Galka Scheyer

The German-born collector, dealer, and educator Emilie Esther Scheyer (more commonly known as Galka) played an integral role in the bi-coastal American reception of the artist group known as the “Blue Four,” comprising Lyonel Feininger, Alexei Jawlensky, Vassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee. Her tireless promotion of European modernism through exhibitions and lectures had a decisive influence on the development of a scene for modern art in California. Her immensely important collection is now housed at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena.

Born to a middle class Jewish family, Scheyer studied musical composition and painting in Paris, London, and Brussels. While traveling in Switzerland in 1915, she encountered the work of Russian artist Jawlensky. She befriended him and became his agent (it was Jawlensky that gave her the nickname “Galka,” Russian for the acquisitive, intelligent jackdaw bird). By 1921 she oversaw his contributions to group exhibitions in Germany (including an important presentation in Wiesbaden), promoted his work in publications, and facilitated sales on his behalf. Later that year, Scheyer visited the Bauhaus in Weimar, where Jawlensky introduced her to Feininger, Kandinsky, and Klee, then fellow instructors at the school. In a prescient marketing ploy, she coined the artists the “Blue Four.” In March 1924, she became the group’s American legal representative and was contracted to promote their work and artistic ideas abroad through lectures and exhibitions. She moved to New York in May 1924, where she arranged the first exhibition of their work at the Charles Daniel Gallery, held in February 1925.

Scheyer struck out west in the spring of 1925. While based in San Francisco between 1925 and 1930, she organized exhibitions in eight major cities on the West Coast. In 1926 alone, she oversaw presentations in Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Francisco; in 1927, she mounted exhibitions in Portland, San Diego, Seattle, and Spokane. She cultivated relationships with artists, intellectuals, and collectors in the Bay Area through intimate lectures at private homes, passionately espousing the “spiritual” quality of her “Blue Kings” to the likes of William H. Clapp, then director of the Oakland Art Museum, Maynard Dixon, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Dorothea Lange, and Edward Weston. Dixon dedicated a pen drawing to Scheyer and called her “Madame Moderne Kunst,” (Madam Modern Art); a painting by Peter Krasnow, Recalling Happy Memories (1927; Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, Calif.), depicts her speaking about a canvas, holding a pointer in her hand. Scheyer lectured regularly on an array of topics pertaining to international modernism at education and arts institutions in the Bay Area, including Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, and Mills College.

In 1930 Scheyer relocated to Los Angeles, hoping to capitalize on the network she had established there. Rivera helped her to arrange a Blue Four exhibition in Mexico City in 1931, and she traveled briefly to Germany in 1932. She began to work with Los Angeles-based collectors, and sold several paintings by Klee to Ruth Maitland and Walter and Louise Arensberg between 1930 and 1934. The film director Josef von Sternberg, a passionate collector, co-sponsored four Blue Four shows in Los Angeles in the 1930s. She befriended fellow émigrés, including Austrian-born architects Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra. In 1933, she commissioned Neutra to design a home for her in Hollywood, built to her specifications in order to display art and to host salon-style gatherings, which were attended by the likes of the composer John Cage and the architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

In the course of her twenty years in California, Scheyer built a personal collection of immense importance. In addition to works by the Blue Four, her collection showcased avant-garde artists from across Europe, including the work of Alexander Archipenko, Hans Arp, Jean Metzinger, László Moholy-Nagy, Pablo Picasso, and Kurt Schwitters. Several works now in The Metropolitan Museum of Art passed through Scheyer’s collection between 1924 and 1945, including Paul Klee’s In the Manner of a Leather Tapestry (1925), Vassily Kandinsky’s Four Parts (1932) and seven works now included in the Berggruen Klee Collection: Still Life (1927), Clarification (1932), Small Portrait of a Girl in Yellow (1932), Collection of Figurines (1926), Suspended Fruit (1921), The Pathos of Fertility (1921), and Tower in Orange and Green (1922).

When Scheyer fell ill in 1944, she made arrangements to leave her personal collection to the University of California, Los Angeles, where, together with the Arensberg collection, it would form the permanent collection of a new university museum. While setting out the terms of the gift, Scheyer requested that a catalogue be published and Arensberg stipulated that a permanent museum building be erected to house the collections within five years. When the gift fell through following the university’s failure to construct a museum or publish a catalogue, Scheyer’s collection of 450 works was bequeathed to the Pasadena Art Institute—now the Norton Simon Museum—in 1953. A complete catalogue of Scheyer’s collection was published in 1976.