Orozco’s Epic Murals, the Art of Flowers, and Cookbooks Through the Ages, All at Dartmouth

It’s got a great art museum, but don’t miss its main library’s Mexican masterpiece.

Earlier this week, in Hanover, N.H., I went to Dartmouth College’s first-class Hood Museum of Art, which is rich in antiquities, European and American painting, and indigenous art from Australia to Maine. Dartmouth’s library is no art slouch, either. Its murals by José Clemente Orozco from the early 1930s are extraordinary, an art lover’s dream, though unheralded. They’re among my secret pleasures. At the rare-books library, I also saw an exhibition on historic cookbooks, for those of us who like good food so much that we enjoy thinking about its evolution through the centuries. Nerds and jocks, young and old, eggheads and Joe Sixpack all need three meals a day.

The Orozco murals — called The Epic of American Civilization — cover the walls of the vast reading room in the basement of Dartmouth’s Baker-Berry Library, its main library building. Like the Hood, the reading room is open to the public and free of charge. To Dartmouth’s great credit, visitors simply walk in the building and head to the reading room, no stop-and-frisk required.

Dartmouth had next to no experience in commissioning art. In the early 1930s, Mexican muralists were in vogue in America. Art-focused professors and top college brass aligned in thinking that a grand mural would be good to have. They weren’t Trots and were by no means on an indoctrination drive, but they thought that shaking things up in ye olde Hanover was part of their educational mission. The Great Depression spurred new thinking, to say the least.

Nelson Rockefeller, who graduated from Dartmouth in 1930, was keen on Mexican art even as a very young man, and, of course, Mexican oil figured in the family fortune. His mother agreed to fund a mural cycle, either by Diego Rivera or Orozco, with a Greek mythological theme. Alma Reed, Orozco’s New York dealer, pushed him, and, as Calvin Coolidge said, “Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence.” Orozco is a far better artist. He’s a philosopher and a storyteller. Rivera’s a celebrity artist. As with Frida Kahlo, his wife, Rivera’s work tires fast.

Orozco and his Dartmouth handlers quickly retooled the project, still embracing mythology but in a New World context, with the myth of Quetzalcoatl, the Mesoamerican multipurpose god, and Anglo America’s development seeming to collide and then merge. Dartmouth was chartered in 1769 to educate Native American as well as English youth, so, loosely, the new focus made sense.

The Epic of American Civilization covers about 2,100 square feet. The reading room has two wings, so Orozco designed murals depicting the pre-Hispanic world in one wing and the post-conquest world in another. Together they propose the cyclical nature of humanity’s search for divine grace, leading to ascendance, conflict, disaster and sacrifice, and regeneration. In the first wing, Aztec warriors, human sacrifice, the old gods, and the pre-Columbian golden age and its fall get panels. Colors are vibrant. Bold, blocky shapes come from Cubism as well as Mesoamerican architecture, jewelry, and ceramics. Figures are totemic, pagan, and have lots of space. Things were simpler then.

By the 1920s, the United States had a thriving public-mural movement, but looks were refined, decorative, and didactic — but fussily so. Think John La Farge, Edwin Blashfield, and the Boston Public Library mural by John Singer Sargent. Orozco’s murals are tough and in-your-face, especially in the post-conquest wing. Cortés and the Franciscans take it on the chin as they introduce the machine, physical and ideological, and mass regimentation. A panel on American education is my favorite. A stern schoolmarm towers over an army of blue-eyed, blond, robotic children. In the background are a schoolhouse and a New England town hall, suggesting that universal education and direct democracy — the New England town meeting — can do right but also go wrong.

There are plenty more gods of the modern world, among them a bloodthirsty arms industry, moneygrubbing potentates, and fat, prosperous, impotent academics. Skeletal fetuses in bottles, mortarboards on their heads, ought to give students a jolt. Missing are unionized public school teachers, NGO parasites, and the likes of Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and Jake Sullivan, but even without them, evil is palpable.

An apocalyptic scene depicts a resurrected Christ crushing old ideologies and inviting emancipation and renewal. In a final panel, a new world emerges from Christ’s destruction of the old, failed one. Workers direct their own education and futures, as well as their own spiritual well-being. Factories and workers build for peace, not war. A central figure, reclining and reading, is no blue-eyed blond but mixed-race, part Anglo, part indigenous.

The cycle is dramatic and biblical and stands the test of time while reawakening the time in which Orozco painted it, as war and depression destroyed old thinking and old empires. Of course, neither Orozco nor his Dartmouth patrons nor 1930s Dartmouth students knew the crucibles to come. That’s instructive and illuminating for students in itself and an antidote to presentism. Dartmouth cherishes the murals, which look fresh through the good care they’ve gotten over what’s approaching a hundred years.

