Eight decades after her death, the multi-hyphenate Galka Scheyer is having a moment. She’d be thrilled.
In February, Dear Little Friend: Impressions of Galka Scheyer, an exhibition devoted to the curator, art dealer, and impresario who brought European Modernism to the West Coast, opened at the Norton Simon Museum. And this spring, at her Richard Neutra–designed home on Blue Heights Drive in the Hollywood Hills, Okey Dokey Konrad Fischer and Del Vaz Projects presented Wunderkammer, a site-specific installation by contemporary artist Rita McBride.
My own introduction to Scheyer came in the form of a small black-and-white snapshot in the archives of R.M. Schindler. Taken in 1931, it shows her reclined on a daybed stacked with pillows. She’s framed by a grid of windows—Schindler’s Kings Road House in West Hollywood, where she lived for a short time. I was conducting research on Pauline Gibling Schindler, best known as the architect’s wife, who in recent years has reemerged back into the history of modernism as a creative force in her own right. In Scheyer, I found another female figure whose role had been, as Norton Simon Museum curator Gloria Williams notes, “relegated to the footnotes of the monographs.” Here, Scheyer was center stage. The image captivates in its portrayal of someone interesting; someone who embraces modernism and its reimagining of life through art, music, literature, and architecture, but is unwilling to be hemmed in by any aesthetic constraints.
Scheyer, who first came to the United States in the 1920s, was determined to awaken the American public to European avant garde art, even if they weren’t yet ready for it. After all, New York City’s Museum of Modern Art wasn’t founded until 1929. “It reminded me of crawling things—of worms or things mouldering in the ground,” remarked an artist who saw one of her early exhibitions. “Galka had her eye on the single project that she wanted, which was to inspire people to look at artwork that was foreign to them, to think about how it affected them, and to have some sort of a sense of inquiry about who made this and why,” notes Williams, who organized Dear Little Friend.
There’s a surprising wealth of portraits of Scheyer—drawings and paintings made by artists in her circle, such as Maynard Dixon or Beatrice Wood—but in this particular photograph, I was struck by the contrast between her languid curves and the rigor of the modernist architecture. Bare feet, soft form, face half obscured by shadow. Her eyes, however, are not closed. Staring directly into the lens, Scheyer controls the composition from her odalisque pose.
Perhaps it’s an émigré’s unlucky fate to never truly relax. Scheyer was constantly on the move—propelling herself forward. Finding, even in moments of repose, an angle, an itch, an idea, a connection. Born Emmy Esther Scheyer in 1889, she was peripatetic from a young age. She left behind her middle-class Jewish family in Braunschweig, Germany to study painting and sculpture in England, France, and Belgium before traveling to Switzerland in 1916. There, she met the artist Alexej von Jawlensky, who later anointed her with a signature nickname after she appeared in his dream in the form of a bird.
“Galka” means jackdaw in Russian, and it’s easy to imagine Scheyer—bobbed hair, piercing eyes—devouring the widening world of modernist art that she encountered through Jawlensky like a smart, little bird devouring seeds. She was so moved by Jawlensky’s painting The Hunchback (1915) that she vowed to meet him and, ultimately, became his model, then promoter, organizing sales and exhibitions in Europe. Yet it was another artist, Lyonel Feininger, who gave her a sobriquet worthy of her dynamism: “Little Tornado.”
Scheyer drew people into her orbit. Jawlensky’s abstract portrait, Mystical Head: Galka (1917), seems to capture her intensity. It’s a riot of color—blue, maroon, pink, and green laid down in thick brushstrokes circling a pair of black eyes, with a single line tracing the curvature of her nose. It was through Jawlensky that she was introduced to his circle. The pair visited the Bauhaus in 1921 and he introduced her to Feininger, Paul Klee, and Wassily Kandinsky.
After successful exhibitions in Germany, in 1923 a friend invited Scheyer to New York City. Instability and hyperinflation plagued the Weimar Republic, and America beckoned with possibility. Before leaving for the States, she persuaded Jawlensky, Feininger, Klee, and Kandinsky to form an artistic group; she would be their American representative. They settled on the name The Blue Four, a compelling bit of branding that contains Scheyer’s association of metaphysical spirituality with the color blue and a reference to Der Blaue Reiter, a group of modern expressionists of which all but Jawlensky had been connected to a decade earlier.
In February 1925, she mounted The Blue Four’s first show at Charles Daniel Gallery in New York City—to little acclaim. Undeterred, Scheyer wrote to hundreds of museums and institutions in search of exhibition venues and lecture invitations. Only the Oakland Art Gallery in California replied. Eventually, she was asked by Stanford University to organize a Blue Four exhibition.
Scheyer’s West Coast debut was announced with a flair in the San Francisco Examiner, which in a November 1925 article dubbed her “Prophetess of The Blue Four.” The opening lines summed up Scheyer’s passion: “Have you heard about the Blue Four? If not yet, you are destined to hear much about them soon.”
California proved both a challenge and an opportunity. Painterly landscapes dominated the art scene, leaving Scheyer as one of the few proponents of avant garde and abstract work. Splitting her time between San Francisco and Los Angeles, she continued to curate exhibitions and give lectures full of personal details and impassioned interpretations of the artworks. As she traveled, she carried heavy leather valises packed with glass slides, like a brush salesman offering wares. But her pitch was one of authenticity. She collected works of art as much as she sold them. Everything modern moved her: art, music, architecture. The progressive ideals that came with modernism were all connected, and embodied in her identity as an independent woman.
