#galka scheyer

[germanpostwarmodern]

The promotion of German modern art in the United States in no small part rested on the shoulders of committed women. One of them was Emilie „Galka“ Scheyer (1889-1945), born in Braunschweig, Germany, as daughter of an industrialist and a trained painter who formed „Die Blaue Vier“, the Blue Four, an artists’ group that consisted of Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Alexej von Jawlensky. It was formally established in 1924 with the goal of promoting the artists in the USA by means of exhibitions and lectures, a task Scheyer was perfectly suited for: since 1917 she was Jawlensky’s private secretary and as such took care of his exhibition activities. At the same time she was an enthusiastic agent of modern art in general who also had a keen interest in the communication of it.

In May 1924 Scheyer arrived in New York with numerous works of The Blue Four in her luggage, works she showed a year later in the Daniel Gallery with little success. This led to her to the decision to move to San Francisco and later to Los Angeles where she established a tight-knit network of actors, directors, emigrants and art people. In LA she unfolded her innovative marketing strategies which included glamorous parties, collaborations with gallerists and her passionate communication of modern art to young people.

On the occasion of The Blue Four’s centenary Scheyer’s hometown Braunschweig celebrates her work both as art agent and artist: until 19 May the Städtisches Museum Braunschweig with „Galka Scheyer und die Blaue Vier - Kandinsky, Feininger, Klee, Jawlensky“ offers a comprehensive overview of Scheyer’s life and work. Alongside it the Hirmer Verlag published the present and equally comprehensive catalogue that not only sheds light on Scheyer’s activities in the USA and her impressively advanced exhibition and communication strategies but also highlights her wonderful late impressionist art. Especially noteworthy is Isabell Wünsche’s essay that uncovers Scheyer’s networks but also points out her rather conservative admiration of the male genius. In view of the complex portrait the catalogue paints of Galka Scheyer it is a warmly recommended read about a true pioneer.

[radical-revolution]

At the still-point in the center of the circle, one can see the infinite in all things.

~Chuang Tzu

Art: Circles in a Circle, 1923

Geometric abstraction

“Circles in a Circle” is a compact and closed composition. Kandinsky began a thoughtful study of the circle as an artistic unit starting from this painting. In his letter to Galka Scheyer he wrote, “it is the first picture of mine to bring the theme of circles to the foreground.” The outer black circle, as if the second frame for a picture, encourages us to focus on the interaction between the inside circles, and two intersecting diagonal stripes enhance the effect, adding a perspective to the composition.

[zazamatic]

Foundations of Los Angeles Modernism: Richard Neutra's Mod Squad

The population of Los Angeles doubled during the 1920s fueled by a balmy climate, relentless boosterism and an economy based on the oil, movie and real estate development industries. Waves of immigrants descended upon Los Angeles from all over the country as well as overseas. Among the newcomers were also much of the artistic community seeking a clean slate and inspiration from a brand new city to break away from the hidebound styles in existence at the time such as the Beaux Arts and revivalist idioms in architecture and industrial design, to pictorialism in photography and representationalism in art.

The iconic photo above of Richard Neutra and his 12 disciples in his Academy of Modern Art class "A Practical Course in Modern Building Art" at his Lovell Health House construction site  symbolized  an avant-garde group of artists, architects and designers who were struggling to gain a foothold for their beliefs in the context of the rapidly metropolizing Los Angeles of the 1920s. Neutra pointing to the warp and weft of rebar and conduit in the floor slab of the Lovell Health House portrays the intertwined lives of the students in this class as they began to weave the very foundations of modernism in Los Angeles.

"Schindler and Neutra came to Los Angeles to work with Frank Lloyd Wright, and I was privileged to know them right away within the first year after they came here. It seems the architects, designers, painters, sculptors got together. The city was so much smaller. ... We met in a Frank Lloyd Wright house — that is, the Freeman House in Hollywood. It was tremendous to have this get-together with people who were creating. And that's how I got interested. - Annita Delano, to Neutra's right in the above photo and long-time UCLA Art Professor and a founding member of the UCLA Art Department in the 1920s.

One student came enthusiastically to me after a lecture and asked whether I wanted to live in her house. I turned down her offer, since I was only in L.A. for a few days. She looked at me very sadly and said: "But its a Frank Lloyd Wright [Freeman] house! Treat it as if it were your own." I accepted, moved later that night after a party into the F.L.W. house, where I [was given] the most beautiful room, with glass walls and doors that led to grass lawns, and a scintillating view of Hollywood, the oil wells sparkling like Jacob's ladders. It. was a dream filled with the perfume of flowers, light, and nightlife." - Galka Scheyer and Archipenko stayed in Los Angeles for 10 days before continuing on to San Francisco where Scheyer began her West Coast quest to market a group of expressionist artists she coined "The Blue Four," which included Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Alexej Jawlensky.

https://socalarchhistory.blogspot.com/2010/08/foundations-of-los-angeles-modernism.html

[afrouif]

Paul Klee, Aquarium Green-Red, 1921. Watercolor and ink on laid papers, mounted on Japanese laid paper mounted on thin cardboard, 22.5 x 12.1 cm. Norton Simon Museum, The Blue Four Galka Scheyer Collection.

