OROZCO AT DARTMOUTHThe Epic of American Civilization

HOOD MUSEUM OF ART, DARTMOUTH COLLEGE DARTMOUTH COLLEGE LIBRARY

This brochure has been sponsored by Monroe Denton, Class of 1968

© 2007 Trustees of Dartmouth College. All rights reserved.

Edited by Nils Nadeau

Designed by Joanna Bodenweber

Printed by Villanti & Sons, Printers, Inc.

All mural photography by Jeffrey Nintzel

Mural images from José Clemente Orozco’s The Epic of American Civilization,1932–34, fresco, reserve reading room, Baker Library, Dartmouth College.Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College

Photographs of the mural in progress courtesy of Dartmouth College Library

Continuous scan of mural used on front cover and center spreadsby Hany Farid

Diagram on center spread by Barbara Krieger

Back cover: The muralist’s tools; Orozco on scaffold with Man Released from the Mechanisticto the Creative Life, May 1932

Preface

The Epic of American Civilization by José Cle-mente Orozco is one of Dartmouth College’sgreatest treasures. Painted between 1932and 1934, the mural features provocativethemes and haunting imagery that continueto resonate with audiences today.

The early 1930s was a burgeoning era forart on the Dartmouth campus, thanks to theambitions of art history professors Artemas S.Packard and Churchill P. Lathrop, who ap-proached Orozco with the support of PresidentErnest Hopkins. This landmark commissionwould be, they surmised, the first in a seriesof regular engagements with “the most com-petent artists available.” Orozco, Hopkins,Lathrop, and Packard could not have envis-aged how their advocacy for transformativeart at Dartmouth would eventually manifestitself. Seventy-five years later, The Epic ofAmerican Civilization remains one of very fewworks commissioned for Dartmouth, yet itsinfluence on countless artists and scholars,students and faculty, and visitors from all partsof the globe is nothing short of remarkable.

Packard and Lathrop were equally con-cerned that students wishing to learn aboutan artist’s studio activities had no resource foracademic support, although Carpenter Hall,home of the Art History Department since1929, was outfitted with drawing, painting,sculpting, and printmaking studios, in additionto seven art exhibition galleries. They pro-posed to President Hopkins that an artist bebrought to Dartmouth to add academic rich-ness to students’ “extracurricular” interest inart making. Carlos Sanchez ’23 thus becamethe first artist-in-residence at DartmouthCollege, followed the next year by José

Clemente Orozco. Decades later, the artist-in-residence program, now administered by theStudio Art Department, has brought nearly150 artists to teach and work at Dartmouth,including Paul Sample, Robert Rauschenberg,Frank Stella, Donald Judd, and more recentlyWilliam Christenberry, Terry Adkins, AmySillman, Alison Saar, Jane Hammond, and SanaMusasama. All of these artists and their stu-dents have no doubt spent time, together andalone, contemplating the narrative, iconogra-phy, and sheer mastery of technique thatOrozco demonstrated in his great murals.

In 1936, a couple of years after Orozco haddeparted the Hanover Plain for his nativeMexico, another artist traveled three hundredmiles to stand before his Dartmouth master-piece. According to the 1989 Pulitzer Prize–winning biography by Steven Naifeh andGregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock—witha group that included fellow artist PhilipGoldstein (later Philip Guston)—drove fromNew York to see Orozco’s mural. Pollock sub-sequently painted an untitled sketch nowknown as Bald Woman with Skeleton (right),which was recently acquired by the HoodMuseum of Art and is reminiscent of several ofOrozco’s panels. Pollock, among many artiststhen, now, and still to come, was moved tocreate something new from his experiencewith this powerful work of modern art.

Although not in direct response to The Epicof American Civilization, another avant-gardeartist shared his ideas of utopia with theDartmouth campus and community in thesummer and fall of 2007. Chinese artist WendaGu created a monumental sculpture for theMain Hall of Baker Library and Berry Library’s“Main Street,” filling the entire space one floorabove Orozco’s murals. Gu’s sculpture for

Dartmouth, titled the green house, was madefrom the hair collected from over 42,000 hair-cuts of Dartmouth students, faculty, and staffand Upper Valley community members. Partof Gu’s thirteen-year conceptual united nationssculpture series, the green house arose fromhis dream that through art he might unitehumanity and encourage international under-standing. Gu’s sculpture at Dartmouth wasequally powerful in its statement about theliving, human dimension of globalization. Itpointed to the diversity represented by ourcommunity in dialogue with Orozco’s The Epicof American Civilization.

We can only hope that Professors Packardand Lathrop would be satisfied that theirvision for art at Dartmouth, although notexactly what they had planned, has sparkedthe imagination and creativity of generationsto follow and has made Dartmouth a vibrantcommunity for artists, scholars, and art lovers.

We are most grateful to Monroe Denton,Class of 1968, whose generous sponsorshiphas made this brochure possible. He was influ-enced strongly during his student days bythe visual power of Orozco’s murals. We feelconfident that you will be also.

