Dead from the Dead

Last February Jose Clemente Orozco, one-armed peer of Diego Rivera, signed and dated the last of his 15 great frescoes on the walls of Dartmouth's new Baker Library (TIME, Feb. 26). Then Dartmouth settled down to contemplate in awe or anger the largest fresco unit in the U.S. Keynote of Orozco's Epic of American Civilization was Mexican mythology and the second coming of Quetzalcoatl, "the white Messiah of peace and understanding." To depict academic tradition in the U. S., without Quetzalcoatl, Orozco did Gods of the Modern World--robed skeletons watching an unclothed skeleton give birth to a skeletal foetus in a mortarboard.

Many a conservative Dartmouth trustee and graduate shuddered at the vitriolic colors and subjects of the Mexican painter, held his peace only out of loyalty to his alma mater. That Dartmouth did not want such reticent respect from her sons, however, became evident last June when the college published a booklet proudly describing and illustrating its new frescoes. Excerpt: "That the Orozco murals should arouse controversy was anticipated and desired. . . . Whatever may be the final judgment of time on the place of Orozco and these murals in the great tradition of art. the college generation which witnessed the creation of these frescoes had a rare and exciting privilege."

Last week Dartmouth got the controversy it desired. The newsy Art Digest carried as its leading article an acidulous diatribe against Dartmouth and its murals by Harvey Maitland Watts, a director of Philadelphia's Moore Institute of Art, Science and Industry. Prouder of his "The Gulf Stream Myth and Its Relation to the Mild Climate of Europe" is Critic Watts than of any other item in his career as a lecturer and author. Wrote he in the Art Digest:

"Orozco starts off with this dictum: In every painting, as in every other work of art, there is always an IDEA, never a STORY. This dictum is falsified not only by the great art of painting . . . but by all the other arts including sculpture, and, particularly, the epic from Homer to Dante, and the drama from Aeschylus to Shakespeare. . . . Through these murals a New England institution has allowed a Mexican painter to satirize English-speaking traditions, spiritual, educational and academic, while forcing on the college the extremely tiresome traditions of an alien and somewhat abhorred civilization of the Toltec-Aztec cults. . . . The spectacle of New England students being expected to revere Tezcatlipoca, the Toltec divinity who was the patron of college students, with side glances of horror possibly at Huitzilopochtli, the war god . . . is probably one of the most amazing if not amusing spectacles ever presented to American college life. . . But all this is a thing apart from the main satire in which Quetzalcoatl's divine attributes by contrast are used to bolster up a crude pictorial misrepresentation of academic education in America as 'a sterile ritual of dead things giving birth to dead things.'

"If this goes on one will expect in the Princeton Theological Seminary a series of murals depicting ... the 'idea' back of the miraculous painting, the Virgin of Guadalupe. ... Or perhaps that able Jesuit institution. Georgetown University, will give over its library to a depiction of the Protestant Reformation with Huss and Luther and Wickliffe the conspicuous characters and the Medicean Popes grossly caricatured."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.