Hackman - Out of sight: the Los Angeles art scene of the sixties

INTRODUCTION
It was very possible to entertain the future here

The living room in Louise and Walter Arensbergs Hollywood home. ()

WALTER HOPPS WAS AN UNLIKELY HERO for a cultural revolution. A fifth-generation Californian, Hopps grew up in Eagle Rock, a leafy and unhurried precinct of oak-lined streets, Craftsman-style bungalows, and middle-class virtues on the northeast edge of Los Angeles facing the San Gabriel Mountains. He was, by his own account, a math-science nerd who expected to follow in the footsteps of his parents and grandparents by pursuing a career in medicine. The adolescent Hopps had only a passing familiarity with the arts, some of it attained in a high-school class designed to turn college-bound science prodigies into more well-rounded students. The class readings and lectures were supplemented by field trips to local landmarks, such as the Los Angeles County Museum, known primarily for its natural history displays, and the Huntington Library, the former estate of the railway and land baron Henry E. Huntington, notable for its collections of rare books and eighteenth-century British paintings. Nothing prepared the seventeen-year-old Hopps for the strange and wonderful works he encountered one Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1949, when the class visited the Hollywood home of the collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg.

Under a canopy of tall pines and alders on a quiet hillside street, the Arensberg residence was, from the outside, an unassuming two-story affair with white stucco walls and a red-tile roof. Inside was another world. The couple had assembled one of the countrys most coveted collections of early twentieth-century European and American avant-garde art (nothing else in Southern California even came close). They had started collecting in 1913 in the wake of the International Exhibition of Modern Art in New York, better known as the Armory Show, and continued long after they settled in Los Angeles in 1927. By the time of Hoppss visit, they owned some eight hundred works of modern art and pre-Columbian artifacts, which they also began collecting in the twenties. Objects filled their house: With pictures hung from floor to ceiling and sculptures covering every conceivable surface, its rooms resembled a crowded Paris salon exhibition more than a modern collectors fashionable home. Art covered every available inch, Jules Langsner reported in ARTnews around the time of Hoppss visit. With more than two dozen first-rate works by all the major figures of the Cubist movement, the Arensbergs boasted a more comprehensive collection of the movement than most museums. Surrealism, too, was well represented, as was nonobjective art. Tables and cabinets were topped with pre-Columbian figures and bowls; larger pieces rested on the floor. The whole house, noted Vogue magazine in a 1945 photo spread, is an exciting assault on the eyes.

Room after room, masterpiece after masterpiece, an astonished Hopps navigated his way as the history of early twentieth-century modernism unfolded before his eyes. In his own tour of the Arensberg home, Langsner found it necessary sometimes to stoop and peer into a darkened corner, or stretch and twist against a reflecting light to see a fragile [Paul] Klee or attempt to perceive at two feet a huge [Jacques] Villon. In sheer numbers, two artists towered above the rest: the Romanian-born sculptor Constantin Brancusi, represented by nineteen of his exquisite forms in bronze and marble, and Marcel Duchamp, whose 1912 painting Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) had been a cause clbre at the Armory Show. The Arensbergs owned not only the painting that had so scandalized the public but a somewhat smaller, earlier version as well as studies for it. In all they possessed nearly forty works by Duchamp, one of the two or three greatest innovators of this century, in Walter Arensbergs view. Duchamp was also the couples good friend and principal adviser.

I was blown away, Hopps recalled of that first day at the Arensbergs. So I asked Mr. Arensberg if I could come back. He could. And he did, again and again. I thought of myself as a rational positivist. And I couldnt figure out why this seemingly nice, intelligent man had devoted his life to this collection. It was the start of a unique, and enviable, education in the history of art. Walter Arensberg spent generous amounts of time with the young man, discussing individual works and artists. Hopps soaked it all in, questioning Arensberg at length and poring over books and periodicals in the Arensbergs library. Deep in his studies one day, Hopps was startled by the appearance in the doorway of a vaguely familiar-looking older gentleman, who introduced himself as Marcel Duchamp.