Last Scream

Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros were the internationally influential figureheads of the Mexican muralist movement. The Mexican Revolution of 1910 was a defining event for all three artists, cementing symbols of cultural identity, an expressive narrative style, and an anti-colonial critique as cornerstones of their work. Orozco spent his formative years drawing political cartoons for newspapers in Mexico City. In the late 1920s and early 1930s he completed a number of mural commissions in the United States; after his return to Mexico his style became increasingly loose and expressionistic and incorporated caricatures and critiques from his early political illustrations. In his celebrated mural The People and Its Leaders, in the Government Palace in Guadalajara, the artist employed extremities of emotion, as seen in Last Scream, to evoke a primal response to the rise of authoritarian governments.