Hollywood Arensberg

de Mark Nelson, William H. Sherman, Ellen Hoobler

"During the first half of the twentieth century, Louise and Walter Arensberg not only assembled one of the world’s preeminent art collections but carved out a unique place in the history of collecting. No one before them had made such audacious connections between modern painting, Renaissance literature, and pre-Columbian sculpture; and few (if any) used collecting more forcefully as a medium for artistic creation and intellectual exploration. The Arensbergs’ collection first took shape in their Manhattan apartment, where—in the wake of the Armory Show of 1913—they gave Marcel Duchamp his first American home and presided over the salon that brought Dada to New York. It expanded rapidly after their move to Los Angeles in 1921, particularly after they purchased 7065 Hillside Avenue and turned it into a domestic museum and research institute. For the next three decades they put the European Avant-Garde, the English Renaissance, and Mesoamerican civilizations into dialogue in dense and playful displays whose visual patterns and hidden meanings shocked and inspired visitors—including some of the period’s leading artists, writers, and curators. When Louise and Walter died in 1953 and ’54, their art, library, and personal papers were divided between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and California’s Francis Bacon Library (now housed at the Huntington). This book uses photographic and archival records–never before assembled or examined—to reconstruct and reinterpret the couple’s collection when it was still under one extraordinary roof in the heart of Hollywood’s burgeoning artistic scene. Bringing together images from many sources, some of them seen here for the first time, Hollywood Arensberg takes us on a wall-by-wall tour of the rooms where Marcel Duchamp and Sir Francis Bacon played secret games of chess on Aztec calendar stones"-- "Hollywood Arensberg presents the first comprehensive reconstruction and interpretation of Louise and Walter Arensberg's groundbreaking collection of modern and pre-Columbian art, giving readers a room-by-room, object-by-object tour of the couple's home in Los Angeles"--