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| Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, 1959 |
Los Angeles gallerist Earl Stendahl (1888–1966) played a crucial role, not all good, in introducing Modern art and Mexican antiquity to Los Angeles. He's the subject of a surprisingly lively show this summer at the Getty Research Institute.
Start with the fact that Stendahl's Hollywood gallery showed Picasso's Guernica for 10 days in August 1939, before it went on to the Museum of Modern Art. The Los Angeles showing was sponsored by a bevy of L.A. or bicoastal notables (among them Dorothy Parker, George Cukor, Dashiell Hammett, Bette Davis, Richard Neutra, and Anna May Wong).
"Is this picture art—or insanity?" asked the Los Angeles Times. The case for Picasso's antiwar masterpiece was given equal time with a local "Sanity in Art" movement arguing that "the traditions of occidental art have no parallel for so distorted a style. Therefore it cannot be art."
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| Installation view, "Stendahl's World: Marketing Ancient Mexico and Modern Art in Los Angeles," Getty Research Institute |
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| Floyd Faxon, View of Stendahl Art Galleries patio, 1944. Getty Research Institute |
It was in this cultural milieu that Stendahl began showing Mexican antiquities alongside Modern art. The implicit point was that ancient Mexico's "expressionistic" distortions of the human figure were modern before the fact. Stendahl was a friend and neighbor of megacollectors Louise and Walter Arensburg. Photos of the couple's Hollywood Hills home place Mexican antiquities alongside Duchamp and Brancusi.
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| Mexico, Colima Style, Dog with Twentieth-Century Addition of a Human Head, 200 BCE–400 CE. Fowler Museum at UCLA |
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| James Mason clutches Mexican ceramic sculpture in North by Northwest |
Hollywood got the message. There was a spate of films in which Mexican antiquities were a marker of advanced taste, often paired with Modern art and villainy. The GRI show features clips from Funny Face (1957) and North by Northwest (1959). In Hitchcock's film James Mason plays a heavy who collects art and lives in a modern home based on Fallingwater. The Mexican Purépecha figure that Mason buys at auction is a literal MacGuffin, used to conceal vital microfilm. Hero Cary Grant smashes the antiquity on Mount Rushmore, revealing the ruse. (In real life Grant owned a fantastic Diego Rivera that he gave to the Norton Simon Museum.)
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| Ernest A. Bachrach, Vincent Price with His Art Collection, 1953. Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences |
The common thread in any story of art and Old Hollywood is Vincent Price. The GRI show has an amusing photo of Price emerging from a literal closet to inspect some dicey Mexican ceramics and a maybe Modigliani. The horror actor was one of Stendahl's clients. Price's gay vibe ironically legitimized him as a pop-culture intellectual (notwithstanding his art history studies at Yale and the Courtauld Institute). Besides producing popular books on art and an instructional video for Sears when it branched into art, Price was celebrity spokesperson for Kahlúa, the syrupy, coffee-flavored liqueur devised by Beverly Hills entrepreneur Jules Berman. In one ad, Price declares: "I collect sensations. For instance, the art of America before Columbus will always hold historical fascination for me.… And from Mexico, I learned of another sensation. Kahlúa, the coffee liqueur. Straight after dinner it is exotic, 'over the rocks' it's refreshing…"
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| Geez, guys, spoiler alert. I'll bet that £100 prize is still unclaimed |
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| Kahlúa ad, 1970 |
Kahlúa ads featured ceramic figures in ahistorical
tableaux similar to those in Stendahl's gallery. Berman collected Mexican antiquities and produced bastardized versions as Kahlúa decanters.
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| Kahlúa bottles, 1960 |
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| Unknown maker and date, Chac Mool. Minneapolis Institute of Art |
The dream of Mexican antiquity as marketable Modernism was Stendahl's MacGuffin. Mexico had restricted export of its antiquities as early as 1827, and only a trickle of objects received export permits. It is impossible to escape the conclusion that Stendahl's business plan depended on illegally sourced objects. Other pieces were dubious restorations or outright fakes. The Getty show begins with a Chac Mool figure now owned by the Minneapolis Institute of Art. You don't have to know anything about Mesoamerican art to grok that it's just not right. Did Stendahl actually believe it was real, or did he think he was offloading it to the hinterlands? (The MIA retains the sculpture as a cautionary example.)
Man Ray, during his L.A. sojourn, took a photo of the fake objet with starlet Teresa Wright. At least he got something out of it, a Surrealist juxtaposition of Hollywood glamor and flim-flam.
"Stendahl's World: Marketing Ancient Mexico and Modern Art in Los Angeles" is at the GRI through Oct. 18, 2026.
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| Man Ray, Actress Theresa Wright With Chac Mool, about 1944. Getty Research Institute |
Comments
Re "'Is this picture art—or insanity?,' asked the Los Angeles Times.":
Excellent question. The answer is "Yes."
> and North by Northwest (1959)
LA was such a laggard in developing a free-standing publicly owned museum for the visual arts, I wonder how much of the same apathy (or ineptitude?) made the entertainment industry take decades in creating a museum for movies?
Now the AMPAS museum is at Wilshire and Fairfax while a majority of movies and TV programming are no longer produced in LA. At the same time, LACMA builds a new wing east of AMPAS that gives the impression the goals of an Ahmanson Foundation are no longer appreciated.
Sort of a case of ships always passing in the night.