Sea Murals

If San Francisco should presently become as distinguished for its arts as for its setting, San Franciscans would owe many thanks to WPA. Already hopeful of this, San Francisco WPA officials were pleased as Punch last week at the dedication of one of the most sophisticated WPA building jobs in the U. S.--a new, $1,500,000 Aquatic Park overlooking the Golden Gate.

No park at all, Aquatic Park is essentially a glorified bathing place on a more modest scale than Long Island's colossal Jones Beach. Its main pavilion is designed on the lines of a neat white ocean liner--an idea carried out with more zip if less simplicity than in a yacht club at San Sebastian, Spain, where it was tried by Architects Labayen & Aizpurua in 1929. Architect William Mooser Jr. can thank his architect father for Aquatic Park's excessively ugly background: a chocolate factory designed in 1916.

Curious modern improvements await swimmers when they come in from the Park's 1,000-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, the Jockey and the Manitou would have nothing but Hiler decorations.

A 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-c- in Paris, Hiler announced, "The position is untenable," and started home.

For the 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.

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