 Thank you very much for that nice introduction. I first became acquainted with Hilger and Nair in 2008 when I visited Louise and Hilly Dunn, her daughter and granddaughter, at their home in Stanford. It seems strange now, since we've been running exhibitions at Hilger for 10 years now, it seems odd to think that the purpose of that initial visit was to determine whether there was enough among her sketches and models and cartoons to make an exhibition at all. And I still remember that first day with Louise saying, oh, I don't know, I don't know if there's anything here for an exhibition. Meanwhile, I was quickly up to my ankles getting like those cartoons that you see downstairs and all the sketches and everything. From the beginning, what struck me about Hilger's work was, aside from the great scope of it, I mean, the breadth and variety of what she created, it's the way she seems to channel multiple threads of visual history. Without ever appearing to be derivative of any one thing or any one movement, she has this uncanny ability to just channel all kinds of art and, as I said, visual history. Her work, it resonates with all these different influences, but at the same time, it remains her own. And in 1922, when she was working on one of her earliest commissions for the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC, she wrote about her process in similar terms. And this is a quote from her. She says, I looked and looked at brief vases and copied and traced until I thought I had the spirit. Then I looked at Egyptian and contemporary art as their coloring seemed appropriate. Then disregarding most of my researches, but being influenced by them, I started designing. And this is the result. These are from the pendentives in the National Academy of Sciences, which was completed in 1924. And you have air, earth, fire, and water. And you can see the influence of a variety of different things. These are painted in gilded gesso. And she worked together with Rafael Wastavino. Those of you who commute back and forth to the city, you see Wastavino's work every day in Grand Central Station. And Gilbert worked with him on the development of those acoustic tiles. So this is raised and painted. And you can see the Greek influences, but also you can see the beginnings of her art deco style. In the earlier part of her career, she's revised an art deco artist. And you see that the art deco mixture of the figure drawing, a little bit of abstraction, the bright colors, the vibrant movement. And this is the very, very early part of her career. And to me, I feel strongly that this approach of looking and looking and absorbing and running all this knowledge through a creative process, I think it characterizes everything she does. And the point here is to talk specifically about the classical influences. But I think to understanding the impact of those influences, we need to look at how she comes to understand classical art, how she comes to acquire those influences, and how she uses them in conjunction with other things that feed her imagination. And we're going to come back to this, but I wanted to start with it. This is called radio and television encompassing the Earth. And this is a metal relief that she created for the Archeo Theater at Rockefeller Center in 1932. Everybody knows the three round bills that are outside of radio, so they use a call. We're during the exhibition downstairs, and you'll see them here a little bit later. This was done with the same metal technique of colored layer and colored metals. And what's interesting to me is the phenomenon of how she could create this really vivid iconography or a concept that had no visual antecedents. I mean, radio and television, telecommunications in general, it's an industry that wasn't still in its infancy in 1932, it was certainly in its early childhood. And it suggests to me a comprehensive knowledge, not just of traditional symbols and imagery, like many artists have, but of the essence of how symbols and images actually work, how they're created, how they're built, and where they come from. It's as if she saw or was able to create a mythology behind the new phenomenon of modern communication. And so in order to understand where or to try to understand it anyway, how she has this ability, I think it's rooted in a number of aspects of her background. First and foremost, the influence of her mother. We know that Hilda's mother showed her books and pictures of world art from a very early age. And this is another quote from Hilda. She says, even before we went to school, she, meaning mother, used to show us reproductions of the best pictures in the world, pointing out to us why they were great, explaining their meaning to us, and telling us the story of the artist's lives. So this is from her earliest days. Another influence would be her extensive travel to see the art. It seems that she saw the art of the entire world. She made her first trip to Europe in 1911 with her mother. And she traveled abroad throughout her life very often on her own, which was unusual at that time. In the 1930s, for a woman to be traveling, to be traveling on a company, but it seems that Hilda was pretty fearless. And then another aspect would be her education. And I mean her artistic education or art training, but also in the context of her ability to create allegories, images, meant for one of her work. I'm also emphasizing her formative schooling and specifically her Catholic education, which I think is extremely important in her development. And I think it feeds into