Such zeal was met with enthusiasm and some derision. Photographers Edward Weston and Dorothea Lange were friends and supporters. In San Francisco, Scheyer met Diego Rivera, who later invited her to exhibit The Blue Four in Mexico City—and, falling into a circle of fellow émigrés, she became close with Schindler, through whom she first encountered Richard Neutra. In 1930, Scheyer staged a successful series of shows, each dedicated to a Blue Four artist, at Harry Braxton Gallery in Los Angeles. The early part of the decade saw her growing influence: she cultivated Hollywood collectors, hoping to entice Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, and other film stars. Actress Marjorie Eaton became a close friend and helped open doors. Yet as she established herself in Los Angeles, political and economic troubles abroad shook her just-laid foundations.
On the eve of Hitler’s rise to power in 1932, Scheyer returned to Europe to acquire more works by The Blue Four. It was a risky trip for a Jewish woman—and, in retrospect, a heroic rescue mission. Intellectuals and artists were targeted; Feininger, for instance, lost his teaching position and was restricted from exhibition or making art.
While in Europe, she gathered more than 200 paintings by avant garde artists and brought them to the States. “There is a material legacy in what she was able to save from Nazi Germany,” says Benno Herz, Program Director of the Thomas Mann House. “Without her, these artworks probably would have ended up in the Degenerate Art exhibition that the Nazis put together in Munich, and some of them would have been burned or looted. Finding these artworks by her best friends, whom she adored as people and as artists—and whom she knew would be canonical artists at some point—is a very concrete part of her impact.”
Returning to a mid-Depression Los Angeles, Scheyer faced closed galleries and struggling art institutions. Rather than giving up, she engaged Neutra to build her a house on a steep lot high above Sunset Boulevard—there, she could host her own exhibitions and invite collectors and artists. Purchased for $150, the land held incredible vistas with panoramic views of the city, but seemed like a folly for construction. Neutra broke ground in 1933; his International Style design is precariously balanced on the slope—yet the sweeping views from this “gallery in the clouds” capture the expansiveness and optimism of early modernism and of Scheyer’s vision.
The architect began the project just a year after completing his own home-studio, the VDL Research House in Silver Lake—an experiment in creating an efficient design that also feels like space extends beyond material boundaries. The Scheyer House is modest, consisting mainly of a narrow, 32-foot-long gallery-living area, smaller private rooms, and a series of narrow terraced gardens. According to historian Walther Fuchs, it is missing from Neutra’s 1951 catalogue raisonné and there are few drawings, minus a perspective study from 1933 made in pencil. It’s depicted sitting atop a craggy landscape. The ship-like railings that wrap the balcony seem as thin and light as graphite lines.
A few years after construction, Scheyer decided that she wanted a dedicated place where artists could be in residence; she commissioned Gregory Ain, a protégé of Neutra (who by then was too busy to take on the small project), to build a second floor addition. In a 1937 letter to Klee, Kandinsky, Feininger and Jawlensky, she described the space, writing, “The Blue Four apartment is a little dream between little trees, glittering through the snow mountains and the sea shimmering.”
Throughout the 1930s and until her death from cancer in 1945, Scheyer ran operations from 1880 Blue Heights Drive—at the end of the dirt road she named for The Blue Four. Hollywood stars like Garbo and Dietrich dropped by, as did emerging talents: experimental filmmaker Maya Deren, composer John Cage, and others. Yet despite the Ain addition, only one of The Blue Four artists, Feininger, ever stayed at the house. Letters from the end of Scheyer’s life show her still looking towards the future, inviting Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to spend some time with her at the house on Blue Heights Drive.
After Scheyer died, ownership of her residence was transferred to UCLA along with her collection, but when that arrangement fell apart, her archive went to the Pasadena Art Institute (now the Norton Simon Museum), and the home was sold into private hands. Two years ago, the house reappeared on the market and was acquired by a German collector, Max Grimminger, who hoped to return it to a vibrant, creative refuge for artists and intellectuals.
Transformation is in the works: this spring, architecture firm Escher GuneWardena, best known for their meticulous restorations of Neutra’s Lovell Health House and other modern gems, will embark on the restoration of the Neutra-Ain structure—and a new residency and exhibition space is taking shape under the name Blue Heights Arts and Culture. The first artist in residence was Beatriz Cortez, who took refuge there from March to August 2025 after her own home and studio in Altadena were destroyed in the Eaton Fire. While in residence, she organized Temporary Home, a group exhibition that poignantly reflected on the twin crises facing present day Los Angeles: fires and ICE.
“It’s remarkable that 80 years after Scheyer’s death in 1945, the house is finally being used for the purpose she originally envisioned,” says Herz, whose research and advocacy helped establish the Hollywood Hills property’s cultural significance and ultimate preservation.
There are many black-and-white photographs of Scheyer taken at Blue Heights Drive. In them, she postures for the camera—sometimes balanced on the edge of a sill or railing, sometimes lounging on a built-in daybed, as in that fateful first image I encountered in the Schindler archives. A 1938 photo by Lette Valeska shows the curator daringly standing on a windowsill, her torso bent to match the architecture, eyes (once again) on the lens. Neutra and Ain’s architecture was more than a backdrop for artworks, it was a frame and a reflection of Galka Scheyer in total—thoroughly modern.