The Winds of Fame

Nearly ten years after his death, Mexico's Jose Clemente Orozco is still one of the world's most debated artists. Last week San Antonio's McNay Institute was staging a major retrospective of his art, expressly designed to bear out the catalogue's contention that "Orozco is the major painter of our time, that he, rather than European painting of the same half-century, is the primary heir and vehicle of the great humanistic tradition of the Renaissance."

Since his major works are murals in Mexico, not even the 51 assembled pictures could give the dimensions of Orozco's power, bitterness and weight, or of the clumsiness, coarseness and obviousness that make him so controversial. One perceptive critic recently returned from looking at the frescoes has joined Orozco's most fervent disciples. In his new book, Mexican Journal (Devin-Adair; $6), Selden Rodman writes that "if there was any doubt in my mind that Orozco was the great artist of our age, it has vanished." But Rodman quotes a number of the master's countrymen to prove that the winds of fame blow cold as well as warm. Sample opinions: P:The late Painter Diego Rivera: "Orozco was the only great artist of the counterrevolution ... He felt no compassion, made no affirmation. Because society disapproved of Hitler, he was for him." P: Painter David Siqueiros: "If ten people were in a room and argued for something --anything--Orozco would take the opposite side. His tolerance for fascism stemmed from our adherence to Communism, no more . . . Orozco's only 'constant' was his bitter hatred of anything having to do with religion." P: Biographer Justino Fernandez: "Orozco is hard on God at the Day of Judgment, because he felt that the punishments meted out to sinful men were too severe." P: Dealer Ines Amor: "He hated mankind, if ever a man did. 'All Indians,' he used to say, 'are ugly.' Why was he bitter? Because of his life, his failures, his poverty, his obsessive inferiority complex." P: Writer Alma Reed: "He had compassion and humanity above all other painters. He was a great mathematician, a great engineer, a great architect." P: Painter "Dr. Atl": "Orozco never did understand how to use color." AP:Architect Juan O'Gorman: "Jose Clemente was incapable of talking rationally or thinking rationally about anything. I often asked him before and after the war why he wore a swastika button in his lapel. He wore it, he told me, because Roosevelt, Churchill and especially Stalin were mankind's greatest scourges, and because the Jews deserved to be exterminated." P:Senora Orozco: "My husband was not only a good man who loved his family and thought of them constantly, but he was always relaxed at home, always serene, irresistibly humorous, and in every way normal."

Genius is not normal, and it stands exposed to every wind that blows. On some winds Orozco scattered seeds of hate; on others he scattered seeds of love and hope. But even as the winds howl, it is clear that they swirl about an artist who was mountainous.

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