Brian KennedyDirector, Hood Museum of Art

Jeffrey HorrellDean of Libraries and Librarian of the College

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Jackson Pollock, untitled (Bald Woman with Skeleton), about1938–41, oil on the smooth side of Masonite attached tothe stretcher. Purchased through the Miriam and SidneyStoneman Acquisitions Fund. © 2007 The Pollock-KrasnerFoundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New YorkPhoto by Jeffrey Nintzel

Gods of the Modern World

Snakes and Spears

Departure of Quetzalcoatl

In 1768 the founder of Dartmouth College,the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, sent “a smallspecimen of the produce and manufacture ofthe American wilderness”—a pipe, tobaccopouch, knife case, and several other articles—to the College’s benefactor, the Second Earl ofDartmouth.1 From its very beginnings, Dart-mouth’s remote location in the New Englandwilderness fostered an active commitment toproviding examples of the “natural and moralworld,” as museum and library collectionswere thought of in the eighteenth century.One of the most notable manifestations of thisongoing commitment is The Epic of AmericanCivilization, the mural that, in the spring of1932, the Mexican artist José Clemente Orozcowas commissioned to paint in the lower-levelreserve reading room of Dartmouth’s BakerLibrary.

The Epic of American Civilization proved tobe a pivotal work in the career of one of themost significant artists of the twentieth centu-ry. Many of the students who witnessed itscreation never forgot the experience, and itsimpact is still palpable seventy-five years later.To understand how this inflammatory work bya Mexican artist came to be created at Dart-mouth College during the depths of the GreatDepression is to understand something bothabout Dartmouth and about Wheelock’s suc-cessors as stewards of student cultural life.

Commissioning OrozcoThe idea of bringing Orozco to Dartmouth toexecute a mural seems to have occurred tomembers of the art faculty around the timetheir new building, Carpenter Hall, was com-pleted in 1929. The following year, thedepartment’s chairman, Artemas S. Packard,supported by a young member of the art fac-ulty, Churchill P. Lathrop, began a campaignto realize their vision of obtaining for theCollege the services of one of the two impor-tant Mexican muralists then working in theUnited States: Diego Rivera and José ClementeOrozco. According to Lathrop, Orozco wastheir preferred choice from the beginning.2

But they were quite aware that the gregariousRivera had better name recognition, soPackard and Lathrop organized several exhibi-tions of Orozco’s prints and drawings in thegalleries of Carpenter Hall in order to make hiswork better known in northern New England.

The persistence of Orozco’s New York deal-er, Alma Reed, was an important factor thatmay have helped offset a tendency to favorRivera among potential supporters of bringinga Mexican muralist to Dartmouth. Chiefamong these was the Rockefeller family, withtheir Mexican oil interests. Nelson Rockefeller,Dartmouth Class of 1930, had been a studentof Lathrop’s, and a tutorial fund for specialeducational initiatives set up by Nelson’smother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, would ulti-mately make the commission possible.

From 1930 to 1931, Orozco was workingon murals for the New School for Social

Dartmouth College and The Epic of American Civilization

JACQUELYNN BAAS

Orozco on scaffold with Departure of Quetzalcoatl,June 1932 (detail)

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Research in Manhattan. Alma Reed informedPackard that Orozco was eager to return to aclassical theme, like that of the Prometheusmural he recently had created for PomonaCollege. On February 20, 1931, Reed wrotePackard that what Orozco had in mind forDartmouth was something “he calls the NewWorld epic painting—taking great traditionalthemes, such as the Prometheus, and givingthem a meaning for today.” On May 22,Packard reassured Reed that members of theArt Department had been thinking about thisproject and how it might be accomplished,and that “some of us are predisposed in favorof Señor Orozco.”

Progress was slow, however, becausePackard was not making much headway withfundraising for an Art Department mural. In aletter to Mrs. Rockefeller of August 8, 1931, heused her suggestion of Rivera as a pretext forproposing an even more ambitious plan: “I ammore than a little excited by your suggestionof Rivera, who, without any doubt, is a greaterall-round painter than Orozco. . . . Would itnot be eminently worth while to think of acontinuous series of mural paintings beingexecuted at Dartmouth at intervals of three tofive years during the next fifty or a hundredyears by the most competent artists availableso that in the course of time we should have inthis one place a sequence of original workssuch as no institution of our day possesses? . . .I am of the opinion that it would not require avery large endowment to guarantee such aprogram. . . . But I am not as competent tojudge of this or of the wisest method of raisingthe funds necessary to make a start as you andPresident Hopkins are.”

By November, Alma Reed was again press-ing Packard about the Dartmouth mural

project. “I am wondering if there is any devel-opment on the matter of the murals for Dart-mouth,” she wrote. “Do you not think itwould be advisable for Sr. Orozco to submithis drawings for the project, based, of course,on the architectural setting for the murals? Hewould be pleased to come to Dartmouth atany time, on his own responsibility, in order totake measurements.”

