Home Photo Gallery Classroom Documents An Approach to Mural Decoration Hilaire Hiler The Aquatic Park building stands modern and boat-like by the Yacht Harbor in San Francisco. Ferroconcrete, glass, and stainless steel. Its curved ends enclose two perfectly circular rooms, the form of which influenced my ideas as to how it might be adequately decorated. White as a tropical cruise liner, long aluminum railings accentuate its nautical character. The streamlined two hundred and fifty feet of its length is visible above the eight-hundred-foot bathhouse which is partially underground. Its modernity reassured me. Architecturally it would provide a framework into which modern painting and principles of decoration would naturally fit. The situation was fortunate also in that I was privileged to meet and talk with the architects at a very early stage in the building's construction and could thus have a finger in every part of the pie: to design floors, wainscotings, electric fixtures, sculptured low-relief carvings, tile mosaics, color harmonies for the ceilings as well as the ceilings themselves. Such a situation is all too rare in the life of the contemporary artist. The opportunity carried considerable responsibility with it; but the sort of responsibility which is gladly shouldered. There would be no aesthetic quarrel in style between the architectural setting and the mural decoration as far as I was concerned. My background was, at the same time, both a help and a hindrance. I had had considerable experience in designing and executing mural decorations, chiefly of a commercial nature. Some fifteen years of residence abroad had made me, for better or worse, quite thoroughly expatriate. I was a member of that lost generation whose roots were torn from the mother soil. My understanding of the life and ideals of my own country was far too vague to be of use. With such a background I did not feel that I could do a "mural with a message" in some more or less literal fashion. Historical subjects or social ones, whether they are called "Cuirassiers at Waterloo," "Don't Wake Grandma," "Japanese Artillery in Action," "Sharecroppers," "The Mail Arrives at Porto Rico," fail to give me a thrill. Tons of news pulp, the movies, and the radio convinced me that mural painting as a means of special pleading could be absurdly feeble. Even when the style purports to be contemporary, I do not feel that a mural must function as an enlarged illustration, no matter how noble its "message" may be. I am well aware that this attitude is in disagreement with that of practically all the mural painters now practicing in America. A mural painting, I believe, should primarily be a decoration functioning as form and color, architecturally connected with the room in which it stands as part of the building which shelters it. That the painting must form a unified and continuously flowing series of arabesques was happily simplified by the nature of the Aquatic building in which I worked. The main lounge, because of its size and function, made possible a decoration which contains as incidental motifs ethnological and psychological symbols drawn from Pacific and American mythology. They are there for those who care to read consciously, or sense their implications. But they are strictly subordinated to the sensory side of the murals as plastic painting. A round room suggested a prismatarium, with a large color circle as ceiling decoration--a room purporting to show the world of color as a planetarium shows the heavens. A second round room suggested a spiral ceiling, with this torm repeated in rope inlaid in low relief into the walls. Yacht club flags of the Pacific Coast provided color and abstract design for this room to be used as a seafood restaurant. A banquet hall on another floor, because of its severity in shape and the fact that its construction was left evident in the great uncovered steel beams which make a gridiron of the ceiling, suggested motifs taken from naval architecture. A correspondingly severe constructivist technique seemed fitting. This has been carried out in low relief and executed in many different materials such as sheet aluminum, balsa and other woods, seine twine, composition wallboard, lacquer, etc. This work, with the labor available, which is not in all cases either expert or experienced, has progressed satisfactorily. Cooperation from the architects has been intelligently helpful. Criticism, unsolicited and unabashed, from house painters, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, masons, terrazzo men, stone cutters, plasterers, etc., has in general been understanding and surprisingly gratifying.
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