Epic Encounter

Jose Clemente Orozco contemplates the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl while painting the Epic of American Civilization mural in Baker Library in 1932. At the time, professor Artemas Packard echoed the sentiment of critics by calling Orozco "the greatest fresco painter since the Renaissance." The artist was no doubt talented, despite having lost a hand at age 21. But the leftist Mexicans presence on campus riled alumni, who felt his modernism was grotesque and ill-suited to Bakers Neo-Georgian architecture. Time has proven them wrong. Starting this month, "Jose Clemente Orozco in the United States," a showing of 120 of his paintings, prints and sketches, opens at the Hood Museum. The exhibit runs through December 15.