Orozco’s willingness to come at his ownexpense to assess the scope of the project wasa turning point. Churchill Lathrop recalled:“Early in 1932, we had a brilliant revelation, anidea that might move the stalled project offdead center. The department had a small lec-ture budget;3 so, why not invite Orozco to givea lecture-demonstration on fresco painting?Such an unusual lecture, by a scholarly artist,would attract considerable student and com-munity attention, and it would produce a fewsquare feet of fresco: a small sample mural.Work-in-progress on even a small mural wouldhave educational value. Also, the presence ofOrozco would give the community the chanceto observe his skill and judge his character.”4

The Artist ArrivesOrozco finally came to Dartmouth during theweekend of March 18–20, 1932. The fresco hepainted on the occasion of this first visit wasoriginally intended as the focal point of amural cycle in the corridor connecting Car-penter Hall and the library on the theme of theGreek mechanical genius Daedalus.5 Variouslytitled “Release,” “Man Released from theMechanistic,” and, more descriptively, “ManReleased from the Mechanistic to the CreativeLife” (right), this first panel was, according toOrozco, “post-war” in theme. He stated in apress release dated May 25, 1932, that the

fresco “represents man emerging from aheap of destructive machinery symbolizingslavery, automatism, and the converting of ahuman being into a robot, without brain,heart, or free will, under the control of anothermachine. Man is now shown in command ofhis own hands and he is at last free to shapehis own destiny.”

During their discussions of the project,Orozco and members of the Art Departmentbecame excited at the possibility of a mural ina larger and more accessible location thanCarpenter Hall. They set their sights on thereserve reading room on the ground floor of

Man Released from the Mechanistic tothe Creative Life

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Baker Library, with which Carpenter is linkedby a pedestrian passageway. Once he spottedthe reserve room’s long expanses of wall,Orozco abandoned Greek mythology for atheme that would retain the universal implica-tions of mythology but be more specific toAmerica. His excitement is palpable in theprospectus he wrote on Hanover Inn letter-head during a second visit to Dartmouth inearly May of 1932 (left):

The American continental races are nowbecoming aware of their own personality, as itemerges from two cultural currents—the indige-nous and the European. The great Americanmyth of Quetzalcoatl is a living one embracingboth elements and pointing clearly, by itsprophetic nature, to the responsibility sharedequally by the two Americas of creating here anauthentic New World civilization. I feel thatthis subject has a special significance for aninstitution such as Dartmouth College whichhas its origin in a continental rather than in alocal outlook—the foundation of Dartmouth, Iunderstand, predating the foundation of theUnited States.6

As Orozco surely had been told, DartmouthCollege was chartered by the King of Englandin 1769 in what was then the royal provinceof New Hampshire for the purpose of “theeducation and instruction of Youth of theIndian Tribes in this Land . . . and also ofEnglish Youth and any others.”

Artemas Packard made several weekend vis-its to New York to discuss details of the com-mission, and on June 9, 1932, a contract wassigned by J. C. Orozco, Artemas Packard, andDartmouth’s treasurer, Halsey Edgerton. It was

agreed that Orozco would complete a muralproject comprising 2,090 square feet (this fig-ure apparently did not include the sectionacross from the reserve desk) and give “suchinstruction in the technique of fresco paintingas he cares to at his convenience.” The artistwas to be paid a total of $5,200 for aneighteen-month project—$4,000 in compen-sation and $1,200 for travel, room, and board.Orozco received $250 on the execution of theagreement and another $1,250 in late Junefor completion of his first panel, The Prophecy,over the door at the right-hand end of thereserve room’s west wing (below). With thesefunds, Orozco was able to embark on a three-month trip to Europe, his first and only visitthere.

The Creation of the MuralsThe following fall, the artist began receivinghis fee in increments of $200, paid on the firstof each month. The balance was to be paidupon completion of the project, but byNovember 1933 it was clear that Orozcowould not complete the mural within theallotted eighteen months (right). The concernof Dartmouth President Ernest Martin Hopkins,both for the artist and for his work, is revealedin a memorandum Hopkins sent to theCollege’s bursar on November 23:

In the development of [Orozco’s] murals . . . hehas taken on much added space over anythingthat was originally contemplated. . . . With theadditional work to be done, however, and withthe decreasing span of time, it has seemed to meperfectly apparent that the last panels wouldhave to be a slap-dash effort, largely withoutthe merit of the careful work done on others. . . .On the other hand, I should be very unwillingto have him quixotically continuing his workand meanwhile being in financial distressbecause of added contribution. . . . In short, atthe expiration of the present arrangement, willyou please continue payments to Orozco solong as he may be here at the rate of $2,500 forsix months, and will you make available to him$500 for expenses in connection with materials,etc. for his painting.

In total, Dartmouth College would pay JoséClemente Orozco approximately $7,000 forpainting The Epic of American Civilization, inaddition to $500 for Man Released from theMechanistic. Accounting records further showthat the College incurred $2,177.05 in expensesin connection with the project, for a total

The Prophecy

Orozco’s proposal on HanoverInn letterhead, May 1932.Dartmouth College Library,DL-34, box 2:8.

cost of approximately $10,000. This was thefigure used by Hopkins in subsequent corre-spondence, although at the artist’s request thecost of the mural was treated in a confidentialmanner.

