The Wonderwall in Hicks
By Sonia Scherr '01
Click here to view four panels in the Hicks mural.
Click here to view a larger selection of the panels. They will revolve automatically.
If there were one quintessentially Swarthmore work of art on campus, it would be the Hicks mural. For anyone who has seen it, the choice is obvious. The piece, an epic of sorts by Swarthmore standards, graces the expansive walls of the Hicks mural room on the third floor of Hicks Hall.
The themes are familiar. One envisions the engineer as the proletarian intellectual, literally, marching side by side with the hard-working men and women of the industrial class. In one scene, several workers are huddled in a circle with a triangle-clenching engineer, as if conferring over a problem.
Another panel features both a white and brown hand clasped together tightly in a display of racial solidarity.
The mural also tackles the role of technology in society. It questions the relentless pursuit of scientific research for political or other goals. One scene juxtaposes a research lab and an illustration of a women searching in a pile of rubble for potatoes.
Taken as a whole, the painting represents a distinctly Swarthmorean view of the world. One of the engineering professors featured in the painting is even supposedly modeled on an actual
Swarthmore engineering professor.
The history
In the mid-1930s, James Egleson '29 approached the College about the possibility of painting a mural in Hicks Hall. Two years later, the mural was completed and opened to the public--but not before a heated controversy involving Egleson, the Swarthmore administration, and a College donor almost led to the project's abandonment. A paper written by Lisa Silverman '84 in 1981 was the source for the following information unless another source is indicated.
James Downey Egleson, painter of the Hicks mural, was born in Capelot, Quebec, in 1907. He grew up in Ridley Park, Pa., and attended Lafayette College before transferring to Swarthmore, where he was a member of the Theta Sigma Pi fraternity as well as the Sigma Xi and Sigma Tau academic honor societies. He graduated from the College in 1929 with High Honors in engineering and received an advanced degree in aeronautical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
An eye problem soon compelled Egleson to give up engineering, however. In 1931, he began working for the New York City Telephone Company and attending art school at night. A visit to the José Orozco mural at Dartmouth inspired Egleson and led to an apprenticeship with the artist in Mexico.
Egleson first broached the subject of the mural to Professor Alfred Brooks, chair of the Fine Arts Department, in 1936. The College gave him permission to paint the first panel of the mural, which depicts both the positive and negative uses of technology. Soon after, he completed a second panel showing the beneficial role of engineering in society, and the College subsequently commissioned Egleson to paint the rest of the mural.
Work proceeded smoothly until a student assistant sent a picture of the partially completed mural to his grandfather, a College alumnus and generous donor. Outraged at what he deemed to be the mural's communist message, the student's grandfather urged the College to force Egleson to alter his mural.
The Board of Managers investigated and found nothing wrong with Egleson's project. In response to continued pressure, however, the College told Egleson that he would have to change the mural or stop painting. Egleson chose to leave the College rather than subject his work to censorship, and the room containing Egleson's unfinished mural was promptly closed to the public.
Egleson eventually yielded to the College's demands, citing his respect for the Swarthmore faculty and administration involved and his need to complete the project to launch a career in art. Two images were painted out of the mural: a gold dollar in the mouth of an eagle in the War panel and a pair of clenched fists in the Peace panel.
The mural has a unique connection to the College--not only because it was painted here. Professor of Engineering Samuel Carpenter was a model for one of the engineers depicted in the mural, according to Professors Frederick Orthlieb and David Bowler, who is now retired.
"On the front wall, one of the figures is relatively tall and slender and is carrying something [a surveyor's tape] that appears to be circular in his right hand. That figure represents Professor Samuel T. Carpenter," Bowler wrote. Carpenter later served as chair of the Engineering Department for many years.
Since the mural's completion in June 1938, it has enjoyed a quiet existence in Hicks 312. And yet, the mural still bears the evidence of its uneasy birth. In the War panel, the eagle's mouth remains empty, and in Peace, no clenched fists pierce the sky.
The response
Egleson wrote in 1938 that his newly completed work would "trace on the minds of people looking at [it] views as divergent as the antipodal opinions that men everywhere arrive at regarding the same reality." He identified the mural's merit in its ability to evoke such re-sponses, saying, "the degree to which it may cause people to ponder the realities of our times may lie in the measure of its contribution to the real educational and cultural mission of the College." The following responses to the Hicks mural suggest that Egleson's creation continues to force people to think deeply--just as the artist had hoped nearly 60 years ago.
Kwabena Adu '01, an engineering major, first saw the mural during his introductory engineering class. Adu recalls being disgusted by what he calls the "communist" aspects. "When I first came to Swarthmore, I was quite conservative," he says. "I [regarded] the mural as communist propaganda."
But in his two and a half years at Swarthmore, Adu's political leanings have shifted. He is now "more open-minded" and has gained "a lot of respect for the mural."
In the weeks following his first impression of the mural, Adu says he tried to "find out its secrets" during class. He remembers thinking that the image of both a brown and white hand clasped in brotherhood "didn't make sense" because blacks form a large majority in Adu's native Ghana.
The absence of women in the mural also continues to puzzle Adu. Pointing to the Science and Poverty panel, in which an old woman searches for food in a pile of discarded bones and weapons, Adu observes that women are present in only the "most troubling" scenes. "It would be great if the mural [depicted] more women," he says.
"The mural reminds you that while you're studying ideal beam bending, there's a whole world out there," says Hannah Rakoff '01, also an engineering major. "It gives you a sense of respect for the real world."
Like Adu, Rakoff finds the mural "interesting to ponder during class," though she confesses that Hicks 312 seems "hardly right for a grand mural." For Rakoff, the images of a bomb plunging into an open book and a gas mask on the ground are particularly disturbing in their depiction of 20th-century themes.
Rakoff is awed by the wide thematic scope of the mural--including its portrayal of such major issues as science and technology, communism, hunger, war, and Nazism--as well as by the ways in which it combines these themes. "The mural is so big, [yet] the scenes seem to melt into each other," she says.
The mural's juxtaposition of opposites also creates a dark and powerful effect, according to Rakoff. For example, "[In the Science and Poverty panel,] you see horrible things surrounding a room where people pursue genteel activities." She sees a lesson in the mural's depiction of evil, for "it reminds us that people need to learn about horror to avoid repeating it."
"I'm glad the mural is there because it ... stimulates discussion of issues that are never considered at some places," says Professor Frederick Orthlieb, an engineering teacher for nearly 25 years. "The mural forces you to consider the sociopolitical context of technology."
Orthlieb finds the mural particularly "intriguing" as a result of the year he spent working at the National Science Foundation's Office of Energy Research and Development before coming to Swarthmore. This experience gave him insight into the exploitive relationship between politics and technology portrayed in the mural. "The political process views technology as a means to an end. And that end is often political," he says. "This point is brought home strongly in the mural."
Orthlieb believes that the darker themes of the mural may have resonated more strongly in the pre&endash;World War II atmosphere in which it was painted. Emphasizing that "the engineering program [at Swarthmore] currently subscribes to humane uses of technology," he is not sure if this was true in the years following World War I. Although Orthlieb notes that the mural "must be understood in the context of its time," he acknowledges that it also speaks to more recent conflicts, including the Vietnam War, Kosovo, and the genocides in Africa.
"People who have had military experience may bring a different view to the mural," he says. "Experiences during one's formative years influence how one looks at the mural. The [increasing diversity] of students at Swarthmore brings more viewpoints to the mural and to its significance."
Although Orthlieb has seen works that depict similar social realist themes, he says that this mural has an "uncommon strength" and "a sharp edge." He adds: "It's powerful stuff if you let it be."
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