her what I perceive to be the result of her imagination. And Hildred went to the Sacred Heart Academy in what was then Manhattanville. You see it up on the hill. This photograph predates Hildred by a few decades. But I always think it's fascinating to see what New York City looked like at one time. Today, this is West Central Harlem. And today, it looks beautiful again, but in a completely different way. I mean, you're a beautiful brownstone building. This is the Hamilton Grange. This is the City College campus. This is the Sacred Heart Academy. It was there until around 1952. And then it became that land became part of City College. And the sisters moved to Curtis, New York, where there is now Manhattanville College. And I see the nodding going on. I know there are a lot of Sacred Heart alums here. And I took it for granted that even where we are, there would be Manhattanville College alums also. The Sacred Heart experience was very important. It was a very important part of Hildred's life. And by extension, the life of the entire family and they will maintain very strong allegiances to this day. But getting back to the source of the classical influences, Latin, and this is until the 1970s even, Latin was at the core of the curricula in Catholic academies, both the academies for men and the academies for women. Mass, of course, which would have been a requirement at that time, Mass, of course, was in Latin. And it was in Latin throughout Hildred's entire life because she died shortly before the Church transitions to the Mass in the vernacular. But the liturgy was not how any of us were taught the language. The language was taught through the Roman classics. And typically you might have the grammar in the first year and the second year. You might start with literature. You might have had Caesar's Gallant Wars. Then you might have had Cicero. If you stuck with it long enough, you could get to read the idiot. So it's a foundational part of the Catholic education. I understand that Latin was also taught in the public schools at that time. But I don't think quite as intensively. So you're reading this literature which is, so you're reading about the gods and the gods and the heroes and a certain amount of mythology. Also, Catholicism, I mean, certainly then and certainly through my entire education, I understand that it's different now. But Catholicism was not taught from the Bible. It was taught from the Catechism. And it was taught from tradition. And I think that this originates way back in the fourth century when Constantine made Christianity the official religion of Rome. You start to see an amount of the old ways and the Christian ways. Of course, the pagan gods are rejected. But you start to have allegories. Concepts that were represented by gods are now represented by allegorical figures. This continues into the Renaissance. And we all know in the Vatican, Stanzae and in the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo, for example, has the creation narrative. But there are also the civils. The Roman civils, the oracles. Raphael in the Vatican Stanzae has the dissertation of the sacrament. But there's also the allegories of philosophy, theology, jurisprudence, and poetry in the ceiling there. So this then dovetails with the Catholic hagiography, the story of the saints. And the saints, as we know, all have symbols and attributes. So this is also a part of what she would have been very much aware of. This is by Hildreth. This is from 1947. This is the ultimate piece of the chapel at Fordham University in the Bronx. And you can see there's a whole array of saints here all with their attributes. In the Hebrew robe is St. Joseph. And I think you can see that he's holding this carpenter's stool, which would be one of his attributes. Behind him is St. Francis, who's contemplating the crucifix because he had the wounds of Christ. He received the stigmata. Upwards is St. John the Baptist as a little boy with the Lamb of God. Down below is St. Ignatius kneeling and pledging his allegiance to God and the church. Across from them, it's interesting to note that there's a side from the Virgin Mary. There's only one female saint. That is St. Genevieve. And you see that she looks like she's holding a model of Notre Dame cathedral. St. Genevieve actually predates Notre Dame cathedral in her life. But her claim to sanctity is that she saved the Holy City of Paris from an attack by the harms. And this is field-driven cooperating here, not necessarily a classical tradition, but a Renaissance tradition. We're probably familiar with the Renaissance tradition of including the Domnus portrait in the religious state. St. Genevieve is in this picture because a woman named Genevieve Brady paid for it. There's a whole story about the Brady's. They were people duke and duchess, the Brady's. So the whole question of Asia and the symbols of the saints gets carried a step further in the Catholic teaching. And this is certain to remember that this is all before the Second Vatican Council. And it's all before the canon of saints was purged by the church. So we have some saints who don't simply have an attribute. They are the attribute, which means they actually never existed. And I'm going to concentrate on just one because she's probably the most famous, and she's apropos this week. This is Veronica. This is St. Veronica. And I remember when we were kids, we never questioned why Veronica both was able to capture the image of Christ. And she, by coincidence, her name meant the image of Christ. Her name, Veronica, comes