A newly acquired painting by one of the best-known California Scene artists, Milford Zornes, will soon grace the collection of Chapman University’s Hilbert Museum of California Art. Museum founder and benefactor Mark Hilbert recently purchased Zornes’ The Canyon from another collector, and the painting will soon go on public display in the museum.
The Hilbert Museum is devoted to exhibiting representational and narrative art by noted California artists of the 20th century.
The Canyon, a watercolor on paper painted by Zornes in 1935, depicts the grandeur and bustle of New York City’s Wall Street. Zornes was working as one of the New Deal’s WPA artists and had gained recognition in the East with a 1933 exhibition of his watercolors at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. From that exhibition, President and Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt selected one of his watercolors to hang in the White House – and Zornes and his art began to receive widespread attention.
The painting was later exhibited at Zornes’ one-man show at the Laguna Beach Museum of Art in 1935, at a one-man show at Scripps College Gallery in Claremont in 1936, and at another one-man show at the Gallery of Modern Masters in Washington, D.C., in 1937.
Zornes’ works can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the White House and the Library of Congress, among others places.
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