Orozco did not want his remunerationcompared with that of his rival, Rivera.7

Hopkins had his own public relations concernsabout the cost of the project. He asked Arte-mas Packard to prepare for him comparativefigures for other mural projects. According toPackard, Puvis de Chavannes was paid$60,000 for the Boston Public Library stairwaymural (“less than half the size of ours”), andthe library paid John Singer Sargent $20,000for the murals he did on the top floor there.Rivera was being paid $21,000 on the Rocke-feller Center contract that would prove to besuch a disaster—“presumably an especiallylow figure,” according to Packard. Orozco’sfee for the Dartmouth project, Packard

concluded, “under ordinary circumstances”would be $50,000—over five times theamount he received.

Orozco signed and dated his last Dart-mouth panel (right) on February 13, 1934.Six days later he, his wife, Margarita, and theirthree children returned to New York andthence to Mexico. The artist’s final statementabout his accomplishment was published inThe Dartmouth on February 17:

Each panel has been a new experience, it haspresented new problems. I have experimentedwith color, and organization of material. I amjust beginning to realize what I have done andwhat all this has done to me.

Orozco was fifty years old when he left Dart-mouth. Even greater artistic achievements layahead, but his Dartmouth mural remains oneof the most developed summaries of his phi-losophy. It is also, in the opinion of many crit-ics, the greatest mural cycle in the UnitedStates. Its main rival is Diego Rivera’s contem-porary Detroit Industry mural at the DetroitInstitute of Arts. Unlike that work, The Epic ofAmerican Civilization was not commissioned bycaptains of industry for the municipal museumof a major city but by educators for the libraryof a New England college. In the end, thedetermination of Packard, Lathrop, andHopkins to bring José Clemente Orozco toDartmouth brought Dartmouth to the worldin ways they may have anticipated but nevercould have foreseen.

Jacquelynn Baas is an independent art historianand a former director of the Hood Museumof Art.

Notes

Quotations without citations are fromcorrespondence and documents preservedin Special Collections, Dartmouth CollegeLibrary.

1. David McClure and Elijah Parish, Memoirsof the Rev. Eleazar Wheelock (Newburyport,Mass.: Edward Little and Co., 1811), 97.

2. Churchill P. Lathrop, “How the MuralsWere Commissioned,” from the publishedpapers of a Montgomery EndowmentSymposium entitled The Orozco Murals atDartmouth College (Hanover, N.H.:Dartmouth College, 1980), 2.

3. The source for this “small lecture budget”was Rockefeller tutorial money, the corpus ofwhich was under the control of DartmouthPresident Ernest Martin Hopkins.

4. Lathrop, “How the Murals WereCommissioned,” 8.

5. A stack wing was later added to BakerLibrary, lowering the ceiling in this passage-way and blocking a window whose light wascrucial to Orozco’s composition for this pre-liminary fresco.

6. Orozco’s statement was written for publi-cation in the press release issued on May 25,1932.

7. In a letter of August 28, 1934, to EdwardBruce, Hopkins wrote: “I have not givenpublicity to the exact details of the arrange-ment in general because of the deep profes-sional jealousy that prevails between Orozcoand Rivera, and the inclination which Riveraapparently has to boast of the larger incomewhich he secures for his work as comparedwith anything which Orozco gets. Orozco’swhole attitude toward us has been one ofgenerous consideration, and I do not wantto give support to his greatest living rival bythe publication of data which might be mis-understood by the public.”

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Work in progress on the west and north and walls of TheEpic of American Civilization (Orozco on scaffold), fall 1932.

Machine Totem

4. Aztec Warriors

5. Coming ofQuetzalcoatl

6. The Pre-ColumbianGolden Age

7. Departure of Quetzalcoatl

8. TheProphecy

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9. Totem Poles3. AncientHumanSacrifice

1. Migration

9. Totem Poles

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A Visitor’s Guide toThe Epic of American Civilization

The Epic of American Civilizationrepresents the most ambitiouspublic work undertaken by therenowned Mexican muralist duringhis years in the United States.Despite its “epic” title, Orozcoconceived of the mural not as anarrative but as a work structuredaround an “American idea,”specifically a representation of acontinent characterized by theduality of indigenous and Europeanhistorical experiences. He used thereserve reading room’s symmetricalwest and east wings—devoted topre-Hispanic and post-conquestcivilizations, respectively—to createhistorical and cross-cultural parallelsand to suggest the cyclical natureof human conflict, self-sacrifice,and regeneration.

2. Snakes and Spears

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11. Cortez and the Cross

12. The Machine

13. Anglo-America

14. Hispano-America

15. Gods of theModern World

16. Symbols ofNationalism

17. Modern HumanSacrifice

18. Modern Migration ofthe Spirit

19. Chains of the Spirit

10. Machine Totems

20. Modern Industrial Man II

20. Modern Industrial Man III

20. Modern Industrial Man I

9 10. Machine Totems

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The West Wing:The Coming and Departure of Quetzalcoatl

1. Migration: In this initial panel, sometimes calledAncient Human Migration, Orozco depicts the origins ofindigenous American civilization as a grimly determinedand regimented march forward. Modern Migration of theSpirit, its thematic counterpart in the post-conquest sec-tion of the murals, appears directly across from it at thefar end of the east wing.

