ICONS

An anguished, muscular figure watches over Pomona College students as they eat their meals in Frary Hall. He’s not a residence counselor guarding against food fights; he is Prometheus, bringing fire to earth, surrounded by overwhelmed humans. The work in Frary was the first mural painted in the United States by the acclaimed Mexican artist Jose Clemente Orozco (1883-1949).

In 1930, long before multiculturalism became fashionable, Jose Pijoan, an adjunct professor of Hispanic civilization on Pomona’s faculty, contacted Orozco to do work on the newly completed dining hall. The muralist was already famous in Mexico but little known here. “It took quite a lot of courage to commission a relatively unknown artist to do a work of this scale,” says Marjorie Harth, director of the Montgomery Art Gallery at Pomona College.

Orozco, whose best-known work, Harth says, is “Man of Fire” depicted on the ceiling at Hospico Cabanas in Guadalajara, spent 57 days on the Pomona mural. He lived in the dorms, ate his meals at Frary and used a student and the wife of a faculty member as models. Not everyone affiliated with the college was thrilled with the finished product. “They criticized having this large, nude male on the wall,” Harth says.

But Orozco considered Prometheus an ideal subject for a mural at a college. According to myth, Prometheus taught humans the arts and sciences. Orozco was paid about $2,000 for the Pomona mural; he would later paint murals at Dartmouth College and the New School for Social Research in New York. These three works are the only Orozco murals in the United States.