Cooper Hewitt says...
Hilaire Harzberg Hiler (July 16, 1898 – January 19, 1966) was an American artist, psychologist, and color theoretician who worked in Europe and United States during the mid-20th century. At home and abroad, Hiler worked as a muralist, jazz musician, costume and set designer, teacher, and author. He was best known for combining his artistic and psychoanalytical training to formulate an original perspective on color.
Hiler attended a number of schools as a young man, including Rhode Island School of Design classes for children, and a brief attendance at Wharton School of Finance and Commerce. Although he was told by multiple instructors to give up art based on his struggles with drawing, he pursued his interests by attending Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art, University of Pennsylvania, University of Denver, University of Paris, and Golden State University.
During the 1920s Hiler was living and painting in Paris and he became friends with the literary crowd that included Henry Miller, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, and Anaïs Nin. He left Paris in 1934. In 1940 he helped found the Fremont College in Los Angeles, which moved with Hiler to Santa Fe in 1944.
After returning to the United States, Hiler was was named art director of the bathhouse building at the San Francisco Aquatic Park from 1936-1939, a major WPA project for which the bathhouse building was to be the centerpiece. In addition to directing the overall design of the Streamline Moderne building, he created two full-room murals . The first, in the main hall of the museum, recalls a playful, hallucinogenic dip into a richly populated aquatic landscape, and the other elucidates his color theories in the form of a circular, 120-color spectrum on the ceiling.
Hiler's most notable achievements are his studies of how color and the human psyche interact. His ceiling mural at the Maritime Museum represents his deduction of 30 sensational—rather than mathematical—color relationships in the form of a wheel, as well as their combinations with black, white, and gray. He titled the room "The Prismatarium", as it was intended to open up the world of color to viewers in the same way that a planetarium opens up the realm of outer space.The Hiler color spectrum deviates from the accepted color wheel that developed in the 18th and 19th centuries following Sir Isaac Newton's documentation of the color proportions found in a rainbow.Newton's color wheel presents red, blue, and yellow as the primary colors situated opposite their complementary colors of green, orange, and violet, respectively, and the variations between each color could be endless.
By contrast, Hiler's spectrum is based on ten color groups: yellow, orange, orange-red, red, purple, blue, turquoise, sea green, green, and leaf green. Each group contains three variations, yielding the 30-step wheel. More steps then this would be indiscernible to the human eye, according to Hiler's "Threshold Theory." This theory also stresses the need for proportionally more gradations from violet to blue, and green to yellow. Hiler's theory stated that the human eye and mind are better prepared to perceive differences in the cool colors than in the warm colors, regardless of the proportion of gradations that may be physically present. He also worked with a grey spectrum, which allowed him to add black, white or grey to each color. The addition of black created "tones," white created "hues," and gray created "shades. These additions yielded 120 colors that provided an outline for every color. Hiler's artwork, including the aquatic mural at the Maritime Museum is directly based on this color foundation.
