It was not until high school that Juan O’Gorman began to make his first trips from San Ángel to the university neighborhood, then located in the Historic Center of Mexico City. This act unveiled to him the forms, dimensions and vitality of the Mexican capital. O’Gorman recalls in his memoirs the city of those years as a small, transparent city surrounded by mountains. It was also during this period that O’Gorman discovered the urban turmoil left after the Mexican Revolution. Considered by many to be a transforming spirit more like a cultural revolution expressed in mural paintings, in the reconstruction of public spaces and in the proper reactivation of an urban industrial life.

Juan O’Gorman distanced himself from his family profession when he decided to study architecture at the National School of Architecture of the San Carlos Academy and not medicine as his father wanted. He joined the winds of cultural transformation, through executing murals in popular spaces and later, declared himself allied to the socialist and communist ideas of the time.

For Juan O’Gorman meeting Diego Rivera during this period provided him the possibility of access to the cultural horizon of his time. It gave him tjhe opportunity to be at the center of the aesthetic and political issues society was facing. It is very important to point out that Juan O Gorman was a collaborator of Diego River even though Rivera was in the beginning a mentor for Juan O’Gorman. O’Gorman helped him materialize various creative goals because of his great technical knowledge in engineering and architecture.

Juan O’Gorman, like many of his classmates and teachers, sympathized at a young age with Soviet socialist thought, which explains his early desires to “improve the future for all humanity.” Years later, he built the tomb of Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) in the house where the revolutionary was assassinated.

Young O’Gorman found a natural link between architecture and painting early on when he worked as a draftsman in the offices of renowned architects Carlos Obregón Santacilia (1896-1961) and Carlos Tarditi. There he was entrusted with the task of executing decorative murals in several pulquerías and cantinas in Mexico City (1924-1925, which recalls the work of Frida Kahlo and her students in pulquerías such as “La Rosita” in 1943.

O’Gorman’s interventions in these places were executed in a very simple way. The preserved records allow us to observe their impact on the 19-year-old O’Gorman with popular culture. Prior to these, he had only practiced easel painting under his father’s influence. His work in these places is the beginning of his outstanding work as a muralist and the emergence of his unyielding commitment to execute works capable of contributing and furthering the education of their viewers.

O’Gorman’s revolutionary spirit led him to propose a school building construction project in the 1930s as Head of the Department of Buildings of the Ministry of Public Education. Despite some criticism, these were the best achieved expressions of O’Gorman as an architect. It was through the planning and construction of several dozen schools in popular and semi-rural neighborhoods of Mexico City that O’Gorman put into practice the concept of modern architecture.

His efficient construction technique and economical use of materials were planned to benefit the inhabitants. Although some critics considered his buildings “monuments to misery” due to the sparseness of their spaces, the buildings designed by the young architect dignified the basic education of the children of workers and peasants who for the first time had toilets, running water and ventilation in their schools.

Juan O’Gorman’s schools in the working-class and peasant neighborhoods of Mexico City revitalized the urban layout of poor and marginalized areas. They improved the living conditions of their users and brought expressions of mural painting to their public spaces made by the hands of local artists such as Pablo O’Higgins (1904-1983), Alfredo Zalce (1908-2003) and Julio Castellanos (1905-1947) among others. For many of the artists invited by O’Gorman, the walls of primary schools were their first opportunity to participate in the muralist movement monopolized by other artists. These opportunities allowed their work to have a real effect and benefit to the daily life of the popular and working classes, thus fulfilling entirely the sense of public art. It was also during this period that O’Gorman, in collaboration with José Antonio Cuevas, founded the Higher School of Engineering (ESIA) replacing the previous Technical School of Master Builders founded by José Vasconcelos (1922).

Painting was also a task that Juan O’Gorman sustained for decades. His first appearance of public or mediatic relevance in plastic arts was carried out in 1938 when he made a large-format polyptych dedicated to the history of aviation for the newly opened International Airport of Mexico City. The creation of the work was commissioned by Francisco Mújica (1884-1954), then Secretary of Foreign Relations for the Government of Lázaro Cárdenas (1895-1970). The importance of this polyptych gave O’Gorman to express his disapproval of the international fascist regimes at that time, specifically the governments of Hitler and Mussolini, as global tensions grew before World War II. The composition and location of the work led to censorship and protests eventually to its partial destruction. This was the first time he experienced his work being destroyed but at the same time he gained notariaty and visibility.

