Artist Hilaire Hiler and the Maritime Museum – Part 1: Work and Life
Hilaire Hiler was a noted muralist and color theorist, and he left his mark as both at the Maritime Museum. Learn more about the artist, and the building that was his canvas, in this four-part podcast.
Part 1: How do Hiler’s work and life factor into the Maritime Museum?
[00:00:01] Hilaire Hiler was a noted muralist and color theorist, and he left his mark as both at the Maritime Museum. He was the art director hired by the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Arts Project to lead the decoration of the Aquatic Park building – the museum’s current home. From 1936 to 1939, he led a team of supervisors and assistants who worked on the building’s different floors. Hiler personally designed the murals for the main lobby as well as the Ladies’ Lounge, which he called the Prismatarium.
[00:00:34] At this point of his career, in 1936, Hiler had already made a name for himself in Paris, New York, and San Francisco. And he was no stranger to painting murals: he had done several for nightclubs in Paris in the 1920s. These included the Jockey Club – in the famed artist’s neighborhood of Montparnasse – where he was part-owner, manager, and jazz piano player. His murals were so popular that TIME Magazine said that nightclubs, quote, “would have nothing but Hiler decorations.”
[00:01:10] It was also in Paris where Hiler befriended a who’s who of the avante-garde. There’s a remarkable photo of him with the artist Man Ray, the filmmaker Jean Cocteau, and literary figures like Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, Margaret Anderson, and Jane Heap. There’s even the bohemian icon Kiki de Montparnasse herself. Beyond the people in this photo, Hiler befriended many other luminaries – including Marcel Duchamp1, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Joyce. Hiler surely absorbed their influences, and those of many more artists in their circles. At the same time – with his good friends, the writers Henry Miller and Anais Nin – Hiler studied psychoanalysis under Otto Rank. Otto Rank was a colleague of Sigmund Freud’s, whose theories delved deep into mythology and artistic creativity.
[00:02:08] Hilaire Hiler brought all these influences and elements from Paris back to Aquatic Park. Perhaps, as a result, the underwater scenes he designed for the lobby have little in common with San Francisco’s other WPA murals. The most famous of these are inside Coit Tower. These murals are works of social realism, politically charged in the vein of Diego Rivera, and are much more tied to the everyday realities of the Great Depression.
[00:02:42] At Aquatic Park, Hiler’s murals have more than a touch of the Surreal, the fantastic, and subliminal. If Otto Rank believed that artists bring to life worlds never seen before, Hiler surely accomplished that. The murals fascinate with imaginary creatures, mermaids, shipwrecks, the ruins of Atlantis and the continent Mu. Despite saying that the murals are not primarily symbolic, Hiler draws from imagery studied by Otto Rank: there are labyrinths; serpents; cowrie shells that symbolize fertility; and that all-consuming presence of water and the sea. Mu. All of Hiler’s motifs that you’d see in his other works – organic shapes, puzzle-like pieces, and geometric figures – come together in defined shades, planes of color, and slants of light.
Artist Hilaire Hiler and the Maritime Museum – Part 2: Work and Life Continued
Hilaire Hiler was a noted muralist and color theorist, and he left his mark as both at the Maritime Museum. Learn more about the artist, and the building that was his canvas, in this four-part podcast.
Part 2: Tell us a little about the Prismatarium and, how Hiler used his color principles in his work.
[00:00:01] For all that went into the lobby murals, these weren’t the works that Hiler was most proud of. That honor went to another part of the Aquatic Park building.
[00:00:11] Hilaire Hiler also designed and painted the Ladies’ Lounge in the Aquatic Park building. This is a circular room that he personally called “the Prismatarium.” It was here, he said, where people can look up and appreciate the nuances of color – just as, in a Planetarium, they can appreciate the nuances of the cosmos.
This was because Hiler painted his own version of the color wheel on the room’s ceiling. It’s an expansion of the 24-color one developed by Wilhelm Ostwald, whose theories Hiler had studied. And Hiler was obsessed with color – as his friend the writer Henry Miller said, Hiler ate and drank color – and was “color itself!”
[00:00:54] The color wheel on the Prismatarium’s ceiling has 30 colors. Hilaire Hiler divided these into 10 triads of similar hues. Each triad was supposed to represent an emotion or mood: the yellows are “happy or gay”, while the reds represent “power or self-reliance.” Blues edging towards green mean “sentimental or tolerant.” Blues closer to purple are “spiritual or depressed.”
A triad was supposed to complement the one directly across it. These two “complementaries,” as Hiler called them, could be connected to form the base of a triangle. Then, each of these two triads could be connected to a third triad to complete that triangle. Together, these three would then form what he called a “triadic harmony.”
[00:01:44] It’s hard to describe these concepts without visuals. Thankfully, Hilaire Hiler used his own color principles in his art. At Aquatic Park, one doesn’t need to walk far from the Prismatarium to see how. For example, his color chart has pinks and greens directly across each other; these “complementaries” form a so-called “triadic harmony” with blues. In the lobby, sea creatures of various shades of green swim in and out of red-pink architectural ruins. All of them visually harmonize, of course, with their blue underwater world.
Artist Hilaire Hiler and the Maritime Museum – Part 3: Project History
Hilaire Hiler was a noted muralist and color theorist, and he left his mark as both at the Maritime Museum. Learn more about the artist, and the building that was his canvas, in this four-part podcast.
Part 3: Tell Us a Little About the History Behind the Murals That Hiler Painted at the Maritime Museum and How That Project Came About.