2. Snake and Spears: The small panel over the doorshows a rattlesnake flanked by spears, symbols ofaggression that link panels with the themes of migra-tion and sacrifice. The bright palette suggests thatOrozco returned to paint this panel while completingthe east wing.

3. Ancient Human Sacrifice: Orozco depicts the ritualof human sacrifice practiced by ancient indigenousMesoamericans. The masked participants tear the heartout of a living enemy warrior and offer it to the gods toensure the stability of the cosmic order. Orozco doesnot use this image to demonize ancient indigenous cul-tures, whose golden age he portrays in the followingpanels. Instead, he sets up correspondences with themodern sacrifices appearing in the murals’ second half,especially the facing panel Modern Human Sacrifice,which represents the human costs of militaristic nation-alism as a counterpoint to the needs of institutionalizedreligion fulfilled in Ancient Human Sacrifice.

4. Aztec Warriors: Orozco portrays representatives ofthe Aztec warrior class, who wear eagle and jaguar cos-tumes to co-opt the powerful attributes of these crea-tures. The monumental sculptured head of a featheredsnake in the foreground represents the plumed serpentgod Quetzalcoatl, whose legend dominates the westwing of the murals.

5. Coming of Quetzalcoatl: Quetzalcoatl, the impor-tant Mesoamerican mythological figure, appears herein monumental human form, bestowing the blessingsof learning, culture, and the arts on humanity. He alsodispels the previously powerful pantheon of godsbehind him—from the left, Xipe Totec, the god ofgreed, dressed in the skins of his victims; Tezcatlipoca,the god of magic, with his feet of smoking mirrors;Tlaloc, the god of rain and storm; Mictlantecuhtli, thegod of death; Huitzilopochtli, the god of war, with hisfeet of feathers; and Huehueteotl, the god of fire, wholived in the cone of the volcano Orizaba. Quetzalcoatlinspires humanity, shown awakening from a deep sleepbelow him, to great acts of creativity, symbolized by theTemples of the Sun and Moon at Teotihuacán. At thebottom right, the people conversing on the porch of ahouse symbolize the beginning of cooperation andunderstanding that is the basis of society.

6. The Pre-Columbian Golden Age: Quetzalcoatl’s giftsof agriculture, the arts, and the sciences lead to a gold-en age of peaceful human cooperation, creativity, andunderstanding. Next to the man cultivating his crop ofcorn, a sculptor carves large stelae and an astronomerstudies the stars, whose cycles are the basis of theMesoamerican calendar, many religious beliefs, and theconcept of universal knowledge.

7. Departure of Quetzalcoatl: Drawing on Meso-american myths, Orozco depicts sorcerer-devotees ofthe former gods—representing the human tendencytoward superstition, greed, and aggression—drivingQuetzalcoatl away and ending his peaceful reign. Thegestures of the sorcerers, massed in front of a temple-topped pyramid, graphically oppose the lunging stanceof the departing god. As Quetzalcoatl sails off on a raftof writhing serpents, he prophesies his return, pointingto the small panel depicting the armed European inva-sion and setting up the murals’ subsequent narrative.

8. The Prophecy: This small portrait of the armed,early-sixteenth-century European invasion of theAmerican continent was the first panel of the muralcycle that Orozco painted. It shows European militarymight embodied in the horse, a powerful weapon thatwas new to the continent. The armor-masked soldiersbear the Christian cross in the form of a huge weapon,an image declaring its role as a tool of subjugation anda justification for the European conquest.

9. Totem Poles: These caricatures of Northwest Coasttotem poles, painted with Machine Totems toward theend of the project, incorporate the indigenous inhabi-tants of North America into the mural’s narrative.

10. Machine Totems: These two vertical panels presentfantastical conglomerations of machines and industrialelements, modern equivalents of the totem poles.Orozco’s signature appears in the left panel.

The East Wing:Cortez and the Modern Era

11. Cortez and the Cross: In the first full panel of theeast wing, which is devoted to modern, post-conquestcivilization, Orozco paints a brutal portrait of thesixteenth-century Spanish invasion of Mexico led byHernan Cortez. Orozco depicts Cortez as an anti-herowho, in the logic of the murals and their epic narrative,fulfills the prophecy of Quetzalcoatl’s return. However,he founds not a new golden age but a destructive,mechanistic society. The heavily armored, machinelikefigure of Cortez, with his serene, detached expressionfar removed from the human suffering around him,stands at the center of the painting. Surrounded bydestruction, including his own burning ships, he isaccompanied by a Franciscan missionary clutching thecross, referring to the Church’s ideological support ofthe invaders and enhancing the portrait of Cortez as agodlike presence.

12. The Machine: In this panel, the mural makes athematic and historical leap into the twentieth centurythrough an expressionistic portrait of a monstrous,chaotic machine with no recognizable function. Thepanel represents the concept of contemporary mecha-nization and symbolizes the mass regimentation ofmodern society. The machine’s gray, jagged mass seemsto feed on the human bodies piled at Cortez’s feet inthe adjacent panel, connecting his destructive imperialistproject with the impersonal chaos of the modern era.

