José Clemente Orozco was born in 1883 in Zapotlán el Grande (now Ciudad Guzmán), Jalisco to Rosa de Flores Orozco. He married Margarita Valladares, and had three children. At the age of 21, Orozco lost his left hand while working with gunpowder to make fireworks.

The satirical illustrator José Guadalupe Posada, whose engravings about Mexican culture and politics challenged Mexicans to think differently about post-revolutionary Mexico, worked in full view of the public in shop windows located on the way Orozco went to school. In his autobiography, Orozco confesses, “I would stop [on my way to and from school] and spend a few enchanted minutes in watching [Posada]… This was the push that first set my imagination in motion and impelled me to cover paper with my earliest little figures; this was my awakening to the existence of the art of painting.” He goes on to say that watching Posada’s engraving decorated gave him his introduction to the use of color. After attending school for Agriculture and Architecture, Orozco studied art at the Academy of San Carlos. He worked as an illustrator for Mexico City newspapers, and directly as an illustrator for one of the Constitutionalist armies overseen by “First Chief” Venustiano Carranza. When the revolutionary factions split in 1914 after Victoriano Huerta was ousted, Orozco supported Carranza and General Álvaro Obregón against Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. The violence he witnessed profoundly affected his life and art. “The world was torn apart around us”, he wrote in his autobiography. “Troop convoys passed on their way to slaughter. Trains were blown up.”

Between 1922 and 1924, Orozco painted the murals Maternity, Man in Battle Against Nature, Christ Destroys His Cross, Destruction of the Old Order, The Aristocrats, The Trench and The Trinity at the National Preparatory School. Some of the murals were destroyed by Orozco himself, and later repainted. Others were vandalized by conservative students and practically destroyed. Thus, Orozco had to repaint many of them when he came back to the School in 1926. In 1925, he painted the mural Omniscience at Mexico City’s House of Tiles. The following year, he painted a mural at the Industrial School in Orizaba, Veracruz.

José Clemente Orozco’s mural series in the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria at San Ildefonso College spans three floors of the building and includes multiple other murals in the stairway, all of which depict his critical view of the Revolution. The Escuela Nacional Preparatoria commissioned him in February 1923; however, his earlier panels created serious political conflict, causing him to cease his work, like Siqueiros’. He later returned to finish the work he began under a new wave of social change in 1926.

Between 1927 and 1934 Orozco lived in the USA. Even after the fall of the stock market in 1929, his works were still in demand. From March to June 1930, at the invitation of the Pomona College Art Department, he painted what he noted was the “first fresco painted outside the country by a painter of the Contemporary Mexican School”. The fresco, Prometheus (Prometeo del Pomona College), on the wall of a Pomona’s Frary Dining Hall, was direct and personal at a time when murals were expected to be decorous and decorative, and has been called the first “modern” fresco in the United States. Later that year, he painted murals at the New School for Social Research, New York City, now known as the New School University. One of his most famous murals is The Epic of American Civilization at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA. It was painted between 1932 and 1934 and covers almost 300 m² (3200 square feet) in 24 panels. Its parts include: Migrations, Human Sacrifices, The Appearance of Quetzalcoatl, Corn Culture, Anglo-America, Hispano-America, Science and Modern Migration of the Spirit (another version of Christ Destroys His Cross). His work was also part of the art competition at the 1932 Summer Olympics.

After returning to Mexico in 1935, Orozco painted in Guadalajara, Jalisco, the mural The People and Its Leaders in the Government Palace, and the frescos for the Hospicio Cabañas, which are considered his masterpiece. In 1940 he painted at the Gabino Ortiz Library in Jiquilpan, Michoacán. Between 1942 and 1944 Orozco painted for the Hospital de Jesús in Mexico City. Orozco’s 1948 Juárez Reborn huge portrait-mural was one of his last works.

In 1947, he illustrated the book The Pearl, by John Steinbeck.

On November 23, 2017, Google celebrated his 134th birthday with a Google Doodle.