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Stendahl Art Galleries records
2017.M.38
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Contributing Institution: Special Collections
Title: Stendahl Art Galleries records
Creator: Stendahl Art Galleries
Creator: Stendahl, Earl (Earl Leopold), 1888-1966
Creator: Spratling, William, 1900-1967
Creator: Man Ray, 1890-1976
Identifier/Call Number: 2017.M.38
Physical Description: 40 Linear Feet(128 boxes, 2 film reels, 4 flatfiles)
Date (inclusive): 1880-2003
Date (bulk): 1930-2000
Abstract: The Stendahl Art Galleries records document the business dealings of the Los Angeles gallery from 1913 to 2017. The gallery
initially exhibited works by modern and local artists, but transitioned in 1935 to dealing mostly in pre-Hispanic art. Stendahl
Art Galleries sold pre-Hispanic works to a variety of collectors, dealers, and institutions, and is considered a significant
gallery in the history of that market. The records comprise subject files; photographic files; exhibition files; documents
related to publications; financial records; administrative files; correspondence; and Stendahl family papers including research
files for the book
Exhibitionist: Earl Stendahl Art Dealer as Impresario by April Dammann.
Physical Location: Request access to the physical materials described in this inventory through the
catalog record for this collection. Click here for the
access policy .
Language of Material: English
Language of Material: Description is in English.
Language of Material: Collection material is in English with some Spanish and French.
The records are arranged in five series:
Series I. Client and topical files, circa 1922-2003, undated;
Series II. Photographic and graphic material, circa 1920-1982, undated;
Series III. Exhibition and publication files, 1925-2017, undated;
Series IV. Administrative and financial files, approximately 1929-2003, undated;
Series V. Stendahl family papers, circa 1913-2017, undated
Open for use by qualified researchers, with the exception of un-reformatted audiovisual materials, which are unavailable until
reformatted, and materials unavailable due to preservation concerns.
Contact
Library Reproductions and Permissions .
Immediate Source of Acquisition
Gift of April and Ronald Dammann. Acquired in 2017.
Earl Stendahl, art dealer, candy maker, and proprietor of Stendahl Art Galleries, was born in 1888 to a family of bakers and
confectioners in Menomonie, Wisconsin. In 1909, he and his wife Enid traveled to California and after a stint selling cars
in San Diego moved permanently to Los Angeles. Soon thereafter he re-entered the family trade, drawing on both his experience
at his parents' restaurant and his in-laws' financial support to open the Black Cat Café on Main Street in downtown Los Angeles.
A resourceful businessman, Earl continually implemented new features to set his establishment apart from competitors. To capitalize
on the art dealers and aficionados who frequented the café, he began hanging the work of local artists on its walls, marking
his first professional foray into the art world.
Stendahl gained a more conventional understanding of the art market while working at the interior design firm Cannell and
Chaffin from 1917 to 1918. After completing his brief military service in 1918, he opened the first iteration of Stendahl
Art Galleries on the ground floor of the newly-opened Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard (a space shared briefly with
fellow dealer Dalzell Hatfield). There, he exhibited and sold works by California Impressionists and plein air painters of
the early twentieth century, including Joseph Kleitsch, Edgar Alwin Payne, Guy Rose, and William Wendt. A solo exhibition
of Marc Chagal in 1930-- the artist's first on the West Coast-- garnered wildly mixed reviews; the shocked response to early
Modernist works only fueled Stendahl's enduring belief that there was no such thing as bad publicity.
In 1931, Stendahl auctioned a considerable portion of his collection and left the Ambassador for a new space at 3006 Wilshire
Boulevard, broadening the scope of his venture to include European and Latin American artists such as Constantin Brancusi,
Nicolai Fechin, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. As with Chagall, Stendahl
offered many of his artists their first California or West Coast shows, and he frequently developed deep and long-lasting
friendships with them, either through correspondence or in the salon-like atmosphere of the gallery that encouraged both artists
and customers to linger. During this time, he developed a celebrity clientele that included William Randolph Hearst, Frank
Lloyd Wright, Edward G. Robinson, Vincent Price, David O. Selznick, and Nelson Rockefeller. Stendahl subsidized the gallery
by returning to his confectionary roots, making and selling chocolates out of its kitchen (and later out of a factory in Burbank),
which were frequently packaged with jigsaw puzzles made from color reproductions of paintings from the gallery's stocks. The
puzzles were originally hand-made by Earl and his son Christopher, though he later employed out-of-work scenic artists from
various Hollywood studios. Both Stendahl Chocolates and Stendahl Puzzles were also sold at Bullock's Department Store, presaging
Earl's collaboration with the May Company stores, an early and successful endeavor to extend the art and antiquities market
to retail consumers by making artworks available within the quotidian context of a department store. In 1939, as part of his
ongoing effort to bring Modern art to Southern California, Stendahl hosted one of only two non-museum exhibitions of Pablo
Picasso's
Guernica to benefit orphans of the Spanish Civil War. That his enterprise garnered less than $250 for the cause may have illustrated
