At Home with the Arensbergs and their Avant-garde Art Collection

Getty Art + Ideas

"The Arensbergs’ staging of the art in their collection, it’s both playful, but like chess, it is really serious business."

The 1913 Armory Show of avant-garde European art sparked a life-changing fascination with collecting in Louise and Walter Arensberg. The couple quickly became influential participants in New York’s bohemian art scene. In 1921 the Arensbergs moved to Los Angeles, where they spent the next few decades building a vast and idiosyncratic art collection in their Mediterranean Revival home in the Hollywood Hills. Works by Duchamp, Picasso, and Brancusi lived alongside pre-Columbian sculptures, eclectic antique furnishings, and thousands of rare books by and about the philosopher Sir Francis Bacon. The riotous display of art in their home excited and overwhelmed visitors—everyone from members of the public to important artists of the day.

The Arensbergs’ LA story, including their art-filled house, is the focus of the book Hollywood Arensberg: Avant-Garde Collecting in Midcentury LA,published by Getty Publications. In this episode, coauthors Mark Nelson, partner at McCall Associates and designer of this book; William H. Sherman, director of the Warburg Institute, London; and Ellen Hoobler, associate curator at the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, discuss the Arensbergs and their obsessive approach to collecting and displaying art.

For images, transcripts, and more, visit getty.edu/podcasts.