration of fragments, much like Guernica. But then he went further than Picasso, for Dive Bomber and Tank combines the representation of fragmentation with actual physical fragmentation. The division of the mural into separate panels was a practical necessity, allowing it to be more easily moved, though it has never left MoMA. Rather than fret about the separations, however, Orozco used this format to his advantage. He proposed that curators could arrange the panels in six possible configurations, in groups of three, four, or six.³ These alternate arrangements transform the mural into a puzzle with more than one solution, an original concept with no known precedents. More than warfare, then, his subject is chaotic fragmentation itself. In any of the artist’s proposed panel arrangements, the metaphoric subject (fragmentation, destruction) not only remains legible, but is underscored: the mural itself becomes a sort of “machine,” in Orozco’s description, that splits apart and tumbles over, sowing greater confusion and making it harder to find the truth. Since its creation, the mural’s six heavy panels have only been exhibited in their “standard” or most logical configuration, a practical curatorial decision, of course, but one that until now has denied one of the most avant-garde aspects of this extraordinary mural.