Caroll Wales and Constantine Tsaousis

Caroll Wales and Constantine Tsaousis are shown above cleaning and restoring the Orozco Murals in Baker Library with Prof. Churchill P. Lathrop, director of art acquisitions, looking on. Professor Lathrop, who was primarily responsible for bringing the late Jose C. Orozco to Dartmouth in 1932, arranged and super- vised the restoration of the Mexican artist's murals to their original colors. Mr. Wales, a Harvard graduate who operates an art restoring business in Boston, and Mr. Tsaousis, a Turkish-born Greek, have worked together since they met in 1952 while restoring Byzantine frescoes in Istanbul.

It took them more than six weeks to remove the film of dust and soot that had reduced the color intensity of the Orozco Murals by 20 percent, according to Mr. Wales' estimate. They used cotton swabs and applied dry cleaner solvent or a very high-grade wallpaper cleaner to remove the dirt without altering the colors painted by Orozco. So exacting were their standards that each day they were able to clean only 12 square feet of the murals or, in particularly sensitive areas, sometimes no more than 12 square inches a day. This was the first restoration since Orozco painted the murals from 1932 to 1934.