Today, a new addition to Orange County’s arts landscape arrives as the Hilbert Museum of California Art, on Chapman University’s west campus in Orange, opens its doors to the public.
Philanthropists Mark and Janet Hilbert of Newport Coast have promised Chapman University about 240 works for the museum, which will have free admission. Chapman put the value of that art at more than $7 million in 2014, when the Hilberts made their gift.
The new museum is housed in a former commercial building that Chapman bought in 2002, across from the Orange train station, though plans are to eventually move it to the former Villa Park Orchards Packing House two blocks away. Along with giving the paintings, the Hilberts donated $3 million for the creation and support of the current and future museums.
California Scene art is the museum’s focus. It’s a style that depicts everyday life in California and that has, at times, been overlooked, especially after the art world turned its focus to modernism after World War II.
Nonetheless, it’s an important style that documents California’s past, Mark Hilbert said as he walked through the building one recent weekday morning.
“The museum is dedicated to narrative art, meaning it’s art that tells a story,” Hilbert said. “The story is California and its people. It’s an important story, because after all, the people of California brought things to the world such as Hollywood, Silicon Valley and popularized surfing, just to mention a few things.”
By a loose definition, the California Scene covers works from as early as the mid-1800s, around the time of the state’s admission to the union, to as late as the 21st century.
But the golden age of the style was in the middle of the 20th century, according to guest curator Gordon McClelland, who organized the opening exhibit and has written more than a dozen books on California art and history.
SENSE OF PLACE, TIME
This first exhibition, “Narrative Visions: 20th Century California Art from the Hilbert Collection,” includes roughly 100 paintings that contain all sorts of stories, from the Depression as it affected Californians to depictions of America’s naval might in World War II to snapshots of Orange County as it once looked.
“It’s the idea of linking social history with art,” McClelland said. “That’s what this show does.”
He pointed to the earliest work in the exhibit, a 1913 painting of elaborate theaters at night on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles. Streetlights are glowing glass globes, and a woman is dressed in the style of the time.
“It has just, again, sense of time and place, which a lot of these do have,” McClelland said. “As you look at them, it feels … that they’re visually conveying a space in time.”
“A lot of these paintings do convey that period that they were done in, and that’s one of the elements that Mark has always focused on.”
Some are scenes from the Depression: a despondent man and a woman trying to console him as behind them, people enjoy a ride on the carousel that was popular at Lincoln Park in Los Angeles at the time (“If I Had the Wings of An Angel,” 1937).
There are the stories of minorities, like the black woman touching up her lipstick at a nightclub in the 1943 painting “Touch-up.”
All captured are San Francisco’s Chinatown (a colorful dragon is paraded in “Chinese New Year” from 1960), Newport Beach (“Balboa Pavilion,” 1960) and a dramatically changing Los Angeles.
Some of the more recent works veer into abstraction, like the landscape reduced to green shapes highlighted in yellow and orange in the 1989 “A Hazy, Somewhat Muggy Day.”
Hilbert calls “San Dimas Train Station” by Millard Sheets the signature piece of the collection.
The watercolor, sharply drawn in 1933, shows the small train station under a dark gray sky, with two figures lit by individual cones of light.
It has a mood of loneliness and isolation and has been compared to Edward Hopper’s famous “Nighthawks,” which came almost a decade later.
“You get a sense of this kind of quiet, rural area (that) just evokes certain feelings on a deep level (and) becomes an icon,” Hilbert said.
The paintings also tell the stories of the artists themselves. “Mary Blair, Overlooking Palos Verdes” (1934) is Lee Blair’s portrait of his wife, fellow artist Mary Robinson Blair, at a clifftop picnic overlooking the ocean. Both worked for Walt Disney Studios, on movies including “Dumbo” and “Fantasia.”
Fletcher Martin’s “Lad in the Fleet” is a peek at that artist’s life. Martin was a prizefighter when he was in the U.S. Navy, and this dramatic painting captures a moment of a boxer, his chest tattooed with a ship, resting in the corner of the ring between rounds, wearing a worried look.
“A lot of these artists came to California in the late ’20s and ’30s because of the studios,” Hilbert said.
Artists came to paint backdrops, design sets, create animation and make movie posters. That was the work they were paid to do, and in their free time, they painted scenes from their lives and what they saw around them.
“They left behind a treasure trove of art.”
25 YEARS COLLECTING
Hilbert said he and his wife built their collection over a quarter of a century, visiting Europe and its major galleries 25 times to develop an eye for composition and quality. It started with a need to decorate their house in Palm Springs on a budget 25 years ago.
“Our wallets were empty and the walls were empty. We went to the consignment stores, where we could buy art for less money. That’s when we ran into the California style of painting,” he said. “I just fell in love with this group of paintings.”
Growing up in California, in Pasadena, he could relate to the stories in the paintings. He thinks most who come to the museum will be able to connect to the works as well in that way.
The plan is to eventually move the museum to the former Villa Park Orchards Packing House on Cypress Street.
In his final State of the University speech today, retiring President Jim Doti will give more details about the packing house project, said university spokeswoman Mary Platt.
Initially, Chapman had hoped that the museum would open in the packing house as soon as the fall of 2017. Now, however, there is no set date, as Chapman and the city “must work carefully together on a project like this,” Platt said.
Future exhibitions could borrow from others’ collections, including private collections, Hilbert said. And those with California Scene paintings in their homes will see the style recognized and hopefully reach out to the museum, Platt said.
As for why the Hilberts picked Chapman as the place for their collection, Hilbert said, “We liked that this university is a happening place. It was growing and expanding. … And of course the city of Orange, which in and of itself is a little historical community, it was a perfect fit.”
Contact the writer: aboessenkool@ocregister.com
