Let Them Look

Two of Mexico's Big Three in painting had come to pay homage to the third. For one evening last week their flaming public quarrels over art and politics were forgotten. Triple-chinned Diego Rivera's habitual garrulity was reduced to a murmured "magnifico, magnifico" as he passed from picture to picture. Fiery David Alfaro Siqueiros, a spotlight lover himself, knew well whose turn it was this night. He kept drawing Jose Clemente Orozco back into the limelight each time the shy, shabby little one-armed man tried to shuffle off to a corner.

Orozco's retrospective show, with its hundreds of drawings, paintings and photographs of his famed murals, was not only a tribute to him, but a 40-year lesson in art, and the discipline that goes into its creation.

The drawings for the murals told Orozco's story of work, sweat and enormous care. Many of them--studies of arms, legs, torsos--were smeared with dirt, spotted with ink and paint, creased from being folded and carried for weeks in his overall pockets. He had grouped them so that even laymen could trace the evolution from first idea to finished masterpiece. A hand from one corner of a large mural might first have been drawn in many ways, now as a fist, then open; first supplicating, then grasping. No one could say of Orozco that he had failed to learn his drawing lessons.

Repulsive Cockroaches. There were small, but not still, voices that were not convinced. In Mexico City's Universal appeared an explosive article by Father Jose Cantu Corro, a painting priest. Roared Father Cantu: "Modern artists . . . their 'ideology' is to give culture to the ugly as if to do away with all true beauty and prostitute the people. Because of this, the belly-bursting paintings with horrible huge heads: because of this the carnic puppets. It is impossible to qualify the abysses to which these repulsive cockroaches have descended. With brooms that have been put into the filthy sewers they painted gruesome drawings, grotesque and horrible, capable of scaring the Devil himself. This swarm of 'artists' has multiplied worse than microbes in the garbage can. Constantly, with incredible audacity, there are expositions of these deformations, even in the Palace of Fine Arts itself."

In a way, Mexico's top Art Critic Antonio Castro Leal seemed to corroborate the angry priest when he told Orozco: "Your art is not easy, soothing, or conservative, but deep and violent." From the first, Orozco had dipped his brushes in violence and brutality. His paintings. like those of his leftist colleagues Rivera and Siqueiros, became the flags of Mexico's political revolutionaries. But there was nothing impersonal or party-line about Orozco's bitterness.

Self-taught and self-sufficient, he had always been somber and harsh. He had lived in Mexico City's red light district, painted its prostitutes and beggars in dark lurid colors. He found little to be joyful about in his own life or in the life about him.

Now 63, Orozco lives quietly with his family on a narrow little street near the heart of Mexico City, works in a white, barren, two-story room that remains cold in spite of the wood fire burning in a grate. The only decorations are a batik on one wall, a badly cracked copy of El Greco's portrait of his daughter thumbtacked to another. The room is jammed with canvases in various stages of un-finish. When he feels like painting, either day or night, he puts in a six or eight-hour stretch. He has never painted a landscape and says that Rivera and Siqueiros have turned to them recently only because they now have automobiles to ride about in. He hopes to have a car some day too.

Unlike his gabby fellow triumvirs, Orozco hates to talk about his work. Said he last week: "If I have any ideas on art worth listening to, if I can teach young Mexican painters or painters anywhere anything, then it is all there on the walls. Let them come look."

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