13. Anglo-America: Orozco creates an ambivalent por-trait of contemporary North American society in thispanel. Although the schoolhouse in the rear serves as asymbol of universal education, and the town meetingsuggests the possibility for cooperative actions thatbenefit society as a whole, Orozco undermines thesetraditional associations in his depiction. The prominentfigure of a tall, stern-faced schoolmarm, here an over-bearing agent of control, typifies the culture. She issurrounded by strictly regimented, expressionless chil-dren. Behind them the adults arranged in rows at aNew England town meeting present yet another exam-ple of cultural rigidity, offering a strong contrast toboth the chaos and the determination displayed nextin Hispano-America.

14. Hispano-America: Orozco presents a proud anddetermined Mexican rebel who strongly resembles theMexican revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata, animportant symbol of Mexican peasant struggles. Orozcoplaces the rebel in a modern urban setting, besieged bythe savage caricatures of the rich and the militaristic.This chaotic scene, representing Latin American idealismleft at the hands of a powerful yet disintegrating mod-ern order, stands in sharp contrast to the institutionaland personal conformity of Anglo-American societydepicted in the previous panel.

15. Gods of the Modern World: In this savage andsatirical denunciation of modern institutional educationand its indifference to the political turmoil of the 1930s,Orozco portrays skeletons dressed in academic garbpresiding over the birth of useless knowledge, embod-ied by the skeletal fetus. The background flames recallCortez’s burning ships, and the embalmed fetuses rest-ing on dusty tomes suggest the academy’s intellectualimpotence and the futile dissemination of false, mean-ingless knowledge. Indifferent to the crises of moderncivilization, the academics remain focused on theirintellectual world, dead to the burning issues of con-temporary life.

16. Symbols of Nationalism: The small panel at theend of the east wing shows a junk pile of historical sym-bols of warfare and empire, suggesting the continuitybetween the military aspirations of the European royalpowers of the past and the modern militaristic national-ism highlighted next in Modern Human Sacrifice.

17. Modern Human Sacrifice: The body of anunknown soldier, whose skeletal hands still testify to hisfinal agony, is buried beneath the trappings of patriot-ism: colorful flags, wreaths, monuments, speeches,brass bands, and the eternal flame that marks the graveof this victim of militaristic nationalism. This panel mir-rors Ancient Human Sacrifice at the opposite end of theroom, creating a thematic link between the two ages ofAmerican civilization through the pointless institutionalsacrifice of the individual.

18. Modern Migration of the Spirit: In the apocalypticclimax of the mural cycle, a defiant, resurrected Christ,painted in acid colors and shedding his skin to reveal anewly enlivened body, returns in judgment to sweepaway ideologies and institutions that thwart contempo-rary human emancipation and spiritual renewal. Orozcopresents a Christ figure who not only rejects his sacrifi-cial destiny by felling his cross but condemns and

destroys the sources of his agony, military armamentsand religious and cultural symbols here relegated tothe junk heap of history behind him.

19. Chains of the Spirit: This small panel depicts vul-tures wearing clerical collars who hold the interlockedkeys to the chains of physical and intellectual bondagepiled beneath them.

20. Modern Industrial Man (five panels): The mural’sfinal panels appear directly across from the centralreserve reading desk and the long walls of the murals,at a sort of resolution point between the pre-Hispanicand post-conquest halves of the cycle. In these panels,sometimes called Ideal Modern Culture, Orozco portraysin a subdued palette a possible future world to emergefrom Christ’s symbolic destruction of society, depictedin Modern Migration of the Spirit. In the four side panels,workers direct their own labor in a new society that isstill under construction, though these anonymous fig-ures at times appear threatened by the technology theywield. In the central panel, a reclining figure of mixedancestry—European and indigenous American, or per-haps African American—is free to set down his toolsand pursue his own education and spiritual nourish-ment. This figure symbolically resolves the competingbut complementary qualities of North American andLatin American cultures, both European and indigenousin origin.

expansion and progress. He uses the reserveroom’s division into two wings to divide hismural into “ancient” and “modern” epochs.The reserve desk functions as a spatial interreg-num that marks the destruction of the ancientworld and the violent birth of modernity.Orozco further exploits this architectural parti-tion to draw analogies between the two peri-ods, as the sequences of images along eachwing mirror one another at various momentswithin the cycle. Ancient America begins withthe migration of peoples into the Central Valleyof Mexico and the arrival of Quetzalcoatl (left),an enlightened deity who establishes a GoldenAge in which the arts, agriculture, and societyflourish. Quetzalcoatl’s departure marks thedecline of the ancient world and its destructionby conquistadors enacting Aztec portent.Modern America begins in Christian conquest,presided over by Cortez, Quetzalcoatl’s anti-heroic counterpart. In the panels that follow,American civilization is refracted throughmodernity’s dark lens. Human industry runsamok; individuality is deadened by a consensussociety and the regimentation of standardizededucation. The cycle culminates in the blindfury of nationalist war and a Christian apoca-lypse. Like Quetzalcoatl before him, the resur-rected Christ destroys what he helped to cre-ate. He chops down his cross and “migrates”the spirit toward a new millennium in whichmodern industrial man might bring aboutanother Golden Age.