from the two words in Latin or Greek. The vero part is the truth, and the icon part is the image. So Veronica has the true image of Christ. She is not in the Lionel. I believe she is in the Legenda Oreo, which is where a lot of the legendary saints come from. This comes from the early Middle Ages. But she is the sixth station of the cross. So she's very present in what we've taught. This painting is by Hans Memling. It's 15th century. And it's in the National Gallery in Washington, DC. And how she gets the true image of Christ is that as he's carrying the cross, she approaches him and she uses her veil to wipe the space. And then when she removes the veil from the space, his image is on it. So this has been venerated for years. And this is an example of how promises teaches us to embody images and symbols and sometimes objects with tremendous value and significance. And I think just a couple of days ago, we saw a major example of it when they grew up with crowned thorns out of Notre Dame. That crowned thorns has been revered for centuries as a holy icon of the Passion of Christ. And it was interesting to see newscasters who typically can be very cynical just celebrating the fact that it was safe and not making any comment on its authenticity. I mean, there are, for what I understand, about 700 new thorns in churches throughout Europe, many of which have been proven to not even be from the same kind of play. But the one that's in Notre Dame is revered as the icon of the Passion of Christ. And now it's acquired in another layer because nobody's ever going to forget the story of the priest running into the burning building to rescue it. We're never going to forget that. So in addition to this education, Mildred, of course, had a lot of formal art education. She studied in New York at the Art Student League. She was in the Boz Arts programs. And at the new school, she was in the program for applied design for women in San Francisco. She studied at the California School of the Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. And this is really interesting. I don't know if it applies to her classical influences. Well, it does, because I'm in a program for Fortune in a minute. She studied mechanical drawing and applied mathematics. And it does figure in here. She studied mechanical drawing and applied mathematics at Columbia, but for the purpose so that she could be a map maker. She joined the Navy. She joined the Navy and made maps during World War I. But a very big influence on her was, of course, access to the Metropolitan Museum. And beginning in 1870, in the 1870s, the Metropolitan amassed this enormous collection of plaster casts. And this is how museums collected ancient Greek and Roman art at the time. It was through plaster reproductions. As the Metropolitan grew and became wealthier, and now we all know they have one of the largest collections of actual Greek and Roman art in the entire world, the plaster cast became less and less necessary. On the left is from the 1880s. This is when they opened. It's an engraving from Harper's Weekly when they opened the plaster cast throughout the gallery. And on the right is a photograph of, well, the few pieces that were left around 1959. I thought I was going to be extremely clever in telling you where you could go to see plaster cast and then when I arrived here today, I was going to go down to see what we're doing this. This is the Slater Museum in Norwich, where they had an enormous collection of these things. And this is the type of thing that those of you who would have seen had the Metropolitan plaster cast of all the famous Greek and Roman statues and also architectural fragments. And if you really want to see something astonishing, this is the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. And they have these enormous replicas, not only of the Greek and Roman statues, but famous architecture. And you see all the way on the right, that's one of the portals of the Metropolitan cast. And you can see the scale from the students sitting on the floor. I mean, these things are even more just enormous. So, this onto radius, onto radius in musical. These are from 1932, we've all seen them. And they are metal, there's several layers of different metals. And you can read in the past downstairs that they were assembled with a special process that kept the metals from chemically interacting with one another. They've been clean since 1932, but they've never needed to be restored there, they are the way they are. And now we start to see real classical influence and her ability, and her ability to create her own iconography. Now, throughout her career, she did work with a man named Hartley Burr, Alexander, who was a professional iconographer. And he often helps her lay out a schematic by a scenario, if they were gonna be interactive images or sort of an iconographic program. But each individual object, the result of each thing is very, very clearly her own. And she doesn't do the muses, these are not the muses, but she creates the personification of dance, drama, and song. We're looking at dance, and we can see this sort of frenetic movement. She had worked in the theater, in the early part of her career. Hildren worked in the theater, she worked with the famous actress Alfred London Lynn Fong's hand, the famous actress Margaret Anglin. And she designed costumes for the Metropolitan Opera. And she did sketches of famous performers. So she knows her theater, and she knows the world of the performing arts. And she did some sketches of famous