Cosmopolitan Californian: the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena honored an early benefactor, German expatriate Galka Scheyer whose collection testifies to her twin enthusiasms for European Expressionism and vanguard art of the Golden State - Collectors

Art in America, March, 2004 by Michael Duncan

It has been difficult for Los Angeles to live down the loss of the Arensberg Collection, a legendary private trove of 20th-century art that included 40 works by Duchamp; 17 sculptures by Brancusi; pieces by Picasso, Braque and de Chirico; and a strong grouping of pre-Columbian artifacts. In 1950, Walter and Louise Arensberg gave the collection to the Philadelphia Museum of Art after, first, the Los Angeles County Museum of History and Art (the precursor of LACMA) and, then, the University of California, Los Angeles, declined to accept the terms of the donation.

The Arensbergs' home in the Hollywood Hills had been a destination for West Coast modernists such as Knud Merrild, Lorser Feitelson, Rico Lebrun, Oscar Fischinger, Beatrice Wood, Helen Lundeberg and Edward Weston. For precocious local high-school students like Philip Guston, Jackson Pollock and Walter Hopps, it had provided a mind-expanding opportunity to see in person what they'd only read about in art magazines. Today, the loss of the collection seems emblematic of the city's lingering myopia regarding its midcentury art history.

Happily, however, another important prize didn't get away. The fascinating collection of Galka Scheyer (1889-1945), a private dealer and German 6migrd, has remained in the region she called home for the last 1i years of her life. Scheyer had intended her art to be housed alongside the Arensberg Collection at UCLA, but had stipulated that if a suitable museum was not built for the two collections by 1950, a committee she had appointed could make other arrangements. And so in 1953, her collection of over 500 artworks and 800 documents was given to the Pasadena Art Institute, subsequently called the Pasadena Art Museum and then the Pasadena Museum of Modern Art until 1974, when it was taken over by the collector Norton Simon and rechristened with his name.

Last year, the Galka Scheyer Collection was shown for the first time in its entirety in a two-part exhibition at the Norton Simon Museum. The exhibition also marked the publication of a handsome catalogue of the collection by art historian Vivian Endicott Barnett (Yale University Press).

An energetic lecturer and independent curator, Scheyer was largely responsible for introducing Americans to the works of the "Blue Four": Paul Klee, Alexei Jawlensky, Lyonel Feininger and Wassily Kandinsky. Her bequest consisted largely of purchases and gifts from these four artists, to which she had added works by other European and California modernists who came into her purview.

In 1916, after seeing an exhibition in Lausanne of Russian art that included Jawlensky's The Hunchback (1911), Scheyer--at the time an aspiring artist--had a moment of impassioned revelation. As Jawlensky reported in his memoirs, she contacted the painter, gushing, "Why should I go on painting when I know that I can't produce such good art as you? It's better I dedicate myself to your art and explain it to others" (all quotes are from Barnett's catalogue essay). Scheyer befriended him and purchased several of his lushly colored landscape "Variations" (1915-19).

Soon acting as Jawlensky's agent, she organized shows throughout Germany, where she became familiar with the works of Klee, Feininger and Kandinsky, who were teaching at the Bauhaus. She acquired much of her collection from these four in the early '20s, also buying works directly from Archipenko, Schwitters, Kirchner, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, Reichel and Schlemmer. From various German and French dealers, she obtained works by Dix, Kokoschka, Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluff, Leger and Picasso.

Although Schcyer achieved some success with the Jawlensky exhibitions, the difficult economic situation in Germany prompted a move in 1924 to the U.S., where she had hopes of opening up a new market for the art of her four favorites. Feininger suggested that she exhibit them as "The 4," a rubric--according to Barnett's catalogue introduction--to which he thought Americans would respond because of "The Big 4" railroads. The group's name was then adjusted to become the Blue Four in order to capitalize on Kandinsky's and Klee's association with the Blue Rider Almanac, the 1911 journal that had helped define German Expressionism.

Scheyer settled for a year with an aunt in New York while she researched American museums and universities that might be tapped to sponsor exhibitions of or purchase works by the Blue Four. In correspondence with Feininger, she stated that she had sent out 500 letters and received 15 positive responses. Energized, Scheyer spent the next few years zigzagging around the U.S. promoting the artists she had come to call her "Four Kings." She organized a show of their works at New York's Daniel Gallery in 1925 before traveling cross-country to Los Angeles, where she quickly tapped into the burgeoning European expatriate community, socializing with Austrian architects Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schlindler and the German designer Herman Sachs. A lecture trip lured her north to San Francisco for an extended stint; there she met Diego Rivera, Maynard Dixon, Dorothea Lange and Imogen Cunningham.