REVIEW | Hollywood Arensberg: Avant-Garde Collecting in Midcentury L.A.
by Adrian Sudhalter | The Burlington Magazine | Online behind paywall, May 2021; print edition: Issue no. 1418, Volume 163, pp. 480–81, published May 2021
“Beyond it’s invigorating attention to a centre of Modernism outside New York, what is particularly fresh and current in the approach of the book is its commitment to addressing each facet of the Arensbergs’ triangulated interests – in modern art, pre-Columbian objects, and Renaissance literature – allotting equal weight to each and giving voice to the interconnections the collectors saw to exist between them.”
REVIEW | Los Angeles’ Lost Palace of Treasures
by Rick Poynor | Eye: The International Review of Graphic Design | Published online 26 May 2021; print edition: Volume 26, Issue 101, pp. 14–15, published Spring 2021
Mark Nelson’s recent book, Hollywood Arensberg: Avant-Garde Collecting in Midcentury L.A., is an exceptional feat of photographic reconstruction. Co-authored with the scholars William H. Sherman and Ellen Hoobler, the project has been twelve years in the making….
VIDEO | The Arensbergs in Hollywood Discussion Series Part 2 (Getty Research Institute):
Hollywood Arensberg: Arriving at the House
Mary Miller, Mark Nelson, William H. Sherman, Ellen Hoobler | Getty Research Institute | Presented live 9 March 2021; published online 11 March 2021
We are pleased to deliver part two of “The Arensbergs in Hollywood Discussion Series,” a two-part series co-presented by the Getty Research Institute and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This program features three short films created by Tumbleweed Films and narrated by Jonathan Browning, providing the first glimpses of the meticulous renovation of 7065 Hillside Avenue. The program was moderated by Mary Miller, director of the Getty Research Institute.
VIDEO | The Arensbergs in Hollywood Discussion Series Part 1 (The PMA Arcadia Library Lecture):
The Arensbergs' Hollywood House-Museum
Matthew Affron, Mark Nelson, William H. Sherman, Ellen Hoobler, Kristen Regina | Philadelphia Museum of Art | Presented live 15 December 2020; published online 17 November 2020
We were honored to deliver the 2020 Arcadia Library Lecture, part one of “The Arensbergs in Hollywood Discussion Series,” a two-part series co-presented by the Getty Research Institute and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The conversation was moderated by Matthew Affron, the Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Part two was presented online by the Getty on 9 March 2021 and is also available on this website.
FEATURE | Avant-Garde collectors in Hollywood
by Cristiana Campanini | Abitare | Published online, in Italian and English, 7 May 2021
A book traces, room by room, the adventure in art of a preeminent American collector couple: the Arensbergs in their Hollywood home.
ESSAY | Revisiting the Arensbergs’ Hollywood-House Museum
by Mark Nelson and William H. Sherman | galleryplatform.la | Published online 4 March 2021
On this platform last June, George Baker offered readers an elegiac account of LA’s lost sites and collections of modern art. He lamented the city’s general reputation for “rebuilding itself beyond recognition,” but he mused most longingly on two Hollywood houses that were once among California’s most active hubs of avant-garde collecting and cultural exchange. The first…
INTERVIEW | The Book/Shop Journal: One Great Reader, Series 3, No. 4: Mark Nelson
by Wes Del Val | Published online 14 February, 2021
I am flattered to have been placed in the company of so many great writers and thinkers who have been interviewed by Wes Del Val on the wonderful journal he curates for the Oakland-based Book/Shop. —Mark Nelson
PODCAST | At Home with the Arensbergs and Their Avant-Garde Art Collection
Jim Cuno, Mark Nelson, William H. Sherman, Ellen Hoobler | Getty Art + Ideas | Published online 25 November 2020
We were privileged to discuss Hollywood Arensberg with Jim Cuno, president of the J. Paul Getty Trust, on the Getty's Art + Ideas podcast—a series in which Jim talks with artists, writers, curators, and scholars about their work.
REVIEW | Hollywood Arensberg: Retracing the Life of a Singular Collection
by Tatsiana Zhurauliova | La Gazette Drouot | Published online 18 December 2020
A new book, published by the Getty Research Institute, reconstructs the Los Angeles home of Louise and Walter Arensberg, offering an intimate portrait of their famous collection of modern and pre-Columbian art.
INTERVIEW | Hollywood Arensberg: Avant-Garde Collecting in Midcentury L.A.
by Tatsiana Zhurauliova | La Gazette Drouot | Published online 16 December 2020
La Gazette Drouot spoke with Mark Nelson, William H. Sherman, and Ellen Hoobler, the authors of the recent book Hollywood Arensberg: Avant-Garde Collecting in Midcentury L.A., published by the Getty Research Institute.
