Word: hiler
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...foot strand: automatic showers set off by photoelectric eyes; towel-less drying in warm air currents. A more immediate pleasure on opening day was afforded by about 5,000 square feet of interior murals done by WPA artists under the direction of many-minded Hilaire Hiler (pronounced Hillair Hyler), one of the wonder boys of modern decoration. A onetime saxophone player who drifted from the University of Pennsylvania to Berlin, from Berlin to Paris, Hiler fell to painting in the '20's and became good so fast that Parisian night clubs like the Jungle, the Grand Duke...
...writer in his spare time (From Nudity to Raiment), Hiler was also a great cafe sitter with Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Man Ray. He knew the Left Bank like the bottom of his glass. In 1934, when the dollar fell so low that a whiskey neat cost 72? in Paris, Hiler announced, "The position is untenable," and started home...
...last two years, large, free-speaking Hilaire Hiler has been in San Francisco, working mostly on the Aquatic Park murals. Those in the central lounge he designed and mainly executed himself. Their subject is the submerged continents of Mu and Atlantis in the green depths of the sea. Swimming and floating everywhere are large, brilliantly colored fish, mythical sea creatures, and tremendously enlarged microorganisms symbolizing the oceanic origin of life. Shafts of sunlight falling through the water work sea changes of color...
Unquestionably Hiler's masterpiece, this mural embodies a refinement of intelligent detail and one of the most thoroughly studied color systems now at the command of an artist. He has evolved his own color chart, with 24 hues based not on the spectrum, obtained by the mechanical refraction of white light, but on pigments found in nature and the observed human reactions to them. He is far prouder of the Aquatic Park's "color chart room"-in which these hues and their tints, shades and tones are painted on a 60-foot ceiling -than of the undersea murals...
Pale, saturnine Hilaire Hiler was born in St. Paul, educated at the University of Pennsylvania. All his life he wanted to be a painter, but virtually his only formal education in the arts was a few lessons on the saxophone. Serious critics have praised his work, night-club proprietors have admired his murals, and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Mrs. John Work Garrett have bought his paintings...