performers, one of whom was Anna Pavlova. Anna Pavlova is on the left. And this is Hildren's sketch of Anna Pavlova, it's called Anna Pavlova in a Grecian costume. That could possibly be Anna Pavlova's idea of a Grecian costume. It certainly is in Hildren's idea of a Grecian costume, as you'll see, Hildren, you will see from these roundels, Hildren's new Higree garments extremely well. But this is where I think that I believe anyway, that nothing happens in a vacuum. They're very, very rarely, very, very rarely is an artist or creative person doing something that's so totally unique that there's nothing like it around. And Hildren, with her awareness of the theater and her awareness of everything around her, it seems to me, based on look, analyzing these reliefs, that I think she's absorbed a lot of other things. There's sort of a surge at this time and interest in classical forms in a variety of the arts, in dance in particular. The photograph on the right is Isadora Duncan. And if you remember the story of Isadora, she created dances in a Grecian vein. She was also the lady of the flowing scarves. And we see this here. And many of you probably remember the story of the flowing scarve actually caused her death. She was in a Maserati convertible with her, a scarve flowing behind her. It got caught in the axle of the car and she's trying to deathly. And so Isadora died in 1927, but Isadora left an incredible legacy and it's very, very famous. To this day, there's a dance company that recreates her work all over the world. Recently they were actually in Greece doing that. So in this, I don't think there's any kind of loafer here, except maybe the shoes. But there maybe is a little bit of Isadora. But I think there's a lot more of this. This is Montagran. It's Montagran and Bertrand Ross. The Montagran's work is called Crihanestra. Montagran did a lot of works that were based on Greek mythology. And you can see from the gestures, the Monta gestures of the angled elbows, the angled legs, and also interesting enough, the bare limbs, which are new in dance, they were not being cut lovis, cut lovis line. So I think there's a little bit more Monta in this than there is Isadora. One is the sketch and one is the left is the sketch and the right is the finish. So moving on, now we're at drama. And she uses the ancient classical references, the Roman masks of comedy and tragedy. The central figure, I believe, is Athena. Athena, among a hundred other things, was the goddess of wisdom. She presided over the arts. She was also the goddess of war, the goddess of government, the goddess pretty much of everything. But here we see her, I think, as the presiding goddess of the arts and inspiration. And she is correctly dressed in what's called a Grecian peplos. And you can see that there's this part that hangs over in the middle there. The Greek garments, they were not sewn, they were simply rectangles of cloth and it depended on how you wrapped it and tied it and ended it and that's how you got the shape. And Hilgritz seems to understand this as you'll see from further examples. And so they would wear that and then there was also a large cloak that they would wrap around themselves called a Hymation. It looks like a hynation in English. A Hymation is the big cloak. So Athena has that. And this is a sketch. And that is a statue of Athena Parthenos in the National Museum of Athens. And so you can see why I think that central figure is Athena. I mean, she's just as formidable. She's wearing the peplos and she's got her wanky headdress which Hilgritz has abstracted into this arched echo shape on top of her Athena's head. So that's why I'm incredibly convinced that she's telling us that this is Athena. And now we get to song. And here we've got, she starts out with the peplos. And today in Couture, you might have a jacket as a peplum and that's where that comes from from this little. She starts with that and then she starts to relax it a little bit and that style of dress is called a chiton. It's just wrapped in a more gentle way without the layers folded over. An interesting thing that she does is that in the early sketches, she hasn't really decided whether song is going to be just on her own or whether it's gonna be a duet. The person, the man is playing an Orphean liar which we associate with this singing act in her poets or even the psalmist of the Bible and it's implied that that person, you can see a little bit more in the second sketch, would also be singing. By the time she gets to the final product, he's playing reed pipes. So song is allowed to be to be the representation for our home. And again, picking up from what I think is the aura around her in the arts on the right hand side, that's also Isadora. And you're dancing bare-legged and she did the way she's dancing on the beach there the way she danced on the stage. If you ever have the opportunity to see the film or the loves of Isadora, Vanessa, right? Great place, absolutely, really great. And so that's where I think some of that has come from. Now we're coming back to radio and television and this to me is Ilger's great lost masterpiece. I think this is heartbreaking that we don't have this anymore. The theater was destroyed in the 50s and the sculpture was lost. There's a replica of one of the subway entrances by the McRoy bill building. I don't have a picture of this, I don't like it. Oh! And it doesn't look like, it doesn't look enough by Filbert to me. It looks like somebody else's copy of Filbert that I'd rather look at first. And what we see here, and