Party at Alma Reed’s Delphic Studios. Included in the photograph: José David Alfaro Siqueiros, Chago Rodriguez, Alma Reed, Enrique Riveron, José Clemente Orozco, and Julia Codesico (ca. 1936) | Enrique Riverón papers, 1918–1990s / Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution / Current copyright status is undetermined
In January 1931, journalist and art-world impresario Alma Reed attended the unveiling of A Call to Revolution and Table of Universal Brotherhood, a cycle of frescoes by José Clemente Orozco and the first mural commissioned for The New School’s bespoke building in New York City’s progressive haven of Greenwich Village. In the 1920s, Art Deco influences had revived a classical tradition of murals worldwide; by 1931, governmental public works programs in Mexico and the United States had brought about a “golden age,” and Orozco was known internationally as one of the “big three” Mexican muralists, alongside Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. But Reed, in her 1956 biography, Orozco (Oxford University Press), remembered the unveiling of the Twelfth Street frescoes as uneasy: Most of the art critics and journalists “looked confused; others positively frightened.”
The New School was only in its twelfth year of operation when the mural was commissioned, in 1930, but the school had already begun to express its values (and aesthetics) by moving from its original Chelsea location to a building designed in the early “International” style by Joseph Urban (with the help of his wife and largely uncredited collaborator, the performer and Barnard professor Mary Porter Beegle). The inosculation of the murals in the humble dining room—a choice intended to accentuate the egalitarian nature of the artwork—in a startling modern building befuddled the assayers. Reed, who had introduced Orozco to The New School’s first president, Alvin Johnson, later lamented: “Alas, evidently all had come prepared with mental pictures of the heroic-sized murals Orozco had painted in Mexico and in California.”
Reed had been a longtime supporter of Orozco. In 1928, she hosted a viewing of Orozco’s work at her downtown apartment, known as the “Ashram.” The next year, she opened the Delphic Studios, where Orozco’s work would enjoy permanent display. The inaugural show at the gallery featured watercolors by Orozco alongside drawings by Thomas Hart Benton, who, slightly younger than Orozco, offered the US answer to the monumental post-revolutionary Mexican mural: Benton, named for his great-great uncle, a five-term senator from Missouri, was appropriately provenanced for Americana. Benton’s introduction to Johnson and The New School had also been facilitated by Reed, albeit with less intentionality. Justin Wolff, in his biography, Thomas Hart Benton (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) summarizes the backroom wranglings:
When Benton heard the news [of Orozco’s commission] from Ralph Pearson, a friend who taught art at The New School, he was irritated, believing that Reed had neglected him by only representing Orozco. … Pearson took up Benton’s cause and marched into Johnson’s office demanding to know why an American muralist had been ignored. Sensing that he could commission another muralist series on the same terms, Johnson agreed to include Benton and so secured the services of two top muralists for next to nothing. The specifics of the deal were worked out. … Benton would paint murals for the boardroom in return for the price of the eggs [used in tempera] and modest recompense for a few lectures at The New School. In the end, Johnson’s only instructions for the two painters were that they depict contemporary life and make works so great that “no history book written a hundred years from now could fail to devote a chapter to [them].” Reed was angered by this maneuvering and received the news of Benton’s commission “very frigidly”; as Benton remembers it, she believed that he had acted opportunistically, an accusation that was, he claims, “plausible.”
Benton’s mural previewed prior to the Orozco unveiling in November 1930 at Benton’s studio. Edward Alden Jewell, a New York Times writer and editor invested in establishing an “American Art” and known for his curmudgeonly reviews, was lavish in his praise, lauding Benton for “meeting the lusty spirit of life with a lusty spirit of his own.” To Reed’s dismay, four months later, Jewell was one of the confused, frightened journalists at the unveiling of the Orozco murals.
“My worst fears were confirmed,” wrote Reed in Orozco:
Mr. Jewell had joined our party for a few moments to inquire about the fresco medium concerning which, he freely admitted, he was “woefully uninformed.” Then with elbow and courtly criticism leaned forward in silent scrutiny of the west wall, his eyes unswervingly fastened on the Soviet panel. Finally, as a result of his careful study … Mr. Jewell ventured a single comment. He solemnly declared: “The red-starred helmets of the Russian soldiers remind me of hams—the Red Star brand featured by Macy’s Department Store.” Orozco’s face registered his painted incredulity. He looked at me anxiously as though to make sure he had correctly heard the critic’s words.