Juan O’Gorman was deeply critical, committed and emphatic when expressing his ideas. The changes that the outbreak of World War II brought to Mexico and the world, the advance of totalitarianism throughout the globe and polarized economic growth forced O’Gorman to abandon the public scene and his architectural work. Starting in the 1940’s, O’Gorman began work on what is now a large part of his pictorial art of which the most well-known is Multiple Self-Portrait (1945). He also realized murals such as History of Michoacán (1942), Historical Representation of Culture (1952), Independence Altarpiece (1961), Fraternity of the Indo-American Peoples (1964), The Confluence of Civilizations in the Americas (1967), Revolution Altarpiece (1968), Porfirian Feudalism as a precedent of Revolution 1910-1914 (1973), among others.

The idea of returning to architecture came towards the end of the 1940’s, after O’Gorman discovered organicism by Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) and the waterfall house (Pennsylvania, 1935. Wright represented the usefulness of architecture in a broader sense than functionalism: linking man with nature and harmonizing human habitation with the natural and cultural environment.

O’Gorman’s first works of organic inspiration was the Conlon Nancarrow Home-Studio (CDMX, Águilas #46, Col. Alpes- 40’s) and his own second home-studio that he and and his family inhabited and the Cave-House (CDMX, San Jerónimo #162-1952). It was also during this period that the Central Library on campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) was made with architects Gustavo Saavedra and Juan Martínez de Velasco (CDMX-1952).

Between 1950 and 1982 Juan O’Gorman dedicated his life to painting. He had his only exhibition at the Palace of Fine Arts, entitled Fantasy and Reality in the work of Juan O’Gorman (1950). In the mid-fifties, the deaths of his friends Frida Kahlo (1954) and Diego Rivera (1957) affected him greatly. He was hired to design and adapt Frida’s Blue House into the museum that we know to this day. He also collaborated to complete Diego Rivera’s Anahuacalli, in south of Mexico City.  

In 1959 the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN) honored him as a founding member of the ESIA of the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN). During his final decades, he worked on the murals of the National Museum of History, Chapultepec Castle (1961-1973), made his series of petro-murals in SCOP (1951), Taxco (1954), Santiago de Chile (1964) and Texas (1967). He also produced his last architectural work, the house attached to Colon Nancarrow’s home-studio. He also supervised the construction work of it with the support of ESIA students (1970).
He entered the Academy of Arts in 1971. In 1973 Antonio Luna Arroyó published “Juan O’Gorman. National Painting Award. Autobiography, Comments, Critical Judgments, and Comprehensive Documentation”.
At the end of 1981, Flor Garduño made a series of photographs of Juan O’Gorman in his home-studio at Jardín 88. A few months later that year the young filmmaker Alfredo Robert shot several hours of conversation with O’Gorman for his medium-length film As a painting we’ll start fading (Como una pintura nos iremos borrando), which received an Ariel in 1988, This was the last work produced about Juan O’Gorman before his death on January 18, 1982.

In 1983, Ida Rodríguez Prampolini and Olga Sáenz published one of the most important and foundational research works around the artist’s work, The Words of Juan O’Gorman (La palabra de Juan O’Gorman) for UNAM’s Institute of Aesthetic Research. In addition Juan O’Gorman. Architect and Painter (Juan O’Gorman. Arquitecto y pintor) also by Prampolini, was published by UNAM in 1982.

Juan O’Gorman died in the first house-studio he built for himself in San Ángel, forgotten by a society of vertiginous change. O’Gorman became one of the figureheads for the memory of a revolutionary generation, artists and intellectuals most of whom died at an early age or were swept aside for the unfulfilled promises of a country indebted to its past.
Juanito, as his closest friends called him, was surrounded in the last years of his life by great friends such as Max Cetto, Ida Rodríguez Prampolini, Ángela Gurría and the Nancarrow Sugiura family. Today, there are those who treasure his memory as the first modern architect in Mexico even though he refused to call himself such. And there are those who remember him as one of the most important muralists in Mexico deserving much greater recognition. O’Gorman was an exemplary human being who challenged with a world alien to him finally decided to end his life by suicide at 77 years of age.

Long live Juan O’Gorman, his half century of uninterrupted prolific production and undying commitment to teaching and truth.