In the 1930s, three Mexicans muralists: Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, and Jose Orozco, commanded headlines from New York to San Francisco. Their Marxist-inspired art took Depression-era America by storm, stirring up ideological controversies that went well beyond the rarified art world. Patronized by millionaires, developers, major art museums, and Ivy League colleges, their example deeply influenced a whole generation of American artists.

Still, seven decades after their heyday, just about everything that made these Mexicans seem timely and relevant has faded. Their passionate, allegorical imagery, based on the blazing issues of the day, seems as obscure as the iconography of 14th-century Italy. Understanding these artists today requires an enormous act of restoration -- nothing less than the reconstruction of an era in American history.

"The Epic of American Civilization: Modern Migration of the Spirits," 1932-34. View more paintings

With its major exhibition, "Jose Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927-1934," the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College has made an impressive attempt at just such a revival, with nods to Dartmouth as well as American history. Although, at some point, all three Mexicans lived and worked in the United States, Orozco spent much more time here than the other two. And the major legacy of his sojourn - the huge mural cycle called The Epic of American Civilization was painted for Dartmouth's Baker Library.

Born in 1883, Orozco is arguably the most Mexican and most American in the broadest sense of the Mexican muralists. Unlike Rivera and Siqueiros, Orozco didn't travel to Europe as a young man. He remained closer to the Mexican vernacular, not so much the na? "folk art" that has long been broadly popular in the United States, but to the darker strains of revolutionary political propaganda, colonial religious art, and the violent death-filled imagery of the Aztecs.

Rivera acquired his cosmopolitan gloss in the caf?of Paris. In contrast, Orozco remained mostly in Mexico during the revolutionary upheavals of 1910-20. He drew political cartoons for leftist newspapers, helped found the Communist-affiliated Union of Revolutionary Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers of Mexico, and, in the 1920s, completed huge mural cycles with political and social themes for the revolutionary government.

"Mexican Hills," 1930. View more paintings

Orozco's smaller works of the mid-'20s are stark, graphic views of social ills. The watercolors in The House of Tears series are set in a brothel. Scenes of destruction, violence, and extreme cruelty make up the drawing cycle Horrors of the Revolution, several of which are on view in the exhibition. In another section of the presentation, called "Images of Mexico," Orozco interprets Mexican themes in a more formal manner. With the well-known Zapatistas (1931), Orozco edges briefly closer to the cubist-influenced mainstream traditions of modernism.

Orozco arrived in New York in December 1927, the start of his second long visit to the United States. The oils on view from his early months in New York are dark, moody works in the browns and grays of a city winter. The Subway (1928), and Fourteenth Street, Manhattan (1928-29) are classic essays in urban alienation.

These New York works form a link between Orozco and American writers like the young John Dos Passos and Theodore Dreiser, who looked at the bland assumptions of 1920s American optimism with a sharp, critical, and sometimes prophetic eye. The showstopper here is an oil-on-canvas called The Dead, an arresting image of fallen and twisted skyscrapers. Painted in 1931, the work looks like a study of the post-September 11 World Trade Center.

"Winter," 1932. View more paintings

In the United States, Orozco fell in with the so-called "Delphic Circle," a group centered around Eva Sikelianos, wife of the Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos. Sikelianos ran a salon called the "Ashram" in her home. The Delphic group around her, with its esoteric initiation, its commitment to left-leaning political causes, and its roots in Eastern mysticism, was typical of many such long-forgotten groups of the era and a good match for Orozco's revolutionary-prophetic approach. Its members became his most important patrons and friends in the United States.

The exhibition spends much time with Orozco's three great mural cycles in the United States: Prometheus (1930), painted for a dining hall at Pomona College in Claremont, California; a cycle devoted to the theme of universal brotherhood for the New School for Social Research in New York City (1931); and The Epic of American Civilization (1932-34), commissioned for the basement Reserve Reading Room of Dartmouth's Baker Library. The exhibition includes not only numerous drawings and other studies for all three murals, as well as massive documentation in the catalogue, but an impressive set of computer-generated reconstructions, so that viewers can examine the murals both in their original environment and as independent works of art.

Like many products of the Mexican mural movement, Orozco's murals in the United States are dense combinations of contradictory goals and sources. They combine Orozco's idealistic optimism with his death-obsessed pessimism. Politically progressive yet in many ways artistically conservative, the murals revive a pre-literate, moralizing approach to art that dates from the Christian Middle Ages. The intense imagery mixes ancient mythologies from Europe and the New World with current events and obscure private symbols.

"Elevated," 1929-30. View more paintings

As a result, Orozco's murals are stunning but hard to digest; at the very least they challenge and even clash with the sedate Dartmouth environment. In The Epic of American Civilization murals, Orozco juxtaposes the pre-and post-Columbian civilizations of the Americas in imagery that is harshly critical and often savagely violent. The Baker Library, in contrast, is a placid, 1920s wasp fantasy of colonial America -- its architecture a much-enlarged reproduction of Philadelphia's Independence Hall, its wood-paneled, leather-upholstered interior studies in the imagined comforts of perpetual white male privilege.

Given Orozco's social reforming intentions, it seems ironic that the Baker Library remains a much beloved building on today's coeducational, multicultural campus, while its basement murals continue to be unsettling. Though mothers of some Dartmouth students asked the college to destroy their "hideous subjects," the Baker murals escaped the fate of Rivera's lost cycle at Rockefeller Center, which were painted over, when Rivera refused to remove portraits of Marx and Lenin. Still, the Dartmouth murals have never lost their capacity to irritate and bewilder. This is a sign of their strength as well as their limitations.

The Jose Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927-1934 exhibition will be on display at the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College through December 15, 2002.

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