Ray Bradbury's Muralism

Copyright 2019 by Gary > Pullman

Another of the better stories in Ray Bradbury's collection The Cat's Pajamas is “Ole, Orozco! Siqueros, Si!”

The narrator, an art gallery expert, is invited to a wake for Sebastian Rodriguez, “an unknown artist” who died while painting murals on a freeway. As Sam Walter explains, “He was hanging upside down over the edge of the freeway overhang, painting, a pal holding his legs, when the pal sneezed, God yes, sneezed and let go.”

His untimely demise cut short a promising career; Cardinal Carlos Jesus Montoya, who'd spied the genius in the graffiti Rodriguez had painted, saw his promise, as does the narrator, who suggests that Rodriguez's work is reminiscent of that of Mexican muralists David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jose Clemente Orozco.

To promote and to protect the late artist's reputation, Montoya arranged to exhibit photographs of Rodriguez's graffiti at a gallery; “then,” Sam explains to the narrator, “when it was too late” for people “to . . . change their minds and ask for their money back,” the cardinal would tell them about Rodriguez's freeway murals.

The artist's death, however, could have “endangered Rodriguez's reputation,” had a group of critics not conspired to hide the truth from the public. As a result of their efforts, Rodriguez's death was attributed not to his fall from the freeway overpass, but to “a bike accident, though no bike was found.” When the cardinal approved of Rodriguez's art, “prices . . . skyrocketed.”

Now, to prevent the public from discovering the fact that Rodriguez was a graffiti artist, the narrator holds Sam's legs while Sam paints over Rodriguez's freeway art.

Bradbury seems to satirize the commercial aspects of art that is created, exhibited, bought, and sold in a capitalistic economy. Rodriguez, although talented by all accounts, was “unknown.” The fact that he painted murals on freeway surfaces marked him as a graffiti artist, which would have besmirched his budding reputation as a legitimate artist, necessitating the conspiracy on the part of Cardinal Montoya, Sam, the narrator, and those who attended Rodriguez's wake, to suppress the truth concerning the origin of Rodriguez's art.

If the truth of the origins of the photographs in the gallery becomes known, the narrator suggests, Montoya will be left “with a gallery of useless photo art,” or, Sam counters, “a gallery full of priceless relics from an artful dodger's life, dead too soon.” If marketing doesn't make all the difference in the perception of the value of an artist's work, it certainly does count, Bradbury suggests.

David Alfaro Siqueiros: Self-Portrait (1945)

The irony is deepened by the narrator's comparing the late, unknown painter's style to that of the celebrated Mexican muralists Siqueiros and Orozco. Although Rodriguez's art resembles theirs, showing “genius” in its own right, his paintings, because they began as graffiti, would be scorned, were the truth known, whereas the murals of Siqueiros and Orozco are celebrated and cherished.

David Alfaro Siqueiros: The New Democracy (1944) 

Irony is also effected by Rodriguez's having spent “a few hours in jail,” presumably for defacing public property by painting his murals on the freeway, because Siqueiros was also incarcerated, but in a Mexican prison, rather than an American jail, for criticizing Mexican President Adolfo Lopez Mateos and leading protests on behalf of teachers and artists on strike. Although Bradbury doesn't describe Rodriguez's murals, it's possible that he painted murals as politically sensitive, in their own way, as those of Siqueiros, one of which, Burial of a Worker, showed a funeral procession in which workers bore an oversize casket “decorated with a hammer and a sickle.”

 

Jose Clemente Orozco: Man of Fire (1938)

Orozco painted satirical political murals, many of them critical of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920). A supporter of Venustiano Carranza and General Álvaro Obregón and against Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, the conservative Orozco was more pessimistic about the effects of the revolution than some of his colleagues, including Diego Rivera.

José Clemente Orozco: Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla (1936)

In Rodriguez's art, the narrator sees something of the style, and perhaps the spirit, of both Siqueiros and Orozco. Perhaps Rodriguez's work suggested a middle political stance between the more extreme, polarized positions of these famous muralists. By not directly stating why the narrator views Rodriguez's work as promising and important, Bradbury leaves open this and other possibilities.

The online article “Mexican muralists: the big three—Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros” provides information on the background of the Mexican Revolution; the rise of muralism as a means of communicating with citizens of “a mostly illiterate country,” a discipline that was dominated by Orozco, Siqueros, and Rivera; and the styles and themes of these three artists. Some of this material could enhance the reading of Bradbury's Story, but also important is an understanding of the community in which Rodriguez lived, the “Mexican-Hispanic-Jewish Boyle Heights” the narrator mentions as the setting for Rodriguez's wake.

Often, though, murals depict the personal concerns of their artists, which may or may not be political concerns as well, and the murals' themes are apt to change from one generation to the next. For example, “Many of the murals depicted the 1960s movement for Chicano equality.” However, a fifteen-year-old girl's mural, painted in 2017, illustrates her idea of “women of influence” and includes depictions of a U. S. Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Sotomayor; a royal, Princess Diana; and a comedienne and talk show host, Ellen DeGeneres.

In his description of Montoya, the narrator of Bradbury's story suggests the types of themes that would be likely to attract the cardinal's interest; perhaps Montoya discovered these or similar interests in the images Rodriguez painted. The narrator sees Carlos Jesus Montoya as “priest, poet, adventurer in rain forests, love assassin of ten thousand women, headliner, mystic, and now critic for Art News Quarterly,” who surveys “the walls where Sebastian Rodriguez's lost dreams were suspended,” “lost dreams” which Montoya is keen to preserve.

By avoiding descriptions of Rodriguez's murals in any but the most general terms, Bradbury allows his readers to envision the artist's work however they please, in effect creating for themselves the very paintings they imagine the artist has painted and allowing them to become their own muralists, painting their own dreams, “lost” or present, a community of artists in which each reader paints an expanse of the same canvas to which everyone else also contributes, just as actual murals are sometimes painted.