Nearly ten years after his death, Mexico's José 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,...