this is what that's fascinated me from the beginning. She creates this entire mythology for something that has no visual antecedents. Now she's got the central male figure and you can see the benefit of her sketching all those blessed casts in the bodies. And so is he Mercury, maybe? Or is he just the spirit of the airwaves more likely? And he's trying to control the airwaves which are getting away from him. And let's look at the way she builds the figure. Oh, and this is another thing, yeah, by contrast in some of her contemporaries. This building is exactly contemporary. This is the Supreme Court of the United States. And what we have here is a classic Grecian pediment like you have on the Parthenon. And so this is what a contemporary is doing and the way a contemporary is channeling an ancient classical influence by simply copying and not really doing anything with it. And it represents liberty in the center between order and authority. And to me, it's like, okay, if you tell me that's what it is, then I'll believe you. But the thing is you can't really get read anything out of this. Also, when you're in front of the building, you can't see it, it's been claimed within an inch of its life. I mean, the sun gets it, it's just this big white blur. But it is a strict classical pediment based on what's called the divine proportion. And I think what Hilter is doing with radio and television, I think she's doing a variant. I think she's deliberately using this triangular shape to kind of add a little bit more, a little bit more of a classical touch to what is essentially the blank wall of a modernist building. Strictly speaking, the hypotenuse, the cited side should be 1.6 of the central, the central rod. On the hypotenuse, she's dead on but the two heads at the bottom line do the same proportion. And there she's kind of varying from the form. And she's also outside the pediment sort of the way, like a hypermetric poem, she's a little bit outside the meter. So she's not quite in that shape. But I think there's enough here to suggest the intent. Because the basic intent is that you use a precise proportion and you create something that can be divided into two exactly matching triangles. And I wouldn't attempt to draw a triangle across this by any means. But I think she's also used in the influence of the pediment because you saw it was liberty between order and authority. So a central dominant figure and then all the subordinate figures coming out. So if you read this as one work of art rather than three, you're getting a similar effect. You have Athena in the center who's presiding over all of the dependent arts. And actually here, she's channeling several different art historical things. A religious triptych in which you need all three parts to tell the story. And also Renaissance tundos, which are common in Raphael and Michelangelo and the Renaissance artists where the picture is forced into a circular frame. And since they're bar reliefs, I guess they're probably more like Deborah Robier than the painters. All right, so this is an early sketch for radio and television. She starts out with a very rigid figure. And this is why I think that she is channeling the proportion, the divine proportion because this to me looks very much like this. And this of course is Leonardo's betrubian man based on the perfect proportion suggesting that everything should be in proportion both in God's creation and in man's creation. And I think that that's what she's channeling here. Then she starts to play with it a little bit. He's still sort of static. And but the figures are starting to change and there are more of these wires going on. But this is an opportunity, I'm gonna jump ahead just a little bit. Those peculiar circles that the airwaves are holding, these are pretty much forgotten shapes. But on the left is an antenna from the 1930s and on the right, that's obviously Colin Furf and the cute speech that he's talking into. He's talking into a circular microphone of the 1930s. And that's what she's doing here. That's what the airwaves are controlling. Now she starts to do something different with the figure. Now he's crouching the airwaves so they're pulling away, they're pulling away from him. And I think she's making him a chariot here. And he's pulling on the way the chariots here would pull on the reins of the horses. These are two ancient bosses. The one on the left is in the gay museum and the one on the right is in the British Museum. The one on the left, this is in an Olympic competition or in the Athenian games or whatever. The one on the right is closer to the point. The one on the right is depicting the chariot of the sun god. And the sun god would be really asked if you could look at San Francisco's Apollo. But the point is he drives the chariot across the entire star. In other words, across the canopy of the earth, dispensing life. The way radio and television is encompassing the earth. So I think that's one way that she's getting at it. Here we're looking at another possible influence. This is not an ancient classical sculpture but this is in the tradition of an ancient classical form called a quadriga. There's one of these on the roof of St. Mark's in Venice without the chariot guy. This is the Brandenburg Gate, which dates from the late 18th century. So what's being represented here is sort of the imperial Germany and the imperial. So the power of figure describing horses, you notice the horses are not all going the same way. So they're branching out like they're going to come back. They're