Reed’s investment in A Call to Revolution and Table of Universal Brotherhood was more than financial. The mural represented a political outlook that informed her life; moreover, in tribute to Reed, Orozco had included a portrait of her late fiancé—the Governor of Yucatán, Felipe Carrillo Puerto, who had been assassinated in 1924 while she planned their wedding in San Francisco—presiding over the panel “Struggle in the Occident.” Michael Schuessler, editor of Alma Reed’s posthumous memoir, Peregrina (University of Texas, 2007), noted that Orozco based the portrait on a photo Carrillo Puerto sent to Reed during their courtship and included in the background the pyramid of Chichén Itzá, which the couple had climbed together.
A week after the unveiling of Orozco’s New School panels, Jewell would publish his official decree in the New York Times: “One is bound to confess—and this with genuine regret—that the Orozco frescoes in the dining room of The New School for Social Research are disappointing. … The walls are a melee of fragments without—from the standpoint of design—any relationship. Whatever attempt at ‘orchestration’ the painter may have made has turned out dismally.”
A week later, on February 1, the Times ran a full page of commentary on Jewell’s scathing appraisal, noting, “Seldom, perhaps, does honesty encounter more deeply felt reluctance on the part of a reviewer than that experienced in preparing comment on the Orozco murals.” Lois Wilcox, Orozco’s assistant on the mural, joined two others in writing letters to the Times picking apart Jewell’s review as lacking education and discernment and scorned his suggestions for a “loosely flowing, continuous arabesque” as peculiar and unrefined. “The negatives and affirmatives,” wrote Wilcox, “could almost be reversed to agree with the professional opinion.”
In 1945, the year of Johnson’s official retirement—as the Second World War was supplanted by the Cold War—Johnson published a pamphlet intended to deflect red-scare denunciations of the Benton and Orozco murals. Johnson dismissed criticism of the murals, particularly regarding the Orozco panels, as politically motivated, aesthetically disingenuous, racist, and antithetical to intellectual freedom. Johnson further cited the popularity of the murals:
Several hundred thousand people have come to view the pictures, and … several thousand newspapers and magazines, not only in the United States but in Canada, Latin America, Europe, and even China have asked permission to reproduce photographs of parts of the murals. A reasonable calculation would fix the number of people who have seen the murals and reproduced photographs of them at over 100 million. The count is not complete.
Johnson downplayed the “Soviet panel” portrayal of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and the Red Army on the grounds of artistic freedom: The murals were not a political endorsement by the school, and those who didn’t like the murals could “lump it.”
In fact, The New School did espouse progressive politics (as did Johnson in his academic pursuits), and public and internal condemnation of the Orozco room as leftist agitprop would endure. Furthermore, Johnson couldn’t contend with McCarthyism and a Western mobilization against Joseph Stalin. In 1947, New York State demanded that educators sign an oath of allegiance to the American and State constitutions; The New School acquiesced. Then in 1949—emboldened by Orozco’s failing health and death at 65 years old from heart failure—the New School Board of Trustees prescribed the Soviet panel be screened from view on specified occasions. On January 28, 1953, the US Senate launched the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, helmed by Senator Joseph McCarthy; two weeks later, the aging Alumni Association of The New School’s Graduate Faculty offered a declaration that the Orozco mural was “propaganda.” The school installed what would come to be known as the “the yellow curtain,” covering the entirety of the “Struggle in the Occident” fresco.
