Art: WHITE BIRD FLYING

WASHINGTON’S Pan American Union quietly put on view last week an exhibition calculated to raise the roof. The work of a passionate, plump and indefatigable Ecuadorian Indian named Oswaldo Guayasamin (pronounced guy-yah-sah-meait, and meaning, in Inca. “white bird flying”), it was as powerful as any painting to come out of South America in modern times. Guayasamin, 35, once studied with Mexico’s late master of mordantly bitter painting, José Clemente Orozco. He has a similar social consciousness, amounting to aching rage at man’s inhumanities, and a similar range of techniques, from abstraction to hammer-blunt realism.

Guayasamin’s subject matter, Ecuador, is all his own. He sees it as a tragic land, where Indians, mestizos and Negroes struggle side by side, half-blind to their own and each other’s needs. Guayasamin’s vision sometimes soars high above the country, as in his turbulent bird’s-eye view of Quito (see color page). More often it swoops down for an agonizingly close look at a funeral, a prison, a prostitute. His occasional canvases of embracing lovers or mothers with their children show a growing tenderness and ability to convey the smooth with the rough. If Guayasamin’s incisive drawing, muddy but emotive color and exuberant sense of design are some day united in the service of a more positive view of man and the world around him, he will be remembered far beyond Ecuador.