Hilbert Expansion Opens

Hilbert Museum with Millard Sheets' mosaic mural, Pleasures Along the Beach (1969)

Chapman University's Hilbert Museum of California Art has reopened after a Johnston Marklee-helmed expansion that nearly tripled the space from 7500 to 22,000 sf. There are now two buildings, separated by a courtyard, with 26 galleries devoted to Mark and Janet Hilbert's 5000-piece collection of what they're calling California narrative art (thanks, George and Mellody). As the Hilbert deploys that term, it primarily means figurative paintings and watercolors made in California from the 1930s to the present, by artists most people have never heard of.

Think of the Hilbert as the anti-Hammer. It's unhip and unwoke, trading heavily in Boomer nostalgia. Some of the big names here are Fletcher Martin, Emil Kosa Jr., Paul Landacre, and Roger Kuntz. If those ring a bell, you've come to the right place. If not, one plus of the expansion is that it's easier to find something to like. There are loan exhibitions of California modernists, Chicano painter Emigdio Vasquez, and historic Navajo weavings. 

The $12 Million Museum. In this age of billion-dollar shrinking museums, there is something to be said for a $12 million makeover that triples the art on view. The new Hilbert is an adaptive reuse of the original (2016) Hilbert Museum and a campus dance studio. The massing of forms is said to be an homage to Luis Barragán. For better or worse, the building's duck is a 40-ft glass mosaic mural designed by Millard Sheets for a Santa Monica Home Savings. It's more kitsch than art, but it should serve the purpose of any duck—to make you look. 

Millard Sheets and assistants, Pleasures Along the Beach, 1969

Grand Foyer

The limitations of a $12 million budget are more evident inside. A (your name here) "Grand Foyer" prompts the thought that grand is not the word. The 26 galleries are functional, a little cramped, and without much variation. 

Emil Kosa Jr., Sunday Morning, about 1940. The Hilbert Museum of California Art at Chapman University

The Collection. The core of the Hilbert collection is California's version of American Scene painting—the grim, uplifting, or ironic views of working people produced during the Depression and wartime years. Most of the artists are tertiary at best. The attentive Hilbert visitor may nonetheless find parallels to today's economic inequality and the art treating it. 

Though the Hilberts foreground Millard Sheets—onetime luminary of the L.A. art world—more interesting to me is Emil Kosa Jr. Paris-born, Kosa somehow found himself painting mattes in the special effects department at 20th Century Fox, while pursuing a side project of creating moody, pessimistic views of rural California.

Burr Singer, Modern Woman, 1940s. Hilbert Collection

Two mid-century women artists I'd like to know more about are Burr Singer, who chronicled the Central Avenue jazz scene, and Jesse Arms Botke, maven of avian painting.

Jessie Arms Botke, Leadbeater Cockatoos, 1930s. Hilbert Collection

Frank Ashley, The Barefoot Sixties, Enrico's San Francisco, 1968. Hilbert Collection

Suong Yangchareon, Crossing Kern County, 2017. Hilbert Collection

The Hilberts are attempting to take California Scene/Narrative Art into a new century. A few of the examples come off as unserious and irrelevant. More compelling is this 2017 Photorealist acrylic painting by Suong Yangchareon.

Helen Lundeberg, Night Interior, 1953-67. The Buck Collection at UC Irvine

Temporary Exhibitions. The Hilbert has reopened with eight temporary exhibitions. That's about as many shows as you'd find at LACMA or the Getty on a given day, except that this is almost all California 20th-century art. 

"A Matter of Style: Modernism in California Art" expands the Hilbert tent with the mid-century avant-garde, a category that has received considerably more attention than California Narrative. But it's not a scholarly show so much as set of available loans. Many of the best come from the Buck collection at UC Irvine.

Karl Benjamin, Elliptical Planes, 1956. (c) Estate of Karl Benjamin. Courtesy of Louis Stern Fine Arts

Agnes Pelton, Rose & Palm, 1931. Euphrat Museum of Art, De Anza College, Cupertino, Calif.

Paul Landacre, Death of a Forest, 1937. Toni and Bob Crisell Collection

Emigdio Vasquez, Mike's Pool Hall, 1996. Fred Ortiz collection

A mini-survey of Emigdio Vasquez (1939-2014) spans Zoot Suiters, Millet-like California field workers, and still life subjects. All however are sourced from a single dedicated collector, Fred Ortiz. 

Emigdio Vasquez, Menudo Still Life, 1989. Fred Ortiz collection

Vasquez cooked menudo for his weekend critiques of artist friends.

Norman Rockwell, Vacation Time, 1922. Bank of America Collection

There are exhibitions on Norman Rockwell, Disney animation artist Mary Blair, Navajo blankets, streamline moderne radios, and views of Orange County. The Navajo and radio exhibits—the most engaging, I'd say—are crammed into uncomfortably small spaces. 

"Mary Blair's Wonderland: Imagining Disney's Alice"

Navajo Banded Eye Dazzler Wearing Blanket, about 1870. Hilbert Collection

TrueTone D2018, 1950

Walter Dorwin Teague, Spartan Nocturne, 1935

Fletcher Martin, Lad from the Fleet, 1938. Hilbert Museum of California Art

Do We Need Another Museum of California Art? The ascendance of Los Angeles as a global art center has stoked interest in the region's art history. Orange County now has four museums covering 20th- and 21st century California art. The Orange County Museum of Art is the highest profile, skewing contemporary. The Laguna Art Museum offers an alternative view more centered on artists associated with the longtime artist's colony. The sleeping giant is UC Irvine's museum to be, currently operating as the Irvine Museum. If and when it one day gets a worthy building, it will draw on two pre-eminent collections of California plein-air landscapes and mid-century modernism. The Hilbert makes four, and that's not counting the venerable Bowers Museum, whose grab bag collection of local history and global art includes some 20th-century California art.

So no, we don't need four museums with similar missions in one county. But that's the way it works in American arts philanthropy, where vanity is as potent a factor as logic.

Edward Biberman, Under the Freeway, about 1950. Hilbert Collection