José Clemente Orozco and assistant Lois Wilcox at work on “Call to Revolution and Table of Universal Brotherhood (Struggle in the Orient)” (1930–31) | Unknown photographer / Courtesy of The New School Art Collection
—To my father, Xavier Moyssén Lechuga
When José Clemente Orozco received a commission to paint a mural cycle at the New School for Social Research in late 1930, he was told that the murals would be on the walls of the student dining room. The room would have people moving in and out—a constant motion Orozco kept in mind while designing the murals.
When the room was full of people, the murals came alive. The gallerist Alma Reed, who organized the commission, reminisced: “As the reception guests assembled, the dynamic forms on the dining room wall seemed to be living beings mingling with the crowd.”
At the time, Orozco was a mainstay of the Delphic Circle, a group who held intellectual gatherings in Reed’s apartment, which she called “the Ashram.” There, he met Mary Crovatt Hambidge, whose late husband, the artist Jay Hambidge, had developed a theory of “dynamic symmetry.” Hambidge claimed that there are two types of art: dynamic and static. He attributed dynamic art to the Greeks and the Romans, and static art to “everyone else.” The theory captivated Orozco, who wrote in his autobiography (translation by Robert C. Stephenson):
The forms created by Greeks and Egyptians are dynamic because they structurally comprise in themselves the principle of action, of movement, and for this reason can grow, develop, and multiply like the human body and all living beings. When this development is normal it produces rhythm and harmony, which are precisely what we mean by beauty.
Mary Hambidge proposed to Orozco that he continue exploring her late husband’s scholarly work. Orozco declined the offer because, he explained, the time-consuming nature of the research would force him to “leave behind painting for a long time.” (It is unclear whether Orozco meant he would have to put a halt to his painting while he was in New York for the murals, or if he meant stop painting altogether in order to further this endeavor.) However, he would utilize the principles developed by Jay Hambidge in his fresco cycle at The New School.
The result was different from the work that predated it—both Orozco’s own and that of his fellow titans in Mexican muralism, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros—the most striking point of departure being Orozco’s decision to paint distinct panels in dialogue with each other, as opposed to uniting the walls in a single continuous image. (He’d later use a similar approach in what I consider his magnum opus, The Man of Fire, painted in the dome of the Hospicio Cabañas, in Guadalajara, Mexico.)
Just outside the room, the first of five panels sets the tone of this interchange. Titled “Science, Labor, and Art,” it depicts three men working in each of these fields. The first figure uses the set square and protractor of engineering (science), the second figure works with a hammer and an anvil (labor), and the third figure holds a rainbow above a piece of paper (art). This introductory panel shows us what Orozco may have thought the function of social research to be and the kind of debate he hoped of a student cafeteria at The New School: a unification of these three disciplines to achieve a better society.
Once inside the former cafeteria, we can see that each panel has a distinct theme, as underscored by their titles: “Struggle in the Orient,” “The Table of Universal Brotherhood,” “Struggle in the Occident,” and “Homecoming of the Worker of the New Day.” For example, in “Struggle in the Orient,” a formation of British soldiers wearing gas masks and, we can assume, utilizing chemical agents, lines up in an assault against Mahatma Gandhi and Sarojini Naidu, leaders of the Indian independence movement. The panel establishes denouncement of class and racial subjugation as one of the central concerns shared across the different panels.
Similarly, the diagonal, a key characteristic of dynamic symmetry, appears on all the fresco’s walls: The pyramid-shaped Mayan castle of Kukulkan, the tilted portraits of Lenin and Stalin, the bayonets of soldiers, the rainbow of art, the foreshortened table around which men of various ethnicities gather, and the raised arms of a woman’s embrace are all slanted diagonally. It’s widely understood across painting traditions that the diagonal provides the illusion of movement, and this is a core principle of dynamic symmetry. Orozco anticipated that his mural would be animated into a state of perpetual motion by the presence of people moving in and out of the room.
In Orozco’s vision, the murals would serve as more than a backdrop for intellectual dialogue and debate. The interaction between the diagonal composition and actual living beings would make the characters of the murals appear as interlocutors with people conversing in the dining room. (The central panel’s “Table of Universal Brotherhood” was a nod to the actual cafeteria tables to be placed under the fresco.) Orozco told Alma Reed that the dining room would be “another Ashram,” dedicated to the pursuit of a social utopia. The New School, he wrote in his autobiography, “is a space for research, not for submission.”
The mural cycle’s reception was mixed to negative. Critics were quick to point out that Orozco’s use of geometric principles “constrained” him, resulting in a lack of expressivity. But Orozco’s aim was for the mural to function not as a standalone artwork but as an interactive space; geometry was to be animated into expressivity by the people regularly moving through the room. If this idea—a forerunner to the immersive experience sought after by installation artists—was poorly received at the time, it has encountered still further challenges since, from the curtaining off of much of the “Struggle in the Occident” during the McCarthy era to closures for conservation purposes. Once the latest multi-year restoration effort is complete, the room will be open again for viewing, with limited occupants allowed in. Yet the potential of Orozco’s vision can only be achieved by carrying out the debates the room was intended to host. If the delicacy of the aging frescoes means we can’t do so inside the room itself, we must at least continue to have those conversations within the school that houses Orozco’s call for brotherhood, struggle, and change.
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.