going to go to the four corners of the earth. So I think that's also informing that. Now, this is a relief. This is a work of art that's going on the exterior of a movie theater. And we know that she consumed all kinds of culture. We know from her journals that she went to the movies. I mean, I read a passage where she was in Moscow waiting to get into St. Basil's Cathedral. She had nothing to do and she was looking for a movie to go to. So we know she went to the movies. We have to, this is 1932. Movies are really becoming to blossom. And we all know, we all know the 1956 banter. And of course the 10 commandments we're probably going to see one on both of them this week. But this is quite a filter, it would have been familiar. This is the 1925 Simon version of the banter. And this was the biggest thing since sliced bread. I mean, the way, because even in 1956, there was only one way to do this. You had to do it and turn the camera on. So in 1925, this is even more challenging. Everybody was aware of this. I mean, it was everywhere in the world. Here are the guys in the chariots, that's Ramon Navarro. And I don't know who that is, but I love this accent. It was happy, it was great. To indicate, really to underline the fact that this was unavoidable, absolutely unavoidable. In 1925, for part of the year, Mildred was in Paris for the international exposition of modern decorative and industrial arts, the famous Art Deco conference. So she was there in 1925. This is the 1925 window card from the French release of the banter. This is from a movie theater in Louvain, but if it was in Louvain, you can be sure it was in Paris. And if she happened to be in New York or San Francisco or wherever in the United States, when the film came out, if it was in Baltimore, Massachusetts, it was in New York, it was in San Francisco, Chicago, it was absolutely everywhere. So to me, I see her as somebody who absorbs not only what she learns and sees from tradition, but from everything around her and everything that's happening around her. And that's why then you start to look at this and then to me, suddenly the bottom part starts to look like it's some sort of a carriage structure. The thing in the front looks like a wheel and I'm imagining another one in the back, you know? And we're already at a time when we've already had Picasso for a couple of decades, we said rock. So the ability to kind of deconstruct the image and make it not necessarily, make it look like it's going in one direction when she really is growing it apart. So we can sort of believe that it's a chariot, even though she has deconstructed it. And to me, this is her genes and that's why I think it's a great shape. I think if we still have this today, it could be the quintessential icon of telecommunications. Now, I said earlier that maybe that figure was Mercury or maybe it was just the end of things. This suggests that it could possibly be Mercury. Mercury usually has a helmet with the wings and the wings on his feet, but this one is Mercury, she calls this Mercury and he has the wings on his feet. This is from a few years earlier, this was gonna be for the communications for the 1930 world's fair in Chicago where she does get some spectacular work that doesn't fit into the context of this exhibition, but it's well worth looking into. And you can see she's using these lines as the airwaves and these antennas seem to be shooting something up there. This was never executed, but you can see the classical modeling is extremely evident Now, here, this is her 1937, this is Mercury. And here he's got the winged helmet, he's got wings on his feet and she abstracts. It's interesting that Mercury holds the caduceus which now is the symbol of medicine, but it was the symbol of the message of God originally. She abstracts it into this thing that looks like a TV antenna that might earn money, but it is meant to be this caduceus and it's Mercury delivering the mail rapidly. And another thing justice forgotten as those antennas that we looked at is the concept of air mail. We don't have air mail anymore. A mail now is just the mail, but this is the thirties, this is 1937, air travel is leaking and air mail was huge. There was a point in the mid-thirties and air mail accounted for more of the post office revenue than regular mail. I mean, we tend to forget all this because it was a higher price. You remember that special papers we had by the TV special onwards, I mean, it was a big revealer to send something by, so that's what's happening here. This is X-tan, it's in Logan Square in Chicago. Mercury also, this is just to indicate that she's not the only one, I mean, it's kind of everywhere. This is a copy of the Renaissance sculpture by Giovanni da Bologna. It's in the central court of the National Gallery in Washington. Before it came to the National Gallery, it was all over Europe. It was in several collections in Europe and then also in a collection in California. And there you see Mercury carrying this caduceus. It's very clear. And this is called the glory of commerce. It's by a sculptor named Jules Coutan. And this is obviously on top of Grand Central Station. And this was built between 1911 and 1914. So she would have seen this frequently. But what's interesting about it in terms of the iconography is that Mercury hears the quote, the messenger god, but he's also the god of commerce. And he's with Hercules and Athena. And we've seen Athena and her role and we're about to see Hercules. This now we're at Hilbert's last commission. And again, she uses, she creates