Orozco room restoration unveiling with Ed Koch, Jonathan Fanton, Clemente Orozco and others (1988) | Photographer: Stanley Seligson/ Courtesy of The New School Archives and Special Collections
Art has always been treated as an investment. The Italian Renaissance was bankrolled by patrons wishing to glorify God—and their own families and administrations. Today, blue-chip art buyers park their assets in storage lockers in tax-friendly freeports, openly treating art as capital rather than culture. Yet it feels different when university administrations repurpose paintings and sculptures that could be proudly displayed and used for teaching to patch budget holes or fund building renovations. Valparaiso University in Indiana, for one, has attracted criticism for its bid to sell three paintings (by Georgia O’Keeffe, Frederic E. Church, and Childe Hassam, and collectively valued at more than $10 million) to fund dorm renovations.
The history of A Call to Revolution and Table of Universal Brotherhood, the mural room painted by José Clemente Orozco for The New School, is a case in point. The cycle of frescoes, completed in early 1931, was among the school’s first art commissions—and painted by one of the most respected muralists of the era to advance the university’s progressive vision. Yet several New School administrations in the 1970s and 1980s raised the possibility of selling the site-specific artwork.
The room in which the frescoes are housed was not built with preservation in mind, and by the 1970s the murals were deteriorating. Conservation was pricey, and consecutive presidents John Everett and Jonathan Fanton, who served in their positions from 1964 to 1982 and from 1982 to 1999, respectively, began to explore options for selling the murals to pay off New School debt. In 1981, the Mexican government expressed interest in acquiring them, offering in exchange to provide funding for some Mexican students to attend the school. Mayor Ed Koch intervened, negotiating for the Equitable Life Assurance Society, a British life insurance company, to pay for the murals’ restoration on the condition that The New School keep them in New York City and try to make them more accessible to the public. (The school sold another set of murals, Thomas Hart Benton’s America Today, to Equitable, in 1984; the organization would eventually donate the murals to the Met.) In 1988, Mayor Koch would intervene again to help persuade the Mexican Consulate to contribute to the murals’ restoration. Even as New School administrations viewed Orozco’s artwork as something that could be sacrificed in the service of broader financial goals, the city recognized it as a public good.
Since all art can be monetized, why should university collections occupy a special status? When I interviewed John Wetenhall, co-chair of the Task Force for the Protection of University Collections, a group sponsored by the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries, he put the case plainly: “When someone gives a work to a museum, they anticipate that that work is part of the collection and mission—not a fungible asset.” University collection artworks belong to and serve the school’s educational mission and intellectual legacy—particularly in the case of site-specific art.
Furthermore, university art collections are usually funded by endowments (though not in the case of The New School), which recognize them as educational resources. Valparaiso University’s calculation of “art or student housing,” for example, isn’t as simple as it sounds.
When a university deaccessions a painting, it loses part of its commitment to art as a public good and a crucial part of education. Yet in recent years, some boards of trustees—Brandeis University’s among them—have argued that the institutional priorities of the university override the stewardship responsibilities of its museum.
For The New School, the Orozco murals are both artworks and cultural artifacts, commissioned by the school’s cofounder and first director, Alvin Johnson, to reflect the school’s self-conception as a harbor for progressive art and scholarship. A $500,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation, secured in 2021 thanks to the efforts of curator Silvia Rocciolo—followed by an extension from Mellon and further grants from the Frankenthaler Climate Initiative and the Terra Foundation for American Art—has provided for the murals’ restoration and ensured their place at the university for the foreseeable future. But their history and the past attempts to sell them show just how vulnerable even the most iconic works can be when a university sees more value in short-term financial gain than in long-term cultural heritage.
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.
