When Mexican Antiquity Was a Hollywood MacGuffin
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." Installation view, " Stendahl...
