Dear Little Friend: Impressions of Galka Scheyer,\u201d<\/a> an exhibition at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif., running through July 20.<\/p>\nInstead of focusing on her famous artists, the show focuses on Scheyer herself. In showcasing personal correspondence and Modernist artworks \u2014 including eight rare portraits of Scheyer \u2014 the exhibition casts a light on the friendships she built with her artists, the circle she gathered around her and the work and willpower it took to bring radical European Modernism to the United States.<\/p>\n
Galka Scheyer was born Emilie Esther Scheyer in 1889 in Germany. She began as a painter, but it was meeting the Russian artist Alexei Jawlensky in 1916 that truly set her course in the art world.<\/p>\n
Jawlensky gave her the nickname that would define her \u2014 Galka \u2014 from the Russian word for jackdaw, a clever, gregarious bird. He also introduced her to three other Bauhaus masters, Wassily Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger and Paul Klee, the Modernists Scheyer united, along with Jawlensky himself, under the name \u201cthe Blue Four.\u201d<\/p>\n
Scheyer arrived in the United States in 1924, first in New York City and soon after in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles, where she held lectures and salons promoting \u201cthe Blue Four.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cShe was instrumental in establishing California as a center for modern art,\u201d Gloria Williams Sander, a curator at the Norton Simon, who organized this exhibition, said on a recent Monday morning in the intimate gallery space surrounded by 12 artworks and a handful of letters and documents under glass.<\/p>\n
The Norton Simon holds Scheyer\u2019s Blue Four Collection, which includes some 500 paintings, drawings, prints, photographs and sculptures from both the Blue Four and other artists, assembled over two decades, along with an archive of Scheyer\u2019s correspondence with her artists.<\/p>\n
Reading through those letters, especially those from Feininger, gave Williams the idea for the show. For decades, he would start his letters to Scheyer with the salutation, \u2018Dear Little Friend.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s what captivated me to think about how to frame this show,\u201d Williams Sander said. Of the 12 artworks in the show, eight are portraits of Scheyer, which Williams Sander explained were \u201cgifts, tokens of friendship,\u201d adding, \u201cit\u2019s how the artists saw her.\u201d<\/p>\n
Williams Sander answered some questions on how we, too, should see Galka Scheyer. This conversation has been edited and condensed.<\/p>\n
Who was Scheyer?<\/strong><\/p>\nShe was one of the most adventurous female art impresarios of the early 20th century. She was a champion of modern art trends and a gifted communicator.<\/p>\n
Scheyer represented four of Europe\u2019s most radical painters under the banner of \u201cthe Blue Four.\u201d What was her goal as a dealer and collector?<\/strong><\/p>\nHer goal was to share the passion she had for art as a vehicle for spiritual and emotional ideas, for uplifting the soul, so to speak. There is a little bit of tension there, because she came to the United States to promote their work and sell their work and cultivate collectors in order to send money back to them in very difficult times in Europe, and specifically in Germany.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, she wrote to the Blue Four in a letter after she arrived in California: \u201cMy work here has nothing whatsoever to do with the selling of art, but with the awakening and development of an understanding of art.\u201d<\/p>\n
How did she end up in California?<\/strong><\/p>\nWhen she realized New York was going to be closed to her \u2014 she landed there in 1924 and simply could not get a foothold \u2014 she went to the New York Public Library and wrote hundreds of letters to every museum director and university art gallery director across the country, explaining her project to show this radical art from the \u201cBlue Four\u201d artists. Only California responded. The director of the Oakland Art Gallery [the predecessor of today\u2019s Oakland Museum of California], William Clapp, wrote back and said he\u2019d love to have a show.<\/p>\n
The open-minded West Coast, freer of tradition and convention<\/strong>.<\/p>\nExactly.<\/p>\n
The show is called \u201cDear Little Friend.\u201d What does that phrase tell us about how these artists saw her?<\/strong><\/p>\n\u201cDear Little Friend” is the phrase that comes up frequently in Lyonel Feininger\u2019s letters to Galka, and it\u2019s a term of affection, a term of intimacy. That\u2019s what sort of captivated me to think about how to frame this show, as I was looking through the letters, I realized we have these gifts to her, and we have these images of her in portrait form.<\/p>\n
I know some people have asked me, isn\u2019t that patronizing to say \u201cdear little friend?\u201d But I think that\u2019s looking at that salutation from the point of view of the 21st century. It\u2019s endearing and because it happens so frequently, even in some of the artworks or inscriptions, it\u2019s just an affection and homage between them.<\/p>\n
Is there a work you gravitate toward?<\/strong><\/p>\nThe Peter Krasnow, because it is emblematic of how she operated. Peter no doubt attended many of these salons where she appeared. It is a snapshot of these gatherings at people\u2019s homes that she held, Hollywood stars\u2019 homes, her own home in the [Hollywood] Hills. And then it has the four blue lines at the top, an emblem that represented \u201cthe Blue Four.\u201d If you had to say, what\u2019s an emblem of Galka Scheyer and her work here, I would have to choose that.<\/p>\n
Why should we be interested in Scheyer?<\/strong><\/p>\nShe really believed in her mission on behalf of these artists and modern art beyond just the commercial value of it. It was for its aesthetic and spiritual impact.<\/p>\n
And there\u2019s something worth reflecting on in the context of her life: She was doing all of this in the 1920s, \u201930s, and \u201940s as a single Jewish woman with a German accent, against the backdrop of the Depression and World War II.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In January 1945, the artist Lyonel Feininger wrote to Galka Scheyer, his friend and representative in the United…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":481509,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[267],"tags":[210606,595,365,362,363,364,1374,198524,366,18,117,210603,6621,19,17,210605,210604,210602],"class_list":{"0":"post-481508","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-alexei-1864-1941","9":"tag-art","10":"tag-arts","11":"tag-arts-and-design","12":"tag-artsanddesign","13":"tag-artsdesign","14":"tag-california","15":"tag-collectors-and-collections","16":"tag-design","17":"tag-eire","18":"tag-entertainment","19":"tag-galka-1889-1945","20":"tag-germany","21":"tag-ie","22":"tag-ireland","23":"tag-jawlensky","24":"tag-oakland-museum-of-california","25":"tag-scheyer"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116563752105327512","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=481508"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481508\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/481509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=481508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=481508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=481508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}