REVIEW | Reconstructing One of America’s Greatest Art-filled Houses
by Christopher Knight | Los Angeles Times | Published online 1 October 2020; print edition published 4 October 2020
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 jam-packed house in the Outpost foothills, a couple of blocks behind Sid Grauman’s pseudo-Chinese extravaganza of a movie theater on Hollywood Boulevard, a few modest examples of Merrild’s work would eventually be found.
ESSAY | Domesticated Duchamp – How Photography Framed a Great Modern Collection
by William H. Sherman and Mark Nelson | Apollo Magazine | Published online 29 October 2020; print edition published as “Moving Pictures,” October 2020 issue, pp. 52–57
‘Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner,’ wrote Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida, ‘a photograph is always invisible.’ Perhaps this explains why there is very little writing about photographs of art collections, despite the fact that most if not all of us spend more time looking at images of artworks than at the objects themselves. This blind spot is no doubt due, in part, to the nature of photography: Susan Sontag observed that ‘a photograph – any photograph – seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects.’ But it is also due to the nature of art: works tend to become familiar and even famous through isolated images that separate them from the contexts in which they were, and are, encountered – be it in private houses or in public museums.
FEATURE | Decades Ago, L.A.’s Only Modern Art Museum Was a Local Couple’s Home
by Jordan Riefe | Los Angeles Magazine | Published online 19 November 2020; print edition published as “Walls of Fame,” November 2020 issue, pp. 28–29
In the first half of the twentieth century, the only modern-art museum in Los Angeles was a couple’s house in the Hollywood Hills. From the 1920s until their deaths in 1953 and 1954, respectively, Louise and Walter Arensberg regularly opened their mansion to those interested in viewing their impressive collection—which featured signature pieces by French Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, cubists Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, and surrealists Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, along with roughly 4,000 rare books, including the world’s largest private library of writings by and about sixteenth-century British philosopher Sir Francis Bacon.
REVIEW | Book Club: A Not-So-Gossipy Study of the Arensbergs’ Art Collection and Hollywood Home
by Robert McKenzie | PIN-UP Magazine | Published online 3 October 2020
As dedicated patrons of Marcel Duchamp, during the first half of the 20th century, Walter and Louise Arensberg came to possess an enormous collection of Modern art (art advising was among the services that Duchamp provided). The couple’s collection is the subject of a new book, Hollywood Arensberg: Avant-Garde Collecting in Midcentury L.A. (co-authored by Mark Nelson, William H. Sherman, and Ellen Hoobler) as is the Arensbergs’ 1920 Mediterranean Revival home, where works by Constantin Brancusi, Salvador Dali, Paul Klee, and Pablo Picasso, among others, were shown to friends, specialists, even students.
REVIEW | Inside the Legendary Art-Filled Home of Walter and Louise Arensberg
by Karen Chernick | Artsy | Published online 11 September 2020
No photographs have been found of the bathrooms at 7065 Hillside Avenue in Los Angeles from back when their walls were still covered with artworks collected by Walter and Louise Arensberg. There also aren’t any photographs of the couple (and their beloved terrier, Lollie) posing in their home, which was filled to the brim with roughly 40 Marcel Duchamps and 19 Constantin Brancusis—just a few of the works that made up one of the most extensive private American collections of early 20th-century art.
REVIEW | The Los Angeles Home That Defined Modern Art
by Andrew Russeth | Architectural Digest | Published online 9 September 2020
In 1927, the collectors Louise and Walter Arensberg moved into a Mediterranean Revival–style house in Los Angeles and spread their trove of ancient American and modern art throughout every inch of it. The scene inside transfixed people: The writer M.F.K. Fisher admitted that being with the “fabulous collection” was “almost unbearably fatiguing.” Curator James Soby wrote of the works that the “hanging breaks every museum precept of height, space, and light, but you see them clearly.” Graphic designer Mark Nelson of McCall Associates tells AD that when he saw photographs of the art-stuffed interiors years ago, his “very first thought was, ‘I have to rebuild this house, figuratively speaking.’”
REVIEW | Hollywood Arensberg: Avant-Garde Collecting in Midcentury L.A.
California Art Review | Published online 17 October 2020
Hollywood Arensberg: Avant-Garde Collecting in Midcentury L.A. is an exciting new book published by the Getty on the collection of notable art collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg as displayed in their home in Hollywood. An attempt to bring their divided collection (currently split between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Huntington Library) back into a single frame, this book presents the first reconstruction and interpretation of their collection in entirety by presenting the works as they were originally displayed in a domestic setting by giving readers a room by room, object by object tour of the couple’s home in Los Angeles.
NOTICE | The 10 Best Coffee T
able Books for the Art Museum Obsessed
by Christopher Knight | Los Angeles Times | Published online 30 October 2020
Anyone who knows Dada and Surrealist art knows of Louise and Walter Arensberg, the collectors extraordinaire whose house in Hollywood was jam-packed floor to ceiling with around 1,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings and other objects, plus pre-Hispanic stone carvings, a few European Renaissance pictures and more than 4,000 texts, most related to the work of 17th century British writer Francis Bacon.