the reticence of the Los Angeles art scene to embrace emerging trends, but it did not dampen his own enthusiasm for them.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the Mayan Revival works of architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, Lloyd Wright, and Robert Stacy-Judd
fueled a national interest in pre-Hispanic aesthetics. Exhibitions like MoMa's
American Sources of Modern Art (Aztec, Mayan, Incan) contributed to the development of this trend. In 1935, reportedly influenced by Diego Rivera's collection of antiquities,
Stendahl himself began dealing in pre-Hispanic objects, which soon became the gallery's primary focus. His first clients in
this area were Louise and Walter Arensberg, for whom he helped create one of the most significant collections of Mesoamerican
antiquities in the United States. Between 1941 and 1962, Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss purchased over 200 objects from Stendahl
which ultimately became a central part of the Pre-Columbian Collection at Dumbarton Oaks. The Arensberg and Bliss collections
were just two of the many Mesoamerican collections of varying sizes that were formed in the United States and Europe during
this time, and as consumer appetites grew, objects were frequently removed from archeological sites without adequate or appropriate
documentation -- in essence, looted -- often with the assistance of local "dealers" who acted as intermediaries between impoverished
residents and foreign collectors. Stendahl went to dramatic lengths to scout potential digs, even posing as a documentary
film director and bringing a sham film crew to shoot a Maya burial site on Jaina Island in 1957. Collectors and dealers, including
Stendahl, exploited lax or nonexistent laws surrounding cultural patrimony, and benefitted both from the ignorance or indifference
of both local and American authorities, as well as from the prevailing attitude of the time that these objects were both plentiful
and culturally insignificant. In mid-century Mexico, for example, any object over one hundred years old could be imported
into the United States duty free. Ironically, Alfred (Al) Stendahl, Earl's son, was appointed to the first Cultural Property
Advisory Committee by President Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Drastically rising rents forced the closure of the Wilshire Avenue gallery in 1945, and Earl, who had a few years earlier
traded a number of pre-Hispanic objects for the property owned by Walter and Louise Arensberg adjacent to their Hillside Avenue
estate, pivoted to selling out of his Hollywood home. Around this period, Earl's son Alfred, and son-in-law, Joseph Dammann,
joined the family firm, participating in nearly every aspect of its operations. In 1954, fortified by the recent sale of
Henri Matisse's
Tea (Le thé dans la jardin) to MGM scion David L. Loew, Stendahl purchased the rest of the Arensberg estate at 7055 Hillside Avenue left vacant after
the deaths of Walter and Louise, making the late couple's home, which had long served as a salon for the Los Angeles art community,
the final Stendahl Gallery location.
Earl actively continued in the business until his death in 1966 while on a buying trip in Morocco. Al Stendahl and Joseph
Damman continued to operate the family business out of the Hillside Avenue location. In 2017, Joseph's grandson, Ronald W.
Dammann, and Ronald's wife, April Dammann, archivist at Stendahl Galleries and author of
Exhibitionist: Earl Stendahl, Art Dealer as Impresario, closed the gallery after three generations and nearly a century of activity.
Sources consulted:
Colburn, Forrest D. "From Pre-Columbian Artifact to Pre-Columbian Art."
Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 64 (2005): 36–41. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3774832.
Dammann, April.
Exhibitionist: Earl Stendahl, Art Dealer as Impresario. Santa Monica: Angel City Press, 2011.
Dumbarton Oaks Archives. "A California Sojourn and the Robert Woods Bliss Collection of Pre-Columbian Art." Dumbarton Oaks
website. June 15, 2017. https://www.doaks.org/research/library-archives/dumbarton-oaks-archives/historical-records/75th-anniversary/blog/a-california-sojourn-and-the-robert-woods-bliss-collection-of-pre-columbian-art.
Nelson, Mark, William H. Sherman, and Ellen Hoobler.
Hollywood Arensberg : avant-garde collecting in midcentury L.A.. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2020.
Stendahl Art Galleries Records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/stendahl-art-galleries-records-5550
Stendahl Art Galleries records, circa 1880-2003, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Accession no. 2017.M.38
http://hdl.handle.net/10020/cifa2017m38
Stendahl Art Galleries records, 1907-1971. Archives of American Art, https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/stendahl-art-galleries-records-5550.
Processed by Allison Ransom under the supervision of Kit Messick in 2019. The finding aid was revised by Kit Messick in 2021.
All titles were devised by the archivist unless otherwise noted.
The archive documents the operations of Stendahl Art Galleries over three generations through correspondence, images, pricing
records, exhibition files, and appraisal and authentication information dating from 1913 until the closure of the Stendahl
Art Gallery in 2017, with particular coverage of its activities in the 1960s and 1970s. The archive focuses heavily on Earl
Stendahl's pursuit of pre-Hispanic objects and showcases his efforts to place pre-Hispanic art in American museums and private
collections starting as early as 1935. Stendhal's interest in modern American and European art and California Impressionism
is also represented throughout the collection, though this aspect of Stendahl's career is more extensively documented in the
portion of the archive donated by son and successor Alfred Stendahl to the Archives of American Art in 