X Delta

In every painting, as in every other work ofart, there is always an idea, never a story.

Jose Clemente Orozco Alumni Magazine, 1933

At present, the frescoes are not arousingtoo much intellectual excitement. We considerthis rather a healthy thing.

"Undergraduate Chair" Alumni Magazine, 1933

How fortunate the generation of Dartmouthmouth men who could use the Librarybefore these murals disfigured its walls.

Letter-to-the-editor Alumni Magazine, 1934

I think that I shall never see/an I-beamlovely as a tree.

Campus doggerel, 1976

... Oafish boobs of all ages now feel theyhave the... obligation to make artisticjudgments on the appearance of things atDartmouth...."X Delta" is, I am afraid,better than we deserve.

Professor James Epperson The Dartmouth, 1976

Art is at the barricades again. Some four decades after the Orozco murals transfigured an otherwise sleepy Baker Library into a storm center of recrimination — with the thunder and lightning raging through the national press — another work of art is giving the campus fits.

Sparking the present controversy is "X Delta," an iron I-beam sculpture by Mark di Suvero currently installed on the front lawn of Sanborn House — not far from the now generally approved Orozcos. Until a few years ago, Dartmouth displayed no outdoor sculpture unless one counts the petrified stump of the Old Pine. The di Suvero, a gift of Kent M. Klineman '54, is the latest of several pieces, nearly all of them "modern," recently placed about the campus.

Small for an outdoor di Suvero work, "X Delta" measures 12 by 18 by 10 feet. It consists of massive I-beams bolted together, with a large U-shaped element suspended from the horizontal support. A wooden platform, or "bed," is suspended from cables attached to the ends of the U. Di Suvero finished it in 1969.

Detractors in the community say that "X Delta" is non-art or possibly even antiart, that it is just plain "ugly," or that sculpture of its type — no matter how acceptable as a creative work — jars brutally with the neo-Georgian architecture of Sanborn and Baker. Defenders use the words "beautiful," "heroic," "aggressive and muscular," and even "whimsical" to describe the piece. The result has been a squaring off of traditionalists (a/k/a "philistines") and modernists (a/k/a "junkyard effetes"). Detached observers see it all as the heart of a college's purpose — intellectual debate.

The present site was selected by an ad hoc College committee, and the phrase "initially placed for exhibition" in an accompanying press release is interpreted by some to mean that the Sanborn lawn might not be "X Delta's" permanent location. That interpretation may have been strengthened when nighttime vandals daubed the sculpture with green paint (it arrived at Dartmouth bearing smudges of graffiti left over from earlier exhibitions around the country).

Di Suvero is no stranger to controversy. His constructions in parks and plazas in New York and his recent major shows at the Whitney Museum and in the Tuileries Garden outside the Louvre — he was the first American and the first living artist ever to exhibit at the Tuileries - have excited hosannas and shouts of damnation. What sets di Suvero's work apart from the rest of the Constructivist school is his open invitation to touch and play. As intended, many observers of "X Delta" have been tempted to try out the suspended platform as a swing. On that basis alone the work might be considered a success.

The 43-year-old di Suvero, of Italian and Sephardic Jewish descent, was born in Shanghai and later moved with his family to San Francisco. In 1950, at the tender age of 27, he had an extravagantly successful one-man show in New York. Writing at the time, Sidney Geist, a well-known sculptor and critic, described di Suvero's work as "not merely tremendous or interesting or even terrific but [deserving] another adjective, like great.... From now on nothing will be the same."

"A place of their own" on Occom Ridge: these undergraduate women settled in happily this fall at the new cooperative house.

"X Delta" (above) incited considerable commotion after its installationon the Sanborn lawn. Greeted with less tumult was Picasso's"Guitar on a Table" (below), a gift of Nelson Rockefeller '30.Picasso painted it in 1912-13 at "the height of his inventive career."

"X Delta" (above) incited considerable commotion after its installationon the Sanborn lawn. Greeted with less tumult was Picasso's"Guitar on a Table" (below), a gift of Nelson Rockefeller '30.Picasso painted it in 1912-13 at "the height of his inventive career."