Needing to slow my racing heart, I walked over to the rare-book library to see Plate to Print: Cookbooks and the Evolution of the Domestic Sphere, a small, smart exhibition of manuals of household labor in the days when women ruled the roost. A British book from 1782 by Mary Kettilby, the earliest in the show, combines recipes and remedies. I read the earliest recipe for orange marmalade and a remedy for “deafness and noise in the head.” The latter involved boiling the urine of the afflicted and using a feather to apply drops in the ears. It sounds like Fauci-worthy quack science. In American Cookery, from 1808, America’s first cookbook, good cooking is part of good wifery and crucial to building a new nation. Cornmeal, pumpkin, and molasses — distinctly American ingredients — loom large. Catherine Beecher and her sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote in 1869’s American Women’s Home that an educated woman made a better homemaker.

Dartmouth-themed cookbooks are primers in nutritious, basic, bland New England cooking, which is my skill set, with instructions such as “boil carrots until tender and then boil them for an additional twenty minutes,” that is, until they’re orange mush. Venus in the Kitchen, from 1953, is a practical but arch book of recipes for dishes promoting libido, among them bull-testicle pie served with a glass of what’s called hysterical water made with parsnip seeds, a bit of peony root, lovage root, and mint, castor oil, brandy, and water. What would Dr. Ruth say?

Plate to Print doesn’t have sophisticated production values. The books are in cases, tucked away on the second floor of the rare-book library. It’s a fun show. We’re in, I believe, fourth- or fifth-wave feminism, having stepped through the Looking Glass and onto a flight to a galaxy so far away that no one there has either butterfly nets or a sense of humor. Or a sense of history.

I love visiting the Hood, which has a splendid, encyclopedic collection of 65,000 objects and a beautifully renovated and expanded building. I saw two good, new exhibitions. Beyond the Bouquet is an inventive permanent-collection show on flower painting in American art. There’s the gorgeous beauty, Maria Oakey Dewing’s Irises at Dawn, from 1899. A seasoned gardener and amateur botanist, Dewing delivers a gardener’s-eye-view of a bed of iridescent irises in overlapping shades of pink, blue, and lavender. Then there’s Rosemarie Beck’s House of Venus, from 1994. It’s an early example of Rococo Revival in American contemporary art. I liked the show’s intelligent juxtaposition of old silver with floral designs, Arts & Crafts pottery, and painting over 150 years.

Nearby, the Always Already exhibition gives us a revelatory look at American abstraction, with the usual suspects from the New York School but also Native American pottery and living artists such as Barbara Takenaga and Kay WalkingStick. It’s beautifully arranged, with geometric shapes in a big Frank Stella painting balanced against a swirling, Surrealist Jackson Pollock, Gene Davis’s Red Burner, and Georgia O’Keeffe’s Taos Mountain. The star of the exhibition is the stupendous Lilac and Orange over Ivory, done by Rothko in 1953.

Both the abstraction and the flower shows start an American art extravaganza recognizing the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. I suggested to the director and chief curator, since I’m a font of good advice, that the Hood keep it celebratory. Our historical shortcomings have been covered ad nauseum and, by now, spotlighting them is deeply tiresome and juvenile. The Hood serves young people, who naturally look to the future. Art and interpretation that grind axes aren’t right for the moment.

Over the years, most of the Hood’s galleries were dedicated permanent-collection spaces and didn’t change, making, students felt, for a static experience. When the museum expanded in 2019, its masters decided to reprogram every gallery a couple of times a year. This not only refreshes each space, but it also encourages curators to bring rarely seen art from storage for a moment in the sun. It’s a good idea.

While all the galleries look great and fresh, where was Guitar on the Table, the Hood’s splendid 1912 Picasso collage, a gift from Nelson Rockefeller and his most cherished work of art? Where was Batoni’s Second Earl of Dartmouth, a Grand Tour portrait of the college’s namesake? The Perugino altarpiece, which a Hood curator discovered? The very young Raphael might have had a hand in it. Its treasures by Alice Neel and Rockwell Kent, and its very good Federal-era portraits? The Jolly Washerwoman, by Lily Martin Spencer? She makes everyone smile. All and more are in storage. I’d suggest the Hood develop a list of 50 or so core objects and find room for them in its various rotations.

The Hood is closed to the general public three out of seven days in the week, including Sunday. Nearly all art museums in America close one day a week. I asked about this since the Hood, like Yale’s art museums and the RISD Museum in Providence, is both the college museum and the civic museum serving, in the Hood’s case, the Upper Valley in New Hampshire and Vermont. Students, I’m told, get the museum to themselves on Monday and Tuesday, and these include kids from the schools in dozens of towns. The Hood doesn’t have the money to open on Sunday.

But having spent $50 million for a superb addition and renovation of the Hood, Dartmouth ought to show it off, especially on Sunday, when working stiffs are free. I’m a parsimonious Yankee and look at staff sizes with a gimlet eye. The Hood’s staff is big. A trim on the administrative, internal-focus side would liberate enough money to open the doors as often as possible.

Dartmouth is minutes from I-91. Summer’s the time people want to be in that part of the world. The verdant campus is attractive, and between Dartmouth’s libraries and the Hood, a treasure trove awaits.