a mythology, a classical style of mythology for something that didn't have one. This is for the Prudential Insurance Company in 1960. The Prudential Insurance Company logo, the logo as well as we all know is the rock of the hole. She did not create the logo, the logo existed for many, many decades. But she creates a mythology for the rock. She uses the mythology here for the rock of Gibraltar, the Prudential Insurance Company. She creates this image of Hercules going through the straits of Gibraltar. Hercules on one of the labors that he was assigned to do. He had to go from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean didn't like the fact that the rocks were in his way. So he, being Hercules blessed through and created the straits of Gibraltar. So she uses the straits of Gibraltar as Hercules' attribute, as if you were the same way you would have the attribute of the saint. She gives him the attribute of the straits of Gibraltar. And there he is in that little boat and he's already blessed through it. He's sailing through it. And this is a sketch. And then on the right is a painting by Domenico Veneziano. This is from the 15th century. It's saying John the Baptist in the desert is also in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. And what prompted me to make this juxtaposition was a couple of things. In the fact that sometimes in paintings, in Renaissance paintings, religious paintings, you see the saint along with his or her attribute. And she has Hercules along with his attribute. But the other thing that has jumped out on me is a little bit of a little bit to the side of the classical influences. It's another influence. Her fascination with these land formations. Because in the Domenico Veneziano painting you see these, whether they're mountains or hills or whatever, they look like they were made with clay sculptors night. And she does a similar thing. And she does it a lot. It's in a lot of her work. And where I think it comes from is the early Renaissance painting. These are two vignettes by Draco in the Sorrento Chapel in Ottawa. One, of course, is the birth of Christ. And the other is the Nolime Tantres. It's the Mary Magdalene St. Jesus is said for the resurrection. And there are those shapes. And she imports them into all kinds of things. This is an altered piece that she designed for an Episcopal church in Buffalo. It now resides in the other quick center at St. Barnabas University, which is near Buffalo. And there are those shapes. And of course, there is a saint with his statue. I mean, in this case, it's not St. John of Vassus, St. John the Evangelist. And he has the emblem of the eagle, which is his. And there are vignettes here from the gospel of St. John. The Prudential Insurance Company Mosaics. These are mosaics. And they were on a Sony original sketch that was in the Elevator Bank. They were taken down 15, 20 years later. I mean, it wasn't, they weren't up. They were very long, very long time. And for many years, many years they were presumed to be lost. A new CEO came into Prudential by this time, even when she was designing them in 1960, abstraction had already become the norm in decorating architecture. You already had abstract murals. So they were kind of a little bit beyond their time, even when they were put up. So they didn't last very long. They were presumed to be lost when we opened the first children near exhibition in 2009. Miraculously, the Prudential Insurance Company suddenly told us that they weren't lost. They were in a warehouse in Iceland, New Jersey. They together with the Dayton Foundation, which is sponsored this exhibition, Prudential and Dayton together funded them, the moving of them and the restoration. The panels, they're not all together, but they're in terrific places. The central panel with Hercules is permanently installed in the Newark Museum in Newark, New Jersey, which is across the street from the Prudential headquarters. So that's a great place for that to be. The other two panels are at the Harvard University Center for Atlantic Studies in Washington, D.C. And you can see there, what they did was, it's pretty spectacular. They built a room for them. They built a new conference room. The one on the top is inside the room. And the one on the bottom is exactly behind it in an outside courtroom. The process of restoring them was fascinating. This is Hildred at their creation. And what's interesting is like St. Genevieve, who we saw earlier, she's the only woman in the picture. I think that's a topic for another whole discussion, as Hildred, what she was able to achieve and what essentially was an answer to the question. But if you take a look at the guy who's the guy with the big checks on his shirt, right behind him, his name is Tony Schiavo. He's not related to me. He doesn't have a moment of his name, but he's also a Sicilian. And he worked on the creation of these murals. About 60 years later, he worked on the restoration. And he's an amazing guy. He's about as durable as the most eggs. He just survived an incredible surgery. And he's alive and kicking in his eggs. But it's just an incredible story that so many years, 60 decades later, he gets to restore the thing that he created. This is where we ended. I just wanted to end with a picture of Hildred. So that we would know at least not what she looked like. This only scratches the surface of one or two aspects of her career. I mean, she's an incredibly prolific artist in so many different genres. I hope you enjoy the exhibition. And I hope you get to know her more.