Mexico City, Mexico
Jorge González Camarena studied at the Academy of San Carlos between 1922 and 1930.
Mexico City, Mexico
Jorge González Camarena studied at the Academy of San Carlos between 1922 and 1930.
Jorge González Camarena.
Jorge González Camarena in his later years.
Camarena was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, on March 24, 1908. He was the son of Arturo González and Sara Camarena. Jorge Camarena was from an artistic and cultural family as his father worked as a photographer. He had seven siblings. His brother Guillermo became the one who invented the colour television set.
From childhood, Jorge Camarena showed a huge interest in art. When he visited his aunt Esther, Camarena spent hours watching her painting while the other children ran in the garden. She inspired him to paint. Besides, he also produced his own comic strip, which he called Los Chiquinitos and sold to his classmates.
In 1919, his family moved to Mexico City, where he started his drawing lessons with a painter named Francisco Zeteno. After being encouraged by a local instructor, he enrolled in the Academy of San Carlos at the age of fifteen. He studied at the Academy between 1922 and 1930.
Jorge Camarena was interested in both traditional academic painting and brand-new trends that were forming. During his school years, among his principal teachers were Mateo Herrera and Francisco Díaz de León. He was taught to work in various media such as fresco, oil on fabric, vinylite, ship paint, tempera, mosaics and ceramics.
In 1930 he became an apprentice of Dr. Atl. He gave Camarena his own studio on top of the former monastery of San Juan de Letrán. There he not only painted but also researched music and led discussions on the arts.
Camarena started his career as an artist working as an assistant to Dr. Atl, who became one of his main mentors until his death. In 1929, at the age of 21, Jorge Camarena wrote and drew for such publications as Revista de Revistas and Nuestro México. In the 1930s, he also worked on the creation of images for the Editorial Casa Galas calendar.
In 1933 Jorge Enciso, a painter and then a director of the Dirección de Monumentos Coloniales, commissioned him to restore the 16th-century frescos on the walls of the former monastery of Huejotzingo, Puebla. It took two years to compete the project. Jorge Camarena used some of the money he received for the project to research indigenous painters, particularly Marcos Cipactli. He also did a study on the presence of demon and devil images in Mexican folklore and art.
Camarena began creating murals in 1939. The first mural work was created in the town of Zimapan, Hidalgo at the Hotel Fundación called Alegoría de Zimapán. At that time, the town was a crossroads for traffic between Tamaulipas and Nuevo León, but later a new highway was built and everything was changed. The hotel was abandoned but the mural remains in good condition.
His second mural work consisted of a pair of oil and wax panels on the stone for the Guardiola Building called La vida, la mujer y el hombre (Live, woman and man), created in 1941. The work was controversial because the images of the man and woman were nudes. The bankers that sponsored the work considered it immoral. In response, Jorge Camarena founded the first Mexican Nudist Society to promote the use of nudes in the artwork. The work remained on the building until 1957. The earthquake of that year caused damage to the piece, and instead of being rescued, it was demolished.
Other of Jorge Camarena’s early mural works included Águila en Vuelo for the Banco de México building in Veracruz and the La Purísma Church. In 1950 and 1951 he produced murals and sculptures for the Instituto Mexicano de Seguro Social building on Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City. The mural was done in vinylite, and was accompanied by two groups of sculptures called El Trabajo and Maternidad. He worked on this project with architect Obregón Santacila. Later the two founded a movement called Artistic Integration, with the aim of strengthening ties between builders and artists on architectural projects.
In 1954 Eugenio Garza Sada, the founder of the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Studies, commissioned Jorge Camarena to make a mural for what is now the main administration building for the university system. Due to the project he had to spent much time in Monterrey. There he became involved in the artist community, leading to the creation of the Arte, A.C. cultural group.
Emilio Azcárraga Vidaurreta asked him to decorate the facade of Televicentro, today Televisa, in 1959. It resulted in a 900m² mural entitled Frisos de la television. However, this outside wall was later damaged, requiring the building to be reconstructed.
