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History major Karime Borego ’27 did invaluable work with me as a curatorial intern during the academic year 2025 – 2026. During that period, she assisted with research related to the upcoming exhibition, The Essential Oneness of the Western Hemisphere: The United States, Mexico, and American Art, 1920-1945, scheduled to open at the BCMA in June 2027. Her reflections on two new acquisitions reflecting the important work of José Clemente Orozco, who made transformation contributions to the modern art in both Mexico and the United States, reflects on the interplay between two members of an international network of artists and the deep interconnections between the ancient history of the Americas and the modern era.

Edward Weston’s of José Clemente Orozco and Orozco’s 1934 lithograph print offer starkly different visual commentaries on the complicated relationship between modernism, indigeneity, and American spectatorship in Mexico and the United States. Seen together, they reveal the instability of primitivism as both an aesthetic category and a cultural fantasy—an instability that was exploited, challenged, and manipulated by artists on both sides of the border.

Weston’s portrait of Orozco, taken during the muralist’s 1930 visit to Carmel, California to create a mural at Pomona College, renders the artist with intense lighting and a noble stillness evocative of Renaissance portraiture. The image is stylized, heroic, and monumental, placing Orozco not only in the lineage of great Western artists but also within Weston’s own modernist photographic project. The very circumstances surrounding the work’s creation—it was made as evening fell without even the use of a tripod—may have contributed to the quality of authenticity and determination that the work evokes. The muralist’s focused gaze, accentuated by his glasses, seems to mark him as a man of vision. Weston considered it one of his finest works, inscribing a print gifted to Orozco: “To José Clemente Orozco / I believe that in this portrait / I have recorded something in you / that I deeply felt.”[i] Orozco, in turn, conveyed his pleasure in the likeness, reportedly described it as the first photograph in which he had recognized himself, suggesting Weston’s success in capturing an essential, almost mythic quality.

As art historian James Oles explains, Weston’s work in Mexico reflected a dual attraction to both the ancient and the modern, with Weston declaring his desire to represent “the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh.”[ii] In the Orozco portrait, Weston monumentalizes a Mexican artist himself, turning Orozco into a symbol of modernist creativity and national authenticity. It is a kind of aesthetic assimilation—Mexico distilled into a face, a gesture, a myth of genius. The portrait’s significance extended beyond the personal: it became a cornerstone of Weston’s career, featured in his first major New York exhibition at Alma Reed’s Delphic Studios and later in The Art of Edward Weston (1932), one of the earliest monographs on an American photographer.

In contrast, Orozco’s Touristas y Aztecas (1934) presents a biting satire of American primitivist tourism. The print depicts bloated, gawking tourists stopping at an Indigenous curios shop, donning feathered headdresses and stiff, ceremonial expressions. The tourists are rendered grotesquely, with hats and cameras, physically dwarfing the dignified, if dehumanized, figures below them. As art historian W. Jackson Rushing argues, the problem with American primitivism was its “fatal superficiality”: an aestheticization of Indigenous forms without an understanding of their meaning.[iii] Orozco’s image makes this superficiality literal, exposing the asymmetrical power dynamic between cultural consumers and those performing for them.

Weston’s photograph eschews the Indigenous body entirely in favor of picturing its modern interpreter resulting in an essential and heroic display of the modernist imagination, while Orozco’s print renders the Indigenous body as an emptied symbol, manipulated for tourist spectacle. As Oles notes, American artists in Mexico often projected fantasies of purity onto Indigenous people, treating them as “idols behind altars.”[iv] Orozco, however, tears down the altar, forcing viewers to confront the absurdity of these romantic fantasies. His satire collapses the myth of cultural reverence into a scene of parasitic consumption.

Weston, of course, did not see himself as a tourist. He believed his images captured an essential Mexico, unmediated and pure. Yet as Oles and Rushing suggest, even sensitive modernists filtered Mexican culture through Euro-American frameworks—what Rushing describes as interpreting Native expression through “concepts and taxonomies derived from Euro-American culture.”[v] Orozco’s print, then, critiques not only literal tourists but the entire aesthetic system that privileges stylized admiration over structural understanding.

Both works emerge from a moment when Mexico was reimagined by foreigners, often from the United States and Europe, as a land of authenticity and spiritual renewal. Weston’s portrait participates in this myth-making—albeit through the image of an artist rather than a peasant—while Orozco’s Touristas y Aztecas violently ruptures it. In doing so, Orozco underscores the political stakes of aestheticization: when Indigenous identity is reduced to an aesthetic ideal, it becomes exploitable—not just by tourists, but by museums, galleries, and the modernist imagination itself.

Notes:

[i] Brett Abbott, In Focus: Edward Weston, Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005), 62.

[ii] Edward Weston quoted in James Oles, South of the Border: Mexico in the American Imagination, 1917-1947. (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 113.

[iii] W. Jackson Rushing, Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde: A History of Cultural Primitivism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 89. Here Rushing quotes the artist Emil Bisttram to make his point.

[iv] Oles, 77.

[v]Rushing, 1.