José Clemente Orozco reorients the “epic ofAmerica” from the standard U.S. narrative thatbegins with British colonization along thenortheastern seaboard and proceeds heroicallywest to a Mexican story rooted in Mesoameri-can civilizations and the devastation wroughtby the Spanish Conquest. In so doing helocates America’s origins in Indo-Hispanicinstead of Anglo-European culture, while char-acterizing our “civilization” as a traumaticrather than an enlightened inheritance.However, his mural should not be mistaken foran assertion of Mexican nationalism. Rather,Orozco reminds his audiences that “America”is a shared landmass, not a synonym for theUnited States. In the1930s Orozco’s continen-tal perspective countered the parochialism ofProtestant New England and the region’s privi-leged place within an increasingly xenophobicand isolationist national imaginary. While localartists, poets, and entrepreneurs were solidify-ing America’s Yankee identity through a pas-toral vision of the regional landscape and itshearty, timebound folk, Orozco was limningan America overdetermined by technology,riven by social antagonisms, and on the brinkof war. In this way, Orozco’s mural gives voiceto everything that depression-era colonialrevivalists, regionalists, and antimodernistssought to repress about modern America.

Orozco presents America’s epic as cyclical innature, the eternal return of destruction andcreation, rather than a linear tale of democratic

Toward an Industrial Golden Age?Orozco’s The Epic of American Civilization

MARY K. COFFEY

Coming of Quetzalcoatl (detail)

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The Murals: A Closer LookOrozco deploys formal and compositionaldevices to move the viewer through his storyand reinforce comparisons across space andtime. We follow the leaning bodies depicted inAncient Migration to the next panel, AncientHuman Sacrifice. Orozco equates this Aztecritual with the blood sacrifice of modern war,depicted directly opposite at the far end of thereserve room. In Modern Human Sacrifice(above), an unknown soldier’s skeletal framemimics the flayed posture of the sacrificial vic-tim. A war monument stands in the place ofthe Coatlicue monolith, while a grandstandingpolitician presides over the offering like alatter-day priest. Orozco forges similar analo-gies between other panels. For example, theacademics presiding over stillborn knowledge

in Gods of the Modern World visually reiteratethe friezelike pantheon of Aztec deities arrayedbehind Quetzalcoatl in the panel depicting hisarrival.

Orozco enhances the drama of his story bycreating visual tension through the juxtaposi-tion of formally contrasting images. For exam-ple, he frames the Quetzalcoatl sequencealong the north wall of the west wing withpanels depicting Aztec warriors on the far leftand conquistadors (The Prophecy) at the farright. They confront one another from acrossthe wall’s expanse, linking the Conquest to themilitaristic impulses subtending both Spanishand Aztec society but also establishingQuetzalcoatl’s reign as an enlightened paren-thesis within the epic of American civilization.

As Quetzalcoatl departs on his raft of serpents,he points dramatically toward his prophesy.An abyss opens between the god and his peo-ple as they lean backward, in dynamic opposi-tion to the forward thrust of his gesture. Theirregression disrupts the visual momentum ofthe cycle, and our attention is pulled in twodirections at once. Like a rubber band that hassnapped, the ancient world recedes from viewas we are flung headlong into the Spanishonslaught and our mechanized future.

In one of the most powerful juxtapositionsin the cycle, Orozco contrasts “Anglo-” and“Hispano-” American society through opposedbut complementary compositions (below).The figures in Anglo-America are gathered intorows that form a neat circle. They focus

Modern Human Sacrifice

Anglo-America Hispano-America

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This spatial contrast is most evident in thethree panels that comprise the cycle’s finalsequence, Modern Industrial Man (right), locat-ed across from the reserve desk. In the centralimage, a racially indistinct worker has laiddown his hammer and picked up a book. Likethe building behind him (a metaphor for soci-ety), he is “under construction.” His bodyechoes the lines of the building’s steel frame,and through this analogy Orozco argues thatthe future of American civilization hinges uponhumanity’s relationship to industry. The twoflanking panels present “good” and “bad”alternatives. On the left, icons of industry—ananvil, wheels, an anchor, steel struts—are lay-ered tightly within a shallow composition. Putto no productive use, their benefit for humani-ty remains unclear. The dehumanized land-scape in this panel recalls the industrial night-mare depicted in The Machine. Nearby, work-ers huddle under a precariously suspendedI-beam. Two identical beams erupt into theforeground, forming a barrier between theviewer and the men depicted there. LikeCortez’s cross, the upright girders reinforcethe picture plane and are at odds with theperspective suggested by the diagonal reces-sion of the suspended beam. This visual ten-sion makes the scene anxious, proposing afuture in which industry threatens to imprisonor crush modern man. On the righthand side,the reverse is true. Here, men labor in unisonto erect a skyscraper. The space recedesrationally toward a vanishing point along thediagonal lines of the steel girders. The buildingunder construction recalls the fallow architec-ture depicted in Hispano-America. However, inthe earlier panel, broken windows indicatedthe failure to bring about a new society after

society, the round gold coins spilling alongthe base of Hispano-America parallel the cyclesof greed and corruption that perpetually undoMexican society.

