“Lenin and Stalin on a New School wall: what could that mean except that the New School was in league with the Communists?,” President Alvin Johnson asked in the midst of a rising tide of anti-communism after World War II. The Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco finished the murals in the new home of The New School at 66 West 12th Street in mid-January 1931. In them, he visualized the contemporary moment as one of revolutionary change, in the marching armies of Russia, the nonviolent protestors of India, and, in a hoped-for vision of the future, around a table of universal brotherhood. Orozco and Johnson knew these scenes might be offensive to some; Orozco even offered to take out the one depicting the Russian Revolution. Johnson refused. “I had been given absolute freedom in my work,” Orozco testified later. “It was a school for investigation, not for submission.”
Despite this exhortation, twenty years later the school covered the portion of the mural depicting Lenin and Stalin. Many thought the murals were a form of propaganda for a dictatorial regime. Others worried that the portrayal tied the school to Communist activities just as Senator Joseph McCarthy denounced “Communist infiltration” in the U.S. government, in the arts and entertainment industry, and, perhaps most troubling, in education. Still others thought it was not just the content of the murals that created unease but their placement in a busy cafeteria where people were subjected to them on a regular basis. The Board of Trustees advised the President to find a new home for the murals, saving them from destruction but removing the provocation. Students elevated the controversy into a debate about freedom and democracy, arguing that guaranteeing “the rights of minorities” – those who believed the murals should remain uncovered and, perhaps, American Communists themselves – ensured a truer form of democracy. After the glare of 1953, the murals moved increasingly out of view as the room transferred from a widely used cafeteria to a faculty lounge.
Irving Howe, writing in the first issue of Dissent in 1954, used the curtaining of the Orozco murals as an example of “the confusion of modern politics.” This was not a matter of the school, he argued, but of a society in which civil liberties were in danger – especially because The New School began as a “refuge for liberalism and freedom.” A school for investigation had become one for submission, Howe implied.
Should an artwork be taken down when historical circumstances make it charged with offense? Can a conflicted history bring new life to an old image? And what is the role of a school in reacting to these changes? To which moment — and to whom — is an institution most responsible?