Dartmouth's Quetzalcoatl

It is never safe to leave one-armed Jose Clemente Orozco long in the presence of large undecorated wall spaces. Artist Orozco, whose jutting jaw and glittering glasses make him look not unlike an ecstatic bullfrog, is, like his friend and compatriot Diego Rivera, one of the most important mural painters in the Americas, an avid reviver of the art of true fresco. Few months ago he lectured before Dartmouth College's Department of Art. Dartmouth's chief pride is a new Georgian library, gift of the late George Fisher Baker. It has nice new walls that made Muralist Orozco's fingers itch. In no time at all he was after the trustees for permission to decorate them.

The trustees were a little uncertain. They had heard that these Mexicans were very extreme, but they gave him a panel, 7 ft. by 8 ft. at the end of a corridor leading to Carpenter Hall, to put up a sample. Muralist Orozco summoned his assistant, Master Plasterer Juan Jorge Crespo, and went to work. They produced a fresco in vibrant Mexican color entitled "Man Released from the Mechanistic." It showed a mass of broken machinery--cannon, gears, buzzsaws, bayonets and distilling worms--out of which is arising a naked youth with a cauliflower ear and a bright shoe-button eye, who seems to be violently clapping his hands.

Dartmouth's trustees inspected it, found it pleasanter than they had feared. Last week came an announcement. Artist Orozco has been given the walls of the Reserve Book Room on which to execute the largest fresco project yet undertaken in the U. S.--two main panels and eight small ones comprising more than 3.000 sq. feet.*

As subject for this great plaster painting, Artist Orozco chose the legend of Quetzalcoatl, the Toltec feathered snake-god, patron of arts. Officials of Dartmouth found this suitable. The college was founded by Missionary Eleazar Wheelock to convert the Indians.

* Ezra Winter's great projected murals for Rockefeller Center in New York will not be frescoes but huge canvases glued to the wall.

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