“Jorge González Camarena, one of the least studied and most prolific muralists of the 20th century”

▲ The volume offers a chronological overview of three of the painter's key murals: Diptych of Life (1941), Television (1959), and Liberation (1963). Photo courtesy of the Jenkins Foundation .

Eirinet Gómez

La Jornada Newspaper, Friday, July 18, 2025, p. 4

More than a means of exploring his work, the catalog for the exhibition Jorge González Camarena: The Unfinished Utopia is a tool to support debates surrounding conservation, memory, and even the role of art in public and private spaces. The publication was presented this Wednesday at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, where the eponymous exhibition is on display, as part of the 45th anniversary of the artist's death.

"This volume will allow new audiences to gain a deeper understanding of González Camarena's work. It's not just a matter of saying, 'There's a very beautiful painting, or a very powerful one,' but rather it allows us to explain the reason for the piece and its context," said Jorge González Camarena Barré de Saint-Leu, son of the renowned painter.

In an interview with La Jornada after the presentation of the volume on the museum's second-floor mezzanine , right in front of her mural Liberation (1963), one of the curatorial focuses of the exhibition, she celebrated the large attendance: "Whenever there's an event focused on my father's work, it's a full house. It's a source of pride that so many people are interested in his work. Ten years ago, a record attendance was recorded at the opening of one of her exhibitions, and in the daily visits, only Frida Kahlo beat her ."

González Camarena (1908-1980) was one of the most representative artists of the second generation of muralists in Mexico. At the Academy of San Carlos, he was an assistant to Gerardo Murillo, Dr. Atl; his works captured universal, nationalist, and historical themes.

Essays and lectures

The work catalog offers a chronological overview of three key murals in the artist's career: Diptych of Life (1941), Television (1959), and Liberation (1963). It also includes a transcript of the lecture "Toward Integral Plastic Arts, " which the painter gave in 1966 upon entering the Mexican Culture Seminar.

It also brings together images of all the works exhibited in the exhibition The Unfinished Utopia, at the Museum of the Palace of Fine Arts, and integrates some pieces that participate in the exhibition Beyond Monumentality, at the Diego Rivera Mural Museum, presented simultaneously this 2025.

Among the texts, the essay Two Controversies Around the Mural Diptych of Life, by historian Ariadna Patiño Guadarrama, stands out, where she addresses the work carried out for the Guardiola Building of the Bank of Mexico, which, after great controversy, was destroyed.

"These types of curatorial programs are very important because they focus on restoring all those moments of artists' work that are unknown, or very little known ," Patiño Guadarrama said during the presentation of the book. He emphasized that one positive aspect of González Camarena's work is that he took great care to document his work. Although there is almost no bibliography, there is a vast amount of newspapers .

Another notable text is From the Wall to the Screen: The Comprehensive Art of the Camarena Brothers at Televicentro (now Televisa Chapultepec), written by Rebeca Barquera Guzmán. It describes the contributions Jorge and his brother Guillermo González Camarena made to the telecommunications company, as well as the creation and disappearance of the mural "Television" (1959).

The mural was adapted to the building's façade, organized into friezes, and depicted arts and disciplines such as dance, singing, sports, and charrería—elements that would be broadcast on television. At the top, he placed a symbol he invented to represent television, using elements of indigenous iconography , Barquera Guzmán said.

The art historian mentioned that this mural was also destroyed. The oft-repeated story is that it collapsed in the 1985 earthquake, but Jacobo Zabludovsky's videos about the quake show no trace of the work. Everything indicates that neglect, deterioration, and the transition from Televicentro to Televisa led to its loss .

The Fifth Muralist in Fine Arts, by Miguel Álvarez Cuevas, is another relevant essay in the book. It reconstructs the historical context and creative process of the sculptor.

"This volume is very important because there are few bibliographical corpuses on the work of Jorge González Camarena. This volume marks at least 15 bibliographical publications on the artist so far," Álvarez Cuevas emphasized.

At the end of the presentation, González Camarena Barré de Saint-Leu added that in a context where works of art are lost in earthquakes, unreviewed archives, or through institutional neglect, this catalog is a piece of resistance that recovers, contextualizes, and returns to the present the legacy of one of the least studied, yet most prolific muralists of the 20th century.