Because my co-authors and I spent so many hours looking at black and white photos while we were working on Hollywood Arensberg, encounters “in the wild” with the color-filled artworks that were once part of the Arensberg collection always manage to surprise…

On April 29, 2022, Hollywood Arensberg co-author Ellen Hoobler will be among the speakers at the second international symposium of the Getty Research Institute's Pre-Hispanic Art Provenance Initiative.

Perhaps the most frustrating part of writing Hollywood Arensberg was living with the nagging idea that there were people alive but unknown to us who had met Louise and Walter Arensberg and/or who had seen their collection in situ—flyers, you might say, beneath our radar. Indeed, though we looked for many years, we were only able to find and speak with two people who had been inside the Arensberg home at the time when it was filled with art.

We are proud to announce that Hollywood Arensberg was one of six books shortlisted for the prestigious 2021 Pierre Daix Prize…

We are proud to announce that Hollywood Arensberg won first prize in the American Alliance of Museums’ 2021 Museum Publications Design Competition.

We are pleased to report that Hollywood Arensberg was recognized this year by the jurors of the venerable AUPresses Book, Jacket, and Journal Show in the category of “Scholarly Illustrated” books.

One of the questions most frequently asked of me and my co-authors is: “Why Philadelphia?" This is shorthand for a variety of similarly-themed inquiries about how it came to pass that Louise and Walter Arensberg gave their collection to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, rather than to one of the numerous other institutions competing to acquire it. Often this question is tinged with a sense of loss, because the collection did not stay in California where it had lived for nearly thirty years. We tell this story briefly in Hollywood Arensberg but, thankfully, an even richer answer can now be found in John Vick's wonderful talk, “Architectural Imagination: Fiske Kimball's Modern Museum." …

It’s our pleasure this week to hand our Blog over to scholar Francis M. Naumann, who has written extensively on the Arensbergs and Marcel Duchamp. Naumann re-created the Arensbergs New York apartment for his 1996 show at the Whitney Museum of American Art titled “Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York.” Francis introduces us to the Arensbergs’ homes in both Los Angeles and New York via two drawing he owns by Beatrice Wood. Take it away Francis…

Please join me and my Hollywood Arensberg co-authors—William H. Sherman and Ellen Hoobler—for a discussion moderated by Getty Research Institute Director Mary Miller on 9 March 2021.

I have often wondered why Louise and Walter Arensberg never purchased the work of the ingenious artist Arthur Dove.

We learned recently that Spazio, a Milan-based organization whose self-described mission is to be “an independent platform for critical reflection, speculation and discussion” has promoted Hollywood Arensberg on YouTube via Facebook with a reading of some of our text by Mariana Siracusa.

The other day I was perusing (for the umpteenth time) Man Ray Portraits: Paris—Hollywood—Paris, featuring photographs from the archives of the Centre Pompidou, when suddenly this picture on page 284 jumped out at me in a new way. The subject of the photograph is the ballerina Tamara Toumanova, but behind her is the Arensbergs’ Aztec Corn Goddess!

The wonderful exhibition Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945, curated by Barbara Haskell (with a book designed by Michelle Nix of McCall Associates!) is still up for another few weeks at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It’s a great chance to see Diego Rivera’s La canoa enflorada (The Flowered Canoe).

Over the past decade or so, my colleagues and I at McCall Associates have been fortunate enough to print over 40 books at Trifolio, in Montorio, just outside Verona. Though the health restrictions of Covid-19 meant no traveling to Italy, I knew Hollywood Arensberg would be overseen with great care by Massimo Tonolli and all of the gifted technicians who work with him: https://trifoliosrl.com/#/portfolio/906

You can see much more of their work here: https://trifoliosrl.com/#/portfolio

—Mark Nelson

Hollywood Arensberg would not have been possible without the support of The Getty and its tremendous staff. We extend our profound thanks to everyone there who helped make the book a success. We are also proud to support the mission (see below) of our publisher, the Getty Research Institute.

—Mark Nelson