HOLLYWOOD ARENSBERG Avant-Garde Collecting in Midcentury L.A.
Knud Merrild was just about the only avant-garde Los Angeles artist whose work was acquired by Louise and Walter Arensberg, the powerhouse collecting couple who moved from Manhattan to Los Angeles in 1921. In their jampacked house in the Outpost foothills, a couple of blocks behind Sid Grauman’s pseudoextravaganza of a movie theater on Hollywood Boulevard, a few modest examples of Merrild’s work would eventually be found.
Merrild (1894-1954) was an enigmatic artist who is hardly a household name today. Still,
some of his small pictures were tucked in among the staggering array of not-quite-yet globally acclaimed masterpieces by the likes of Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Constantin Brancusi, Fernand Leger, Salvador Dali, Giorgio de Chirico and scores more.
Perhaps most notable among them was Dada founder Marcel Duchamp, the Arensbergs’ favorite.
Merrild was a Danish-born expat. He had arrived in town a few years after the Arensbergs did and, like anyone with an interest in avant-garde art, gravitated to their home.
His layered Cubist and Surrealist abstractions no doubt appealed to two of America’s most astute — and daring — collectors of Modern European art. (His friendship with the racy writer D.H. Lawrence no doubt helped.) Merrild would go on to develop an experimental technique that he called “flux painting,” an oils-and-water method that allowed fluid colors to ooze, spread and seek their own marbleized shapes.
Merrild tipped and turned the small works before the fluid colors dried, but the mixed paint also moved with independent, chemically induced alacrity. Beginning in 1942 and predating by a few years the radical drip paintings of Janet Sobel and Jackson Pollock, the flux compositions owe much to the mysterious vagaries of chance.
I’ve long wondered what might have inspired such a radically inventive approach to painting. Now there’s a robust clue: A terrific new book from Getty Publications displays the nearly 1,000 works in the Arensbergs’ collection in a way we’ve never seen before: room by room, wall by wall, tabletop by tabletop.
One revelation is that, surely thanks to knowing the Arensbergs, Merrild was captivated by the cryptic power of chance.
At one time or another, the Arensbergs owned the lion’s share of everything Duchamp made. (Multiple versions of his infamous “Nude Descending a Staircase” were in the house.) Engaging the mysterious properties of chance was a driving force in Duchamp’s aesthetic. Merrild’s puzzling, chance-driven work fit right into the collectors’ astounding trove of European avant-garde paintings and sculptures.
“Hollywood Arensberg: Avant-Garde Collecting in Midcentury L.A.,” set to be released Oct. 22, is 432 pages of fascinating reconstruction of the collectors’ house. Walter was heir to a Pittsburgh company involved with iron smelting, and Louise was a German-born textile heiress whose wealth funded their collecting enterprise. Their 1920 Mediterranean Revival house, with a sunroom added later by Modernist Richard Neutra, was designed by William Lee Woollett, architect of
Broadway’s Million Dollar Theater downtown.
A reader travels room by room through the two-story domicile. Side trips explore the gardens. There, monumental pre-Hispanic sculptures held sway.
Art lore is filled with Arensberg stories — about their astonishing collection; their close friendship with Duchamp; the life-altering visit to their home by a weird young kid from Eagle Rock named Walter Hopps, who would go on to become an internationally important curator; their futile efforts to find a permanent museum home for their astounding art in Los Angeles and a dozen other cities (the Philadelphia Museum of Art finally agreed); and more. But only a few photographs of the home’s interior have been widely seen.
There are enlightening essays and research notes by authors Mark Nelson, a book designer; cultural historian William H. Sherman, director of London’s Warburg Institute; and Ellen Hoobler, a curator at Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum. The thick tome is marvelously designed, the layout marked by coherent simplicity.
The scheme is a sort of scholar’s version of a 3-D home tour on a real estate website.
For each room, as well as the grounds, a documentary photograph on the right faces a floorplan on the left. (Most photographs are black-andwhite.) A small arrow on the floorplan indicates the spot from which the picture was taken, and the direction.
Turn the page, and a numbered line drawing on the right picks out every art object in the preceding photograph. A numbered list on the left page identifies the corresponding art in the line drawing opposite.
Some of the photographs zoom in. Others show the same room in different years. New art objects arrive, paintings move around, the installation changes.
People are rarely seen — except for occasional groups of soldiers visiting from a nearby hospital, or perhaps the Arensberg Collection, late in World War II.
The Arensbergs lived in the house for almost 30 years. Art dealer Earl Stendahl, source of some of the Modern work and almost all of the pre-Hispanic art (including knowingly looted items), moved in next door.
Louise Arensberg died in November 1953 at 74. Less than two months later, Walter, 75, followed her. Stendahl bought the property and opened a private gallery. An incomparable chapter in the history of great art collecting closed. Surely, this captivating book will inspire new avenues of exploration.