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AMONG the Toltecs, who developed over many centuries an amazingly advanced American civilization, and among the more militant Aztecs, who largely absorbed the Toltec culture, the god Quetzalcoatl was the great white messiah revered as one who had come to their tribal forebears bringing the arts and crafts on which their civilization was built, repudiating the barbaric native medicine men, and proposing a new ethical ideal and way of life. Eventually, the tribes failing to live up to the god's precepts and falling again under the influence of their medicine men, Quetzalcoatl departed on a raft of snakes into the East, whence he had come, promising to return in five hundred years.
Orozco has taken this legend as the theme of his frescoes. Planning his epic of American civilization in two parts, the first representing the aboriginal culture and the second symbolizing the elements introduced by the white man, Orozco adapted his scheme to the structure of the room, the west wing of which contains the pre-Columbian, the east wing the post-Columbian, parts of the project.
The work is an epic interpretation of the constructive and destructive forces which have moulded the patterns of life on this continent. Choosing not to confine himself to the literal representation of historical incident, Orozco has concentrated vastly larger meaning into pictorial symbols. The two main sections, physically separated by the division of the room, are bound together like the different movements of a symphony by the closely related development of major and minor themes--themes of idea, of color, of form.
The full significance of the separate panels does not appear except in relation to the composition as a whole, and the complex orchestration of the work with its contrasts and repetitions must be studied with constant reference to the thematic analogies between the two main divisions. Obviously, anything like a complete analysis of the minute details of composition is not possible in a brief descriptive sketch. In any abbreviated consideration of these murals, one must remember Orozco's frequently reiterated injunctions that no single panel is separately significant and that any given interpretation in words is a restriction of the meaning of the mural to the experience of a single person. This outline, then will serve only to suggest the general theme of the project and the legendary background which provides the artist's symbols.
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