Hiler Hits Out

One of the Pacific Coast's most striking artists got blackballed last fortnight by the streamlined and businesslike Los Angeles County Museum. He promptly raised a willywaw, of the sort that gets pictures talked about. The man who raised the rumpus is Hilaire Hiler, whose great sleek murals of subsea fauna and the oceanic origins of life are a feature of San Francisco's handsome public bathing pavilion in Aquatic Park (TIME, Feb. 6, 1939).

Hiler had submitted vivid canvases of a nautilus, a purple flower and an iceberg to the Los Angeles Museum's fourth annual showing of local artists. His primitivist father, 77-year-old Meyer Hiler, had also offered work. When the Museum's sole juror, Director Roland McKinney, turned the Hilers down, Hilaire wrote:

" '. . . I will confine myself herein to saying again that I cannot accept the illegitimate judgment of colleagues to whom I never delegated the mission of appreciating my work. . . .' This . . . is a verbatim translation of a [sentence from a] letter written by Painter Paul Cezanne over three quarters of a century ago. Apparently things are not much improved."

In rebuttal, Director McKinney offered only silence.

Paris or Bust. The Hilers will probably get along. They have been doing so for some time. If they cannot speak with any great eloquence for themselves, their work speaks for them with widening effect. Large, gregarious Hilaire was born 44 years ago in St. Paul. He went to the University of Pennsylvania, majored in finance at the insistence of Papa (longtime notions seller and theatrical agent), flunked out after two years. Informed by two Philadelphia art schools that he could never learn to draw, he taught himself the piano and the saxophone, thought he would support himself as a Paris art student by jazz playing. But he was forcibly removed from a Europe-bound freighter by Papa's private detectives.

Eventually, however, he made it. He played his horn in Paris nightclubs, joined the first jazz band ever to play in Ger. many (their audiences included brass hats in the Army of Occupation at Coblenz). Back in Paris, Hiler was manager, host, musician and barman at the famed Jockey, Left Bank hot spot owned by Jockey Milton Henry's wealthy widow. One night in her cups Proprietress Henry ejected a Negro who proved to be a Senegalese prince and member of the Chamber of Deputies. Next day the Jockey was padlocked. Hiler reopened it, invited every Negro in Paris to the reopening.

Cafes and Costumes. Hiler held his first Paris one-man show of paintings in 1923, his first in the U.S. two years later. . But Parisians knew Hiler best as a bar and nightclub decorator (the Jungle, the Grand Duke, the Manitou), as a cafe lounger with Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Man Ray. When nearly blind James Joyce could not see a drawing Hiler made of the writer's head, Hiler did another in thick charcoal which Joyce could follow with his fingers. Hiler also began to accumulate one of the world's best libraries on costume (he and Papa have produced a Bibliography of Costume compiled from some 8,000 books and periodicals).

About 1933 Hiler suffered from a nervous disorder, got psychoanalyzed. He also had his massive, fanlike ears surgically set back to his skull. Hiler has also suffered from his name. When a San Francisco guidebook spoke of him in 1939 as Hilaire Hitler, he got so mad he sued the publisher and writers for $100,000. Today he seems in fine inner and outer repair. So does Papa, of whom says Hilaire: "He is to painting what Saroyan is to writing: neither knows a thing about his craft; each does a damn good job."

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