THE FRESCOES ON DISPLAY
Visitors to Baker Library Have Something to SayAbout Artist Orozco and His Work
OROZCO OFTEN expressed the feeling that his frescoes were a failure if people could not appreciate them without an explanation. Gobin Stair '33, his assistant, said: "No one needs instruction to understand good art, for the artist is expressing real live emotions and feelings which all men experience and should be able to understand." Yet a summer spent as college guide has convinced me that the average person has neither the background nor the imagination to gain much of value from the fresco project unless he is furnished with some interpretation.
I've met them all the women who meekly inquired after the "Oresco Frozcoes"; the positive female who insisted vehemently that the human sacrifice panel was upside down "it must be," she said; the swaggering near-inebriate who ventured that "the guy who did this was tighter than I ever was a monstrosity, a monstrosity!" One elderly lady I remember particularly. After viewing the project she expressed her feelings by saying that she thought that the murals destroyed that feeling of patriotism and idealism engendered in her by the fact that an ancester of hers had signed the Mayflower Compact.
Touring parties have been of varied types. There have been the inevitable tourists stopping to take a glance at the frescoes that they might tell their friends they had seen them—many of them chiefly disappointed because they learned that the project was not done by the same man who had his murals torn out at Radio City. There have been alumni using the frescoes as a good excuse for seeing Hanover again. One in particular, after stating that the Porto Rican Minister of Education has felt Dart- mouth hardly the place for Orozco's work, berated me as though I were the artist because the faces in the murals were mongolian and negroid to his way of thinking. There have been students showing fond parents through. One I overheard interpreting the panel on the prophecy and departure of Quetzalcoatl as "intelligence emerging from the sea of destruction." Another explained Cortez and the destruction of the Aztec Empire as "Balboa coming on the horizon and discovering the Pacific Ocean." To still another the panel of the reactionaries driving the great White Messiah from the country became the crusades which crusade? "Oh, just any crusade."
Yet many have been the keenly interested observers people who in short time exhausted my slight knowledge of the frescoes. One of the most interesting was a Mr. King, an English actor who played with Maude Adams in Hanover this summer. His enthusiastic comments were well understood, but he jovially remarked that what impressed him most was that the guide who gave a lecture with such apparent enthusiasm and understanding should thereafter seem as interested in a newspaper's comic strip!
Many art students and critics have visited Hanover this summer. One I remember rather vividly, a little Jewish lady (with Irish wit, she later told me). She was a personal friend of Orozco "such a charming man and so unobtrusive in spite of his great ideas. Such a master of technic and color it struck me first but then it became superb. But how unpopular he is with his contemporaries Siqueiros and Rivera. Because he does not sacrifice his art impulse to his propaganda motive his work is wrong in the eyes of his contemporaries."
And that very spirit of peremptory condemnation of the frescoes even before viewing them has been quite evident this summer. Too many parties have asked me to show them those "awful paintings on the wall" or those "monstrosities they call art." I think the most violent criticism I have heard has come from those who have never taken the time to try to understand this symbolic symphony of civilization on this continent. With preconceived notions of beauty as entirely perfection and pleasantness, they look once and condemn. My most embarrassing contact of the summer was with a woman who laughed me out of the room when I spoke of Orozco as a man of genius who had effected his project at Dartmouth through two years of arduous work. She stood and laughed at the frescoes that was as far as it went. "Don't tell me that's art," she said, "I've seen art and I know what it is."
In illustration of an opposite attitude may I speak of my short acquaintance with Boynton Merrill '15, who received an honorary degree from Dartmouth in 1928. Dr. Merrill warned me frankly that he had set his mind against the murals because of the comments he had heard and was certain he would not appreciate them. But he listened attentively to what interpretation I could give him and when I had finished he turned and thanked me, saying that though he knew nothing of art and could not criticize on that score, he thought the ideas were magnificent and all too true.
Perhaps the most prevalent comment from some of the alumni and the more conservative guests has been why did they have to put the frescoes here at Dartmouth? in a conservative New England College full of American tradition?—why do they have to let a Mexican put up murals using Mexican civilization as a basis? Any comment I might make to the effect that the ancient civilization of Mexico and Central America represent the cultural peak of the American Indian was rarely appreciated.
Still, on the whole, this symbolic representation of the most artistic revaluation of our times has left more than a favorable impression on the majority of the summer guests. What little I could do by way of interpretation was wholeheartedly appreciated by most of my parties. Many came with preconceived ideas and left convinced that this work of Orozco is the work of a genius a thing not to be viewed once and condemned but something to be viewed many times and appreciated.
By way of conclusion I am going to speak of an encounter with one of the camp groups whom it was my pleasure to guide. The group was made up of ten girls between the ages of ten and sixteen seeing the murals because their counselor thought it would be good for them. They were more interested, however, than I expected and listened attentively. But when I finished, one little girl turned to another and said saucily, "But I still think the guides in the Empire State are the best looking I've seen."
College Guide, Summer of 1954
