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The second greatest Mexican muralist last week brought to a brilliant end another big set of true frescoes with satirical tinges, for another capitalist institution. Early in 1932 one-armed José Clemente Orozco spied the inviting bare walls of Dartmouth College's new Baker Library. After a preliminary trial on a corridor (TIME, June 6. 1932), the Dartmouth trustees turned him loose on 3,000 sq. ft. of wall space in the Library's Reserve Book Room. He went off that summer to think. A solitary figure, speaking little English, he has worked steadily since January 1933, through Dartmouth's winter sports, through its deserted idyllic summer, through an autumn, loud with undergraduate roars from the Memorial Field on Saturday afternoons, through a second Winter Carnival. Last week he signed his name in one corner, painted the date in Spanish, "Febrero 13, 1934," called it a job, the U. S.'s biggest fresco.
Orozco had taken for his subject the American emergence of a "new world, new race, new art" from "two cultural currents —the indigenous and the European."
There in the great pillared room last week, among the 15 big panels, four small ones in bright, raw, swirling colors, was "indigenous" Quetzalcoatl, the Toltec feathered snake-god, patron of arts. "Hispano-America" showed a stanch Mexican soldier rising above a monied and medaled chorus of capitalists and generals. In "Gods of the Modern World" robed skeletons watched an unclothed skeleton give birth to a grotesque foetus wearing a mortarboard. Pride in Dartmouth's liberal tradition made many a conservative trustee who liked these murals not at all hold his peace.