Until 1942, Reed had continued her work as a New York gallerist, representing, in addition to Orozco and Siqueiros, Mexican artists such as Carlos Mérida and Cuban artists such as Enrique Riverón and Chago Rodríguez. She also represented a proportionally high number of women for the period, many of them international, including Julia Codesico from Peru and Suzanne Ogunjami from Nigeria. With the advent of World War II, Reed focused on journalism. In 1950, she moved to Mexico City, where she negotiated the intersections of journalism, politics, and arts. When The New School installed the yellow curtain, she was in the midst of drafting her biography of Orozco, which was already contracted for major publication in English and Spanish. Uncowed by McCarthyism, Reed paid an angry visit to Agnes de Lima, The New School’s director of publicity; the meeting concluded with Reed storming out of the mural room. In a memo dated April 8, 1953, de Lima summed up the visit to Hans Simons, the third president of The New School. De Lima wrote that Reed had argued for the liberation of the “Struggle in the Occident” section, wielding both carrot and stick: As a carrot, she suggested that the government of Mexico might contribute to the restoration of the panels, and, as a stick, that she might exercise her considerable influence to effect an international incident. “As perhaps you remember,” de Lima reminded Simons, “Felipe Carrillo, the Mexican hero portrayed in the mural, was her betrothed so she feels particularly concerned aside from any injury the Mexican government might feel.”
De Lima went on to make her recommendation: “Perhaps it might be possible to uncover that part of the wall and let her know so that we don’t have any repercussions from Mexico.” Then she amended the typewritten memo in ink: The Mexico section of the wall should be uncovered “promptly.”
De Lima’s “promptly” highlighted the real risk of a publicity catastrophe; it also invoked her influence at The New School. Not only was she the institution’s public relations director of 20 years, she was also arguably the school historian. In one of her many influential books and essays on education, she asserted that progressive educators “not only study history,” they “make it.” For De Lima, as for Reed, the debate around the mural represented the intersection of her political, professional, and personal life. She and Alvin Johnson had an extramarital affair in 1920, within the year of The New School’s founding; their daughter, Sigrid de Lima, would later study creative writing at the school.
As a result of Reed and de Lima’s siege on the curtain, all but the Russian panel of the murals were liberated, and, as de Lima instructed, promptly. But even shrouded, the remaining panel generated criticism. In an article published on May 15, 1955, President Simons defended the Orozco room in The New York Post:
The murals have been there since 1930; they survived the indigestion of the Nazi-Soviet pact. Libertarians who loathe communism … managed to admire art, swallow their food, and remember that in a democracy one can distinguish between art, politics, the right of the artist to be politically wrong, and the duty of everyone to be tolerant, not to say adult.
With the waning of the Red Scare—and Senator McCarthy’s declining health—President Simons and The New School made the most of media and student inattentiveness to quietly dismantle the remainder of the curtain. The final decloaking of the mural (the specific date is unknown) roughly coincided with Reed’s 1956 publication of Orozco. Despite writing at length about the commission and critical reception of the frescoes, Reed doesn’t mention the school’s censorious actions. Perhaps she sought to honor the terms of an agreement with The New School that had unveiled the Mexico panel; perhaps the terms were not yet secure. In later years, Reed remained steadfast in her disinclination to historicize the episode; the yellow curtain is undocumented in her gallery’s monograph about Orozco’s work, J. C. Orozco (Delphic Studios, 1932), The Mexican Muralists (Crown, 1960), and The Ancient Past of Mexico (Crown, 1966). Rather than decry The New School’s political cowardice, Reed was inclined to champion Orozco’s character. When Time magazine profiled the artist in February 1959, offering a rebuttal to his reputation for misanthropy and contrarianism, Reed furnished an epitaph: “He had compassion and humanity above all other painters.”
In 1966, Reed passed away while in the midst of writing the memoir later recovered and published as Peregrina. She was buried in Merida, Yucatán, in a grave facing that of Felipe Carrillo Puerto.
This essay is part of a series of interdisciplinary responses to Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco’s 1931 mural cycle A Call to Revolution and Table of Universal Brotherhood. The mural, one of The New School’s earliest commissioned artworks and the only surviving permanently installed public example of classic Mexican fresco painting in New York City, is currently the subject of a multi-year conservation project that will see its surface restored and environmental conditions stabilized for years to come. While conservators prepare to gently treat the efflorescence clouding Orozco’s imagery, Public Seminar has invited scholars from across The New School to look at the artwork with fresh eyes.
The preservation effort has been made possible by funding from the Mellon Foundation, Frankenthaler Climate Initiative, and the Terra Foundation for American Art.
