Shining on: Orozco's "Epic of American Civilization".

• Author: Harris, Patricia Roberts
• Position: Jose Clemente Orozco's murals in Dartmouth College's Baker Library

Mural Painting is art's equivalent of public speaking -- loud, forceful and vibrant. Unlike the polite conversational tone of paintings to be hung in a home, a mural typically tackles grand subjects and universal ideas. Mexican artist Jose Clemente Orozco (1883-1949) was a master of the form. His Expressionist style and bold ideas demand a viewer's complete attention.

But until recently, one of his masterpieces, "The Epic of American Civilization," spoke with a voice muted by years of obscuring grime and a pallor of mineral salts accumulated on the surface. Thanks to a five-year conservation program culminating in an intensive two-week restoration in June 1989, Orozco's masterpiece again speaks boldly of the resilience of the human spirit.

Along with Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, Jose Clemente Orozco was a central figure in the muralismo movement that arose in Mexico after the Revolution. While living in the U.S. between 1927 and 1934, Orozco painted murals at Pomona College in California and at the New School for Social Research in New York City. His masterpiece of the period, however, was "The Epic of American Civilization," painted from 1932 to 1934 while he was a visiting professor at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Churchill P. Lathrop, a Dartmouth professor emeritus of art history, recalls Orozco fondly. Charged by the president of Dartmouth to make art of interest to all students at the college, Lathrop and another young professor invited Orozco to join the faculty as an artist in residence -- a radical move at a time when few colleges studied the work of living artists.

"We thought the act of painting a mural would be important," Lathrop recalls with a smile. "The idea was to get the students involved." Little did Lathrop realize that the college would end up with Orozco's most complex and accomplished painting outside Mexico and one of the finest works of his career. Moreover, the invitation launched a tradition of artists in residence at Dartmouth, making it the oldest such program in the U.S.

Orozco was taken with the idea, in part because Dartmouth College had been founded before the American Revolution explicitly to educate the native population as well as the English colonists. Originally invited to demonstrate fresco technique on a corridor wall between the art building and the library in May 1932, Orozco spotted the cavernous reading room in the basement of Dartmouth's newly-constructed Baker Library...