In the year 1965, Jorge Camarena was commissioned by the Mexican government to produce a mural for the city of Concepción, Chile. The mural became a gift to the people of that region in southern Chile who had suffered a major earthquake in 1960. The resulting work was 300m² on a wall of the Casa de la Cultura José Clemente Orozco at the Universidad de Concepción.
Other most notable murals during Jorge Camarena’s career include La erupción de Xitle at the Cuicuilco site, Monumento a la Independencia in Dolores Hidalgo, Belisario Dominguez at the Mexican Senate and Las Razas at the Museo Nacional de Antropología e Historia. The last mural, Trilogía de Saltillo, he created in 1978, two years before his death, in the municipal building of Saltillo, Coahuila.
While best known for his murals, Jorge Camarena also created over 2,000 easel work and some sculpture. His most renowned work of this type was La Patria, an image of a woman with national symbols to represent the country of Mexico. During the 1960s and the 1970s this image was used on the cover of free textbooks produced by the Secretaría de Educación Pública.
At the end of the 1970s, the Mexican government commissioned Camarena to produce a painting for the Bulgarian people of Saint George. He was invited to Bulgaria to unveil his artwork. In appreciation, the Bulgarian government sponsored a European tour of Jorge Camarena’s artwork which ended up in the Museo de Arte Moderno in New York.
Jorge Camarena was a major figure in the Mexican muralism movement. Throughout his career González Camarena earned many awards, such as the Insignia Jose Clemente Orozco from the Congress of Jalisco State in 1956; the second prize at the Salon Annual de Pintura del INBA sponsored by the National Institute of Fine Arts in 1962; the Gold Plaque from the Government of Jalisco in 1964; the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic from the government of Italy for painting a portrait of Michelangelo, located at the Italian artist’s house in 1967; and the National Prize of Arts in Painting in 1970.
For the 100th anniversary of his birth in 2008, institutions such as the Museo Soumaya, the Instituto Politécnical Nacional, the Mexican Senate and the Instituto Mexicano de Seguro Social held exhibitions and homage to his work and life.
Most of his easel works are in the hands of private collectors in both Mexico and abroad. These include the Museo Soumaya, the collection of the Carso Foundation, the collection of José López Portillo and the estate of Henry Ford. Some are in the Museo de Arte Moderno.
Madre Patria
Veterano
La fusión de dos culturas
Las Razas Y La Cultura
Los Tezcaltipocas
El Abrazo
Tercer Victoria
Paisaje
Rostro
Mujer Sentado
Viento de piedra
Sin título
Pueblo olvidado
La ola
Muchachas celebrando un rito mágico
Cuarto estudio de Huejotzingo
Victoria Dorantes, estudio para el mural Ciencia y técnica
B.B. (Brigitte Bardot)
Proyecto para la fachada de Televicentro
Un Cerro de Torreon
Cabeza prehispánica
Paisaje con sapo
Proyecto para el mural de la Constitución de 1917
Escena de cabaret
Mestizaje Arquitectónico
Constructores en lo cultural, material, social, científico, político
Retrato
Paisaje rural
Ni más ni menos que Santa Martha
Camarena believed that the Mexican Revolution should be honoured by working towards social justice.
In the interpretation of Mexican history, Jorge Camarena stated that neither the country’s indigenous or Spanish cultural background should be denigrated in favor of the other.
Camarena was accepted as a member of the Academia de Artes in 1972. He was also a member of the Asociación Mexicana de Artes Plásticas and the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana.
Quotes from others about the person
Mauricio Gómez Mayorga: "His [Jorge González Camarena's] faith in geometry and form, that is, in space and matter, make him a constructor, a builder of plane and mass."
Diego Rivera: "[Jorge González Camarena was] the most Mexican of all."
In 1934 Jorge González Camarena married Jeannie Barré de Saint-Leu. The marriage produced four children.
Guillermo González Camarena was a Mexican engineer. He was the inventor of a colour-wheel type of colour television, and also introduced colour television to Mexico.
