Wall Man

On both sides of the continent critics and public now have a chance to judge the mature work of a painter who has become almost as essential to smart dinner table conversation as backgammon: Jose Clemente Orozco. Vibrant, intensely serious Artist Orozco is Mexican, of lineage from the 15th Century Conquistador es. One-armed, squarejawed, thickset, with glittering spectacles he looks not unlike an ecstatic bullfrog. In 1922, after a painful apprenticeship tinting postcards in California and drawing scathing cartoons in Mexico, he joined the famed Syndicate of Revolutionary Artists organized by Minister of Education Jose Vasconcelos.* Led by spectacular, pistol-carrying Diego Rivera they worked for a flat sum of eight pesos ($4) a day decorating the corridors and patios of Mexico's public buildings with flaming murals. There were weighty men in that syndicate. Beside Rivera and Orozco there were such names as Jean Chariot, Carlos Merida and Pachecho. Their water boy and official brush washer was Miguel Covarrubias, now a highly paid smartchart caricaturist. Artist Orozco meanwhile was experimenting with the medium that was to bring him his greatest success: true fresco, painting in tempera on wet plaster so that the design becomes a part of and not an application to the wall. In 1929 the political explosion that brought death to thousands of Mexican soldiers landed Artist Orozco in New York where he was adopted wholeheartedly by Miss Alma Reed, operator of the since defunct Delphic Studio. Exhibitions were given, the organ of critical praise swelled in diapason. The West's view of Orozco, a view of one of the finest things he has done, was made possible by the removal of some scaffolding from the dining hall of Pomona College, 40 mi. south of Los Angeles. Last winter, head of Pomona's art department was Professor Jose Pijoan, authority on Latin American art, avid Orozcoan. So long, so vigorously did he preach Orozco to the sons and daughters of Pomona that on their own initiative they invited Orozco to come west, decorate their dining hall. "We have no money," said Prof. Pijoan when Orozco arrived, "at present only $500." Artist Orozco glowered through his glasses. "Never mind about that," he said. "Have you got a wall?" When Artist Orozco returned to New York he left behind a huge ogival Michel-angelican fresco, 25 x 35 ft. representing a giant Prometheus bearing the fire of truth, in pulsating Mexican color. Wrote Critic Arthur Millier of the Los Angeles Times: "The wall has been energized by the genius of Orozco until it lives as probably no wall in the United States today." Long-legged Arnold Ronnebeck of the Denver Times was even more enthusiastic. Added Sumner Spaulding, architect of Pomona's dining hall:

"I feel as though the building would fall down if the fresco were removed."

The East's view of Orozco is obtainable this week at the Metropolitan Museum, Manhattan. Two of his huge canvases are part of the loan exhibition of Mexican art circulated by the Carnegie Institute and the American Federation of Arts, sponsored by ex-Ambassador Dwight Whitney Morrow and Dr. Frederick A. Keppel. Artist Orozco himself is further downtown squatting on a scaffold in the new School of Social Research, painting great swirling designs on wet plaster with a very small brush. Beside him his master plasterer and assistant Juan Jorge Crespo, prepares the wall for Orozco to paint, two square yards at a time. "Fresco painting," explained Artist Orozco, "has much to do with the time of day. If I start one piece at ten in the morning, I must start the next piece at ten the next morning so that the colors will dry the same."

Gardenias & Gauguin

In a welter of gardenias and orchids, amid the sheen of many emeralds, in an atmosphere fragrant with excellent things to drink, a new art gallery blossomed last week on Manhattan's artiest street, East 57th, with an opening exhibition that snapped one more spat-button of respectability on the artistic insurgents of 1918: Derain, Picasso, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse. Grizzle-chinned Henri Matisse was present in person to confer a Parisian benediction. Owner and patron of the gallery was beauteous Marie Norton Whitney Harriman, onetime daughter-in-law of Sculptress Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, present wife of Banker-Sportsman William Averell Harriman. The Marie Harriman Gallery will probably never feel that fear of financial disaster which hangs like a permanent black pall over most of its glittering neighbors.

At the opening last week Mrs. Harriman gravely explained to reporters that she had been collecting French moderns for years, that her house had become so crowded that she must either stop buying pictures or rent more rooms to hang them. Hence the Marie Harriman Gallery. Art critics, dodging nervously among socialites, were impressed. Of the 29 canvases on view, not one was unimportant. Present were such frequently reproduced works as Picasso's mustachioed Harlequin, a good Tahiti Gauguin, Renoir's Claude as a Clown in Red, Cezanne's Man with a Pipe, eight irreproachable Derains. Another beauteous young socialite ma tron to take art seriously is Mrs. Mary Gallery Coudert, who last week obtained a Paris divorce from Attorney Frederic R. ("Fritz") Coudert Jr. (defeated last November for New York's District Attorney- ship by Tammany's Judge Thomas C. T. Grain) because domesticity interfered with her sculpture. She will make her home in a Paris studio.

* Defeated and exiled candidate for President in the election of 1929.

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