[harvard-art-museums-photography]

[Lyonel Feininger and Galka Scheyer, Hollywood, California, 1936], Unidentified Artist, 1940s-1950s, Harvard Art Museums: Photographs

Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of T. Lux Feininger Size: 3 x 3.5 cm (1 3/16 x 1 3/8 in.)

https://www.harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/8876

[bauhaus-movement]

“Circles in a Circle” (1923) is a compact and closed composition. Kandinsky began a thoughtful study of the circle as an artistic unit starting from this painting. In his letter to Galka Scheyer he wrote, “it is the first picture of mine to bring the theme of circles to the foreground.” The outer black circle, as if the second frame for a picture, encourages us to focus on the interaction between the inside circles, and two intersecting diagonal stripes enhance the effect, adding a perspective to the composition.

[jonasgrossmann]

lyonel feininger und galka scheyer, hollywood, 1936 @ medium

[fatmaaomar-blog]

Assignment 4 Research paper

Who is Imogen Cunningham?

She is an American professional photographer. Imogen Cunningham was born in 1883. She is best known for her botanical photography, though she also produced images of industrial landscapes, and street scenes. After studying photography in Germany, Cunningham opened a portrait studio in Seattle, producing soft-focus allegorical prints in the tradition of Pictorialism which is a style of photography influenced by academic painting from the turn of the century as well as portraiture. From the early 1920s she began to take close-up, sharply detailed studies of plant life and other natural forms, including a two-year-long, in-depth study of the magnolia flower. In 1932 she joined an association of West Coast modernist photographers known as f64, rejecting sentimental soft-focus subjects in favor of greater sensuousness. Cunningham was also interested in human subjects and frequently took pictures of the hands of musicians and artists. Edward Weston was a supporter of her work, and she associated at various times with other iconic 20th-century photographers, including Ansel Adams, Minor White, and Dorothea Lange.

 ‘’My interest in photography has something to do with the aesthetic, and that there should be a little beauty in everything." said Imogen Cunningham

 Calla Lilly

 https://i.pinimg.com/736x/d7/34/1f/d7341fb9cf0f75000fb8fb118234b7fb--famous-photographers-calla-lily.jpg

 Artist:

Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976)

Date:

c. 1920 (printed 1971)

 Medium:

Gelatin silver print 

Dimensions:

Image: 10-5/8 x 8-3/4 in. (27.0 x 22.2 cm) 

Credit Line:

Norton Simon Museum, Gift of the Artist to the Blue Four Galka Scheyer Collection 

Accession Number:

PH.1971.139 

Copyright:

© Imogen Cunningham Trust

 The significance of the photo.

 While caring for her young children, Imogen Cunningham condensed her domestic landscape into still life. She presents nature with the sensual parallels to the female form that she explored through her long career. Moreover, by using lily’s, Cunningham has captured some interesting shapes in camera crop to accentuate the curves in the flower.

 Sources:

https://www.theartstory.org/artist-cunningham-imogen.htm

 https://www.nortonsimon.org/art/detail/PH.1971.139

[jewishbookworld]

Galka Scheyer: A Jewish Woman in International Art Business by Katrin Keßler

Galka Scheyer: A Jewish Woman in International Art Business by Katrin Keßler

Galka (Emmy E.) Scheyer (1889–1945) was an extraordinary woman: Jewish, painter, art collector, and mediator. After meeting the Bauhaus artists Alexej von Jawlensky, Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee, she founded the artists’ group “The Blue Four” along with them. To promote her “four kings” not only in Europe, she emigrated to the US in 1924. Scheyer organized exhibitions and…

[germanpostwarmodern]

Galka Scheyer House (1934) in Los Angeles, CA, USA, by Richard Neutra

[aic-design]

Galka Scheyer House, Los Angeles, California, Perspective Study, Richard Joseph Neutra, 1933, Art Institute of Chicago: Architecture and Design

Restricted gift of the Auxiliary Board of the Art Institute of Chicago Size: Approx. 25.4 × 40.6 cm (10 × 16 in.) Medium: Pencil on tracing paper

https://www.artic.edu/artworks/68938/

[jbh1126]