[00:00:01] The San Francisco Maritime Museum, which sits on a cove at the north end of Fisherman’s Wharf, was not built to be a museum. It was built by the Works Progress Administration in the mid-1930s as the center for the city’s Aquatic Park – this was a recreational site that San Franciscans had been trying to develop since the previous century.
[00:00:20~] The building’s lowest level, opening to the beach, had automatic showers, drying rooms, and concessions. The second and third floors were to have lounges, restaurants, and decks for watching watersports. The fourth, topmost floor was a commentator’s space. All these levels were built in tiers, so the building itself looked, in the architect William Mooser’s words, like “a great white ocean liner.” Given the ambition, vision, and excitement for the building, it was called by newspapers as “A Palace for the People.”
[00:00:54~] Through its visual arts arm, the Federal Arts Project, the WPA hired local artists to decorate the building’s interiors. Many of them knew each other from the local bohemian arts scene, or other WPA projects, and would go on to work on others after Aquatic Park.
[00:01:13~] Hilaire Hiler, who settled in San Francisco after living in Paris during the 1920s, was hired as artistic director for Aquatic Park. He oversaw other noted artists who supervised different areas of the building. These artist-supervisors included Sargent Johnson, the only person of African-American descent who worked for the WPA in Northern California. Johnson designed carvings for the building’s façade, plus mosaics for its fountain and veranda. The team of assistants included Ann Sonia Medalie, who glazed and painted the details of Hiler’s murals, and later worked with Diego Rivera. There were also Mohammed Zyani, who cut the tiles for Johnson’s unusually shaped mosaics, and Shirley Staschen, who had helped paint murals at San Francisco’s Coit Tower.
[00:02:06~] As was fitting, Hilaire Hiler decided that Aquatic Park’s decorations would celebrate San Francisco’s relationship with the sea. But, in contrast to other local WPA murals made at the time – which depicted contemporary life and are steeped social realism – the murals at Aquatic Park feature abstract motifs of marine or nautical life. In Hiler’s words, “the murals are neither primarily representational or symbolic, but decorative.” The 37 panels that Hiler himself designed are more fantastical and surrealist. They show Hiler’s vision of life under the sea: full of imaginary plants and creatures, mermaids, shipwrecks, and the ruins of lost lands. Hiler said these lands are Atlantis, as well as Mu – a legendary continent that sunk in the Pacific Ocean.
[00:02:59~] Ultimately, Hiler’s murals may have nothing overtly to do with San Francisco, its Bay, or its storied waterfront – but they still put the city and its long-awaited Aquatic Park on the map.
[00:03:12] How the project ended for Hiler and company might be just as interesting as how the project came about. Months before Aquatic Park opened, the federal government turned it over to the City of San Francisco, which then leased the building to private concessionaires. This angered the artists, who truly believed that the publicly funded “Palace for the People” should not be commercialized. Sargent Johnson left his mosaics of sea forms unfinished in protest; Beniamino Bufano withheld several planned animal sculptures. Ironically, the building without politically charged art became part of a political storm anyway.
[00:03:52~] For his part, Hiler got into another fight with the concessionaires over creative control. Particularly, he felt that they brought furnishing that clashed with his concept for the Prismatarium. This was the Ladies’ Lounge where he painted his color wheel on the ceiling. Hiler resigned 10 days before opening day, and he even struck his signature off the lobby murals. Aquatic Park opened in January 1939 with hundreds of eager visitors; Hiler was not there.
As far as we know, he returned 10 years later to look at his work. The newspapers reported that he said, “I’d like to touch them up.”
Artist Hilaire Hiler and the Maritime Museum – Part 4: Conservation
Hilaire Hiler was a noted muralist and color theorist, and he left his mark as both at the Maritime Museum. Learn more about the artist, and the building that was his canvas, in this four-part podcast.
Part 4: What Are Some of the Challenges in the Stewardship of Those Murals?
[00:00:01] The challenges in caring for the Aquatic Park murals can be said to fall on a practical side and a more philosophical one. The “practical” side involves managing “typical” conservation factors like exposure to sunlight, water, and salt air. But these are made more interesting by the fact that the murals are in a historic building right by a beach. It has architectural details that are not quite ideal for preservation: large, near-floor-to-ceiling windows, for example, run along its sides. There are large doors – with glass panes! – that people continuously open and close. Of course, measures have been taken to mitigate damage: there is UV film, as well as blinds for the windows that still let people enjoy the views. But getting people to stop raising them for a better look is a challenge on its own!
[00:00:53] There’s another side that relates to the question of how the building should be used. This is a question that’s run through its history: first, the building was supposed to be Aquatic Park’s public recreation center. Controversy came when the upper floors became a privately-run casino. All this was scuttled when the building became an army unit’s barracks during World War Two – we have photos of soldiers bunking right up to the faces of Hiler’s lobby murals! Then, a senior center moved in. Finally, the Maritime Museum came in 1951. The lobby was filled with displays. On the floor above the lobby, most murals were boarded up to create more wall space for exhibits; these were all but forgotten for decades.
[00:01:42] In 2010 and 2017, the Maritime park completed major projects that repaired damage to the murals over the years. The art was restored to their full detail and color, and the sections that had been covered, revealed.
Now that the public can see it all again, we’ve circled back to the question “How should we use this building?” How are we to maintain this public space that everyone can visit, and bring back more activities and exhibits, while respecting the murals? This isn’t even entirely a matter of physical protection. Hiler and his colleagues envisioned the murals to be not simply pictures on the walls, but as a seamless whole with the terrazzo floors, painted ceilings, and interior design. How do we set up exhibits without obscuring and undermining all that?
Last updated: February 28, 2023
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