The Hilbert Museum is the place you go if you want to see traditional art. Their curatorial program most reminded me of the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento on a much smaller scale… ahh, but not for long, as the Hilbert is expanding from it’s current “glorified gallery” size of 7,500 square feet to 22,000 square feet according to one of the museum’s talkative docents who gave me the background on the coming renovation. The current exhibits are all up thru May 7th and then the museum will shutter for about a year (again, the docent had no shortage of information) and emerge as a major league exhibition space.
The final shows up for the next three and a half weeks include a look at some paintings in the museum’s permanent collection and:
•A tiny survey of the work of animator Chuck Jones, featuring original drawings and animation cells,
•A show of illuminated manuscript digital printouts by artist Michael Johnson,
•A sprawling survey of the California Watercolor society’s first fifty years (1921-1971),
•“Forging Ahead” a survey of the career of Bradford Salamon, which is the exhibit that we made the drive down to see.
Salamon’s work was the only art in the entire museum that embraced scale, and only in some of the works. The biggest artworks anywhere on display in the rest of the museum were the classic “above the couch” size of about three feet long two feet high including frame and matte board or smaller.
In contrast to most of the other work in the Museum, many of Salamon’s paintings were on surfaces that may as well have been drive-in movie theater screens. And the intended audience for most of his work are the generations who know what drive-in movies are and went to a few of them “back in the day”. In fact, for a show called “Forging Ahead”, most of Bradford Salamon’s pictures are aggressively looking back. Painting subjects include an old aspirin bottle – like they looked when baby boomers were kids, old round-faced alarm clocks – like they looked when baby boomers were kids, the old entrance to Disneyland – like it looked when baby boomers were kids. A large painting of C-3PO, a character that has been in our collective cultural consciousness for 45 years now, is about the most recent subject matter for these paintings.
Other paintings in the show are based on childhood memories, playing on the theme of old photographs… back when the artist, a baby boomer, was a kid. There are also portraits of living people, including some artists of note like Llyn Foulkes and Don Bachardy, two artists Salamon professes (in wall-label addenda to these and many paintings in the show) to admire. These are two artists born in the 1930s who generally stuck to figurative work in an era of anti-figurative Modernism and Postmodernism.
One thought after looking through the exhibits at the Hilbert was that this was a museum pretending that Modernism never happened. But that was wrong, the watercolor show had many examples of midcentury cityscapes that played with Cubist ideas and beyond. And with Salamon’s adventurous scale, there were certainly notions of art concepts from at least the turn of the last century. But an analysis of the Hilbert as a place that pretends Surrealism never happened is an irrefutable conclusion to arrive at. The most Surreal thing in the whole museum were the digital prints of illuminated manuscripts by artist Michael Johnson and his surrealism was a pre-modern pretty angel/decrepit devil dichotomy. That the Hilbert had no examples of LowBrow art – that technically proficient art movement that is also bursting with originality and imagination – on display in its permanent collection leads me to believe that no matter how grand the Hilbert’s coming expansion is to be, it will be to maintain the stereotype of Orange County as a bastion of cultural conservatism on par with it’s well known political conservatives.
ALL PHOTOS by the author