LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Supporting Dr. Dearborn

Dear Sir: I wish every Dartmouth alumnus could read the communication of Dr. George Van Ness Dearborn '90, in the "Arts and Artists" section of the Boston Transcript for March 10, 1934. He has with such restraint a nd exactness expressed my own feeling that I exclaim "Amen and Amen," for heretofore I had supposed my own estimate of the Orozco delineations in whole or in part was accountable to a possible lack of appreciation of graphic art.

I have read and reread everything I have seen in print in criticism of Orozco's work, but nowhere before have I seen one word deprecating these grotesque depictions, and in particular this one panel so insulting to every man ever connected with Dartmouth College, to the institution itself, and indirectly to all other colleges and college graduates.

The indelicate (mild word) portrayal, if perpetrated by some disappointed boy on the wall of a suitable outbuilding, would be appropriately located and be very easily understood as his vituperation of the failure of his instructors in his one case; as such it would be a telling vehicle of expression; located where it is it smells to heaven, a stench in the nostrils of every good taste, an impudent affront to the very men who harbor it in their own precincts, to their endeavors and to the young men in their supposedly earnest approach to life- If all education is thus futile why not close up shop? Why invite young men to such a promised failure?

I have no notion of seeing this in print, although quite willing to have my humble opinion recorded with Dr. Dearborn's.I doubt if this expression would be acceptable to any Dartmouth publication. My sole object in addressing you is to ask if you will inform me by private letter or in print whether there are more than two of us who feel that an outrage has been com- mitted on the walls of an otherwise dignified building of our College.

18 Orne St.,Marblehead, Mass.,March 12, 1934.

Pro and Con

[Dr. Dearborn of the class of '90 recentlywrote a "letter to the Transcript" statinghis opinion of the Orozco murals. His letter, and the reply made to it by Robert S.Chase, a painter who has worked in Hanover, are reprinted below. These lettershave aroused much interest— ED.]

To the Editor of the Transcript: I am appealing to you as an expert in matters of the "social consciousness" (so dear to the wise and genial soul of the late deeply regretted Josiah Royce) to tell us why it is that J. C. Orozco is allowed to get low-rate advertising and cash a-plenty by putting pictures such as his "Academic Education" on the walls of a library reading room at Dartmouth College? Are academic values being "devaluated" at the old institution above the Connecticut? And yet"there she stands."

I consider the mural a disgrace not only to real fine art (we are used to that) but to the institution that tolerates it.

February 12, 1934,U. S. Veterans Hospital,Kingsbridge,New York City.

To the Editor of the Transcript: If George Van Ness Dearborn had written his opinion of Beethoven say, in eighteen hundred and odd, he would probably have used the same language that he uses in respect to Orozco and Dartmouth, in his letter to the Transcript of February 12.

The trouble with Mr. Dearborn we suspect, is his birthday. When a man is born in 1869 it is dollars to doughnuts that at sixty-five he will not be in sympathy with the coming in of a new world, particularly as reflected in the fine arts.

Orozco is one of the most sincere artists working today and it would have been easy for Mr. Dearborn to discover that the terms on which he works are those of a rather unpaid college professor which is the status pretty much of the "teachers" under our present system particularly during this depression.

To many these frescoes of Orozco are epoch making works. They share in that "eternal dignity of labor and art which lies in their effecting that permanent re-shaping of environment which is the substantial foundation of future security and progress. . . . . The fruits of such endure and make possible the development of further activities having fuller significance."

February 16, 1934,Boston, Massachusetts.