COLLECTOR'S CHOICE: OROZCO

OF the three Mexican painters who for 25 years led Mexico in its great painting renaissance, Diego Rivera, 68, is now in Moscow to check up on suspected cancer, and unctuously expressing his hope of painting like the trite Soviet real ists. Firebrand David Siqueiros, 56, just back himself from a Moscow pilgrimage with a com mission to do the "world's largest mural" (4,500 sq. ft.) for the new Warsaw sports stadium, de lights in ridiculing contemporary Mexican art ists, including fellow Party Member Rivera. With the passage of time it seems that the least political and most impassioned of the three, Jose Clemente Orozco, who died in 1949, now stands the best chance of surviving the changing fortunes of time and fashion.

No one is in a better position to judge that than Mexico's No. 1 art collector, millionaire Drug Manufacturer Dr. Alvaro Carillo Gil, who for more than 20 years befriended all three painters, today owns 500 modern Mexican works worth $2,000,-000. Says Collector Carillo: "In Mexico we seem to have reached our last artistic peak in the late '403." For him both Siqueiros and Rivera in recent years have become "paintbrush and spray-gun pamphleteers." With only Indian-born Rufino Tamayo, 55, whose warm, semi-abstract paintings make him a big prizewinner outside Mexico, now strong enough to challenge the hold of the Big Three, Dr. Carillo still keeps Orozco at the top of his list as "the finest of all Mexican contemporary artists, the best in our hemisphere--surely one of our century's greatest draftsmen." Two paintings from Dr. Carillo's collection (opposite), now part of an exhibition touring Japan, show that though Orozco's fame rests primarily on his tempera murals, his talent is as strongly evident in his sketches and studio paintings. Orozco's Resurrection of Lazarus, showing the raising of a dead body in a whirling atmosphere of awed faces, remains a powerful and reverent painting which transcends Orozco's protestations that he was a nonbeliever; his Cortez Leading His Troops, composed in a pattern of shearing knife edges, shows why Orozco has been called one of history's most violent painters.

For Orozco the great figures of what he called "The American Idea" were the enslaved Indian and peon, the conquerors like Cortez, the revolutionists Zapata and Padre Miguel Hidalgo. But Orozco alone of Mexico's Big Three took a hard second look at the world about him and had the courage to draw what he saw: the Marxist "liberator" in turn enslaving the revolutionaries, the Franciscan friar as the symbol of brotherly compassion. These views, plus his hatred of war and distrust of political panaceas, often brought his art into open conflict with the rhetoric of Rivera and the angry manifesto images of Siqueiros. But they expressed the age-old cry of the Mexican people, and as such stand a chance of echoing in men's minds as long as poverty and injustice exist.

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