The Scheyer House reborn

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Photo: Justin Reinhardt, Max Reinhardt's great-grandson.

In April of last year, I sent a note to Benno Herz, the program director of the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles, asking if he knew that the Galka Scheyer House had come on the market. This is the hilltop gallery-home that Richard Neutra built in 1934 for Scheyer, a crucial figure in the propagation of modernism on the West Coast. I'd visited the house the previous year, at the invitation of its then owner, the late Frank M. Devine, and registered its significance. It represents not only a pivotal moment in Neutra's development — his turn from a somewhat severe modernist mentality to a more open, mellow, landscape-oriented aesthetic — but also a landmark of Los Angeles cultural history, embodied in Scheyer's spirited embrace of trends across the arts. She was not only the primary advocate for the group she called the Blue Four (Kandinsky, Klee, Jawlensky, Feininger) but also an early supporter of younger talents such as John Cage and Maya Deren. She connections in Hollywood as well, although the likes of Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Josef von Sternberg, and Fritz Lang tended to enjoy her vibrant company without purchasing the works on offer. She was an astonishing and unclassifiable person who will have a chapter to herself in my forthcoming history of the German-speaking emigration in Los Angeles.

In 2016, another monument of that era, the Mann House, was in danger of being torn down when a minor miracle occurred: the German government purchased the house and converted it into a residency for writers, scholars, and thinkers. I idly wondered: could something similar happen to the Scheyer House? If anyone could work such a wonder, I knew it would be Benno. Amazingly, he did. He wrote an article for the Frankfurter Allgemeine, which caught the attention of a German art-lover, who proceeded to buy the house with the idea of turning it into an artists' residency. EscherGuneWardena Architecture will begin a restoration process later this summer. At the moment, as KCRW reports, the house is being occupied by the artist Beatriz Cortez, who lost her home in the Altadena Fire. On a rainy day last winter, I met Raymond Neutra, the architect's youngest and only surviving son, for a conversation at the Scheyer House; a short film of our talk, augmented by rich documentation of Scheyer's life, is soon to be released.