[photo credit: Norton Simon Museum]
“Dear Little Friend: Impressions of Galka Scheyer,” on view through July 20, presents portraits, correspondence and ephemera that trace the personal relationships of the German-born art dealer whose 1953 bequest of 450 works and 800 documents to the Pasadena Art Institute helped transform a modest local arts organization into the institution that eventually became the Norton Simon Museum. Rather than showcasing the Blue Four paintings for which the collection is known, the exhibition turns inward, examining the woman behind the enterprise.
Galka Scheyer was born Emilie Esther Scheyer in 1889 in Braunschweig, Germany, to a middle-class Jewish family. She studied music and painting in Paris, London and Brussels, but a chance encounter with the work of Russian artist Alexei Jawlensky in 1915 changed her trajectory. By 1916, the two were close friends. Jawlensky gave her the nickname “Galka” from the Russian word for jackdaw, a clever, gregarious bird and introduced her to three other artists: Feininger, Vassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee.
In 1924, Scheyer united them under the name the Blue Four and declared herself their representative in the United States. She organized their first American exhibition at a New York gallery in 1925, then headed west.
Settling in California that same year, Scheyer mounted exhibitions, delivered lectures and ran educational programs across the Bay Area and Los Angeles. Her efforts helped establish the region as a center for modern art, according to the museum’s press release. Maynard Dixon, the painter of the American West, inscribed his 1925 portrait of Scheyer “To Madame Moderne Kunst” — To Ms. Modern Art.
When she moved to Los Angeles full-time in 1933, her circle expanded to include artists, collectors and cultural figures: Beatrice Wood, collectors Louise and Walter Arensberg, and architect Richard Neutra, who designed her home-and-gallery space in the Hollywood Hills. That home, a Neutra-designed structure on Blue Heights Drive, was purchased in 2024 by German art collector Max Grimminger and is being established as Blue Heights Arts & Culture, a nonprofit artist residency, according to a report in Hyperallergic.
The exhibition features Wood’s vivid 1934 colored pencil portrait of Scheyer, which the museum describes as capturing the dynamic, performative energy of her presentations. Also on display is Jawlensky’s “Mystical Head: Galka” from 1917.
In a 1936 letter to Jawlensky, Scheyer wrote: “I shall never forget those inspiring days when you initiated me into the sacred world of art. I shall never forget you really did make me what I am today.”
Curator Gloria Williams Sander, who organized the exhibition and oversees the museum’s Galka Scheyer-Blue Four Archives, also curated the museum’s 2017 “Maven of Modernism” show. Scheyer’s work, Williams Sander has said, “was driven by kinship, not just commerce.” The portraits, artworks and letters in the exhibition, Williams Sander said, “are more than artifacts; they are tokens of gratitude from a community that responded to her vision with enduring friendship.”
Scheyer died in December 1945 at 56. Her trustees chose the Pasadena Art Institute founded in 1922 as the permanent home for her collection, a decision that, according to the museum’s own history, helped turn the small organization into the Pasadena Art Museum, a pioneering center for modern and contemporary art. The Norton Simon Museum, which assumed management in 1975, now holds the most comprehensive assemblage of Jawlensky’s paintings and drawings in the Western Hemisphere and of Klee’s work west of the Mississippi, according to the museum, along with works by 44 other artists including Pablo Picasso and Diego Rivera.
The exhibition is accompanied by public programs, including lectures, tours and film screenings. Details and additional programming are available at nortonsimon.org.
The Norton Simon Museum is at 411 W. Colorado Blvd. It is open Thursday through Monday, noon to 5 p.m., with extended hours to 7 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. It is closed Tuesday and Wednesday. Admission is $20 for adults and $15 for seniors 62 and older. Members, students with valid I.D. and visitors 18 and under are admitted free. Admission is free for all visitors on the first Friday of each month from 4 to 7 p.m. Parking is free but limited. Information: (626) 449-6840 or nortonsimon.org.
Photographer Edward Weston once called Scheyer “the ideal ‘go-between’ for the artist and his public.” Eight decades later, the letters and portraits she left to Pasadena are still making that introduction.