3/3 The house became an architectural laboratory: it is the birthplace of the Southern California modernism we celebrate today. Here in the twenties Schindler, working alone and also with his erstwhile partner Richard Neutra, created a body of work as vital today as it was incomprehensible to the East Coast establishment eighty years ago. The seminal Lovell houses, Pueblo Ribera Court, the Jardinette Apartments, and the Wolfe house on Catalina Island all were designed at Kings Road. In the 1920s and early 1930s especially the house was the focus of constant social gatherings; there are reports of people drifting in at all hours. Maurice Browne, a founder of the Chicago Little Theatre, recalled in his autobiography that Pauline, “…brilliant, warmhearted, bitter-tongued…was trying to create a salon amid Hollywood’s cultural slagheap….” Frank Lloyd Wright and his son Lloyd, Edward Weston, John Cage, the progressive dancer John Bovingdon, the poet Sadakichi Hartmann, and Galka Scheyer were among those who passed through. Later, it was largely Mrs. Schindler’s initiative that established the house as a mecca for left-wing political activity in Los Angeles. words by @makcenter photography by @jbh1126 (at Schindler House) https://www.instagram.com/p/B8rhRDQFGsE/?igshid=1xojbocal8juh

[selfrescuingprincesssociety]

Scheyer was ahead of her time in many ways. She successfully invented a niche career for herself, navigating a sort of self-made gig economy out of necessity. A single, ambitious career woman, she built a life as an art dealer, curator, lecturer and educator in the 1920s and ’30s. She did this despite a sometimes abysmal economy and the fact that her status as an unmarried, childless woman made her an anomaly.

Wait... she moved to the US from Germany by herself when she was in her 20s, and started looking for work as an art critic and dealer?? Badass. She wrote hundreds of letters to universities and galleries around the US looking for work giving lectures or organizing exhibits? Badass, again.

[whileiamdying]

Artist: #VassilyKandinsky (#Russian, 1866–1944) Date: #1932 Medium: #Oil and #gouache on #canvas Dimensions: 23-5/8 x 27-5/8 in. (60.0 x 70.2 cm) Credit Line: Norton Simon Museum, Museum Purchase for The Blue Four Galka Scheyer Collection with funds donated by Mr. and Mrs. Alexander P. Hixon Accession Number: P.1972.01 Copyright: © Norton Simon Museum ON VIEW Description After moving to #Munich at the age of 30 to paint, Russian-born Vassily #Kandinsky quickly assumed the role of leader among the city’s #AvantGarde artists. Coming of age as a #painter in this vibrant milieu led Kandinsky to create the first #NonObjective paintings in the history of art. Originally he was inclined toward the #expressionist qualities of color, but by the time he completed a decade of teaching at the #Bauhaus and moved to #Paris, he began to prize form over color. Nevertheless, his works created during this transitional moment in 1932–33 project a spiritual quality that always rested at the core of his #abstract painting. The floating rectangles and glowing orb of Unequal give a sense of objects hovering in space, particularly as the thin brushstrokes of sky-blue give way to the infinite black background beneath. Interestingly, this picture had been purchased by Galka Scheyer but was missing from her collection when it was bequeathed to the Norton Simon Museum in 1953. Lost for nearly two decades, the painting was found and acquired in 1972 and returned to its place alongside the other works of her collection.

[artanddesignmatters]

Alexej Von Jawlensky (born 1864 in Torzhok, Russia; died in 1941 in Wiesbaden, Germany) Mystischer Kopf: Galka (Mystical Head: Galka), about 1917 Oil on board On loan from a Private Collection, Boca Raton Photo Credit: Alice Lowe @ArtandDesignMatters www.ArtandDesignMatters.com Courtesy of The Boca Raton Museum of Art www.BocaMuseum.org @BocaMuseum This is a portrait of the painter and art dealer Galka Scheyer (1889-1945). She began her career in her native Germany before moving to Los Angeles and solely promoting the art of Alexei Jawlensky, Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, nicknamed the Blue Four. Jawlensky’s style was Expressionistic as he painted abstracted compositions in contrasting electric colors. A particular forte of his was the portrait bust which would prove to be his career-defining series; it began in 1917, ended in 1919, was inspired by Galka and imbued with a mysticism from the religious icons of his native Russia. Reference: The Boca Raton Museum of Art . . . #admMuseumSupport #admSupportsTheArts #ArtandDesignMatters #LetsGoToTheMuseum #admFloridaArtCrawl #BocaRatonMuseumOfArt #VisitFlorida #VisitBocaRaton #ArtHistory #ArtHistorian #ArtCollector #CultureTravel #CultureTraveler #art #artmuseum #museum #GalkaScheyer #AlexiVonJawlensky #CultureTrip (at Boca Raton Museum of Art)