Biography

Hilaire Hiler, painter, costume and set designer, muralist, musician, writer and psychologist was born Hiler Harzberg in St. Paul, Minnesota, July 16, 1898. During his infancy his family moved to Providence, Rhode Island. There his father, Meyer Hiler sold his interest in a jewelry firm to start a vaudevillian production show.

As a child Hiler attended the Rhode Island School of Design and was a private pupil of the Marquis de la Jarre.Hiler attended the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania. Hiler also attended life drawing classes at William Server's studio, a semester at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and a following semester at the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art. After the armistice was declared he moved to New York where he met Wynn Holcomb, a well known caricaturist. Holcomb offered him the opportunity to help coordinate a monthly spread on Paris for Shadowland magazine.

It was 1919 when Hilaire found himself on the left bank in Paris as a jazz saxophonist. He continued to play jazz during his travels to Berlin and Copenhagen and was also involved with costume and mask design, circuses and clowning. This was the beginning of a wanderlust, transient lifestyle.

An increasing amount of hatred, hostility and prejudice against Jews caused the Harzbergs to camouflage their religious heritage. So in 1928 when Hilaire's parents, Meyer and Kay, came to join their son in Paris, the Harzberg family formally changed their name to Hiler.

Hiler's tenure in Paris was spent assimilating the theories of various post-cubist movements. Hiler is most recognized for his leadership in the "Precisionist" movement. The Precisionist painters were using the forms of urban industry in their efforts to achieve some sense of a new reality. Hiler's paintings of this period express a folk like quality. The Precisionist prided themselves on rude vitality, stark simplicity, and no attempt to be realistic. Linear perspective for the Precisionist is disregarded.

Moreover, the precisionist movement that Hiler participated in often left the human figure to look like cutouts, evoking a child like innocence. Hiler's ideas about abstract art were also taking shape in several articles published in various little magazines in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Among those that were published include, From Nudity to Raiment, An Introduction to the Study of Costume, 1929 and Notes on the Technique of Painting, 1934. He wrote for California Arts and Architecture magazine and in 1940 published a textbook, Color Harmony and Pigments. In 1945 he published Why Abstract?, Manifesto of Psychromantic Design, and Why Expressionism?. In 1936 Hiler was back in the United States and embarked on a W.P.A. 4000 foot mural for the San Francisco Aquatic Park.In 1944 he started Hiler College in Santa Fe, the same year that he received a B.A. from Golden State University. He received his Ph.D from the same institution in 1948. In 1947 he opened Fremont University in Los Angeles and served as president until 1951 when he returned to Santa Fe and changed the name of Hiler College to Fremont College. During the 1940's Hiler continued his pursuit of psychology through study with Alfred Korzybski at the Institute of General Semantic in Chicago in 1945 and the University of Denver in 1949. In 1953 Hiler left Santa Fe and retreated to Puebla, Mexico. In 1958, his good friend Waldemar George produced, Hilair Hiler and Structuralism, containing essays about the evolution of Hiler's work. After travels to the Canary Islands and Dublin, Hiler returned to Paris, where he died in 1966. Several posthumous retrospectives have been held in 1968, 1977 and 1985.