The Narrative behind the ArtThroughout the mural, Orozco’s depiction ofpictorial space functions as a code for inter-preting his political message. In general,Orozco employs cubist techniques—a shallowsense of space, fragmentation, and a flatten-ing of the composition that pushes against thewall’s surface rather than receding toward adistanced vanishing point—to indicate achaotic and disordered society. When repre-senting a functioning and productive socialorder, however, Orozco employs a more con-ventional one-point perspective. For example,in Coming of Quetzalcoatl the pre-ColumbianGolden Age fostered by the god is signaled byrational pictorial space. A diagonal brick walldivides the composition and recedes toward asingle point located between the pyramids ofthe Sun and Moon at Teotihuacán, “Place ofthe Gods.” Conversely, in Cortez and the Cross(left), Orozco illustrates the destruction ofconquest by fragmenting objects and flatten-ing depicted space. Here, the visual recessionsuggested by the rectangular boulder lying atCortez’s foot is interrupted by a gangrenouscross that halts the movement of our eye,obstructs our view, and refers us back to thepicture plane. The shallow composition readsas claustrophobic when compared to thebreathing room in the more pacific Quetzal-coatl scenes. The rubble heap that Cortez hasmade of Quetzalcoatl’s civilization scales thewall, refusing any comfortable entry into thescene.

inward, gazing toward an empty space at theheart of the image. Zombielike children trail astern schoolmarm who monitors the scenealong the righthand margin. If Anglo-Americaclaims a highly disciplined agora with nothingat its core, Hispano-America spirals in an orgyof cruelty around the charismatic figure of therevolutionary hero. In the former composition,our eye traverses the orderly crowd along hor-izontal registers that convey a sense of steadybalance. In the latter, our gaze moves in cir-cles as we trace the motion of the corruptgenerals, politicians, and capitalists that rotatearound the doomed guerilla. The compositionis simultaneously centripetal and centrifugal,suggesting that the violence depicted isendemic and explosive. If the yellow block ofwheat depicted in the foreground of Anglo-America echoes the regimentation of U.S.

Cortez and the Cross

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the Mexican Revolution. Here, the projectseems to be proceeding apace. In the right-hand panel, modern man is in full commandof industry, just as he was in the ancientGolden Age.

Orozco’s Murals: Art for AllIn his 1928 manifesto “New Worlds, NewRaces, New Art” (Creative Art 4, no. 1 [1929],republished in ¡Orozco! 1883–1949 [Oxford:Museum of Modern Art, 1980], 46), Orozcoequates the modern skyscraper with hisattempts to forge a new mural art commensu-rate with the novel spirit and racial culturethat emerged in the Americas. The “architec-ture of Manhattan is a new value,” he writes,“something that has nothing to do withEgyptian pyramids, with the Paris Opera, withthe Giralda of Seville, or with Saint Sofia, anymore than it has to do with the maya [sic]palaces of Chichen-Itza or with the ‘pueblos’of Arizona.” Mural art, like the Manhattan sky-line, must eschew tradition and generate itsown visual language within a new cycle ofhuman creation. For Orozco, it was the publicnature of mural art that elevated it aboveother art forms, for, as he claimed, “it cannotbe hidden away for the benefit of a certain

privileged few.” With this statement in mind,we can read Modern Industrial Man as a literaltranscription of Orozco’s manifesto as well as alament for his own position as a public artistworking for the “privileged few.” In the UnitedStates Orozco found that there was no “disin-terested” public sphere—even mural art couldbe made a “matter of private gain.”

Given the artist’s stated convictions thatmural art “is for the people . . . for ALL,” thisfinal sequence has often been interpreted asan endorsement of the working-class politicsof Orozco’s Marxist peers within the muralmovement. However, close scrutiny revealsthat Orozco deviates in important ways fromthis ideology. Like the Mesoamerican manwho lies dreaming under Quetzalcoatl’s sternbut benevolent ascent, Modern Industrial Manis defined by his relationship to leisure, not amode of production. It is his capacity for self-edification—his intellectual as opposed tophysical labor—that matters. Significantly,Orozco makes this bid for self-directed learn-ing in the reading room of a library at a pri-vate college. After his fiery denunciation ofinstitutionalized knowledge in Gods of theModern World, he seems to be advocating forpublic access to the resources of higher educa-

tion. However, Orozco’s mural is less an indict-ment of Dartmouth in particular than a radi-cally unorthodox expression of socialisthumanism or even anarchism. While acknowl-edging its location, his mural addresses thebroader plight of humanity under the condi-tions of private ownership, exploitation, andsocial inequality that capitalism entails.

Identified by his humanity rather than hisclass or race, Orozco’s “modern industrialman” suggests the possibility of a new GoldenAge, depending upon which way we turn. Ifwe go left, we reenter the catastrophe of themodern world. If we go right, we find our-selves renewing the cycle of enlightenment.But this is not the atavistic return to a pre-modern utopia advocated in the regionalistpainting of the period or the indigenist politicsof his Mexican colleagues. Rather, Orozcoleaves us at the threshold of an industrialfuture in which man and modernity are recon-ciled through the productive labor of themind, not the body or the machine.

Mary K. Coffey is assistant professor of arthistory at Dartmouth College.

Modern Industrial Man

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