Alfred Neumeyer

Victory without Trumpet

For generations students of archaeology had to look at pictures of the famous Nike of Samothrace in a reconstruction which showed her with a long trumpet in her outstretched hand, blowing a fanfare of triumph (fig. 1). This attempt to complete the image of the armless statue was based on a Hellenistic coin which shows a similar Victory, trumpet in hand. To the modern eye, educated by the sculptural aesthetics of Maillol and Henry Moore, the thin accessory looked decidedly unpleasant.

Orozco's Mission

Surrounded by vast, half-completed projects, Clemente Orozco died in the summer of 1949, at the age of sixty-six. By his death the world has lost one of the few men of stature in the realm of painting. In writing down the word “stature” I remember what a little, what a frail man Orozco seemed to me when I visited him in his modern apartment-studio house in Mexico City in 1947. Black and sallow, the eyes protected by glasses with unusually heavy lenses, hard of hearing, with only one arm, I looked at one who usually would be called an invalid. Yet this incapacitated being was the same one who, year in, year out, would cover the walls of Mexican buildings with an “orbis pictus” for his people. At the moment he was occupied with the murals for the Jesus Hospital in Mexico City and the huge abstract composition for an out-of-door theater executed in automobile spray. His mind was then preoccupied with technical problems of weather-proof color. Yet at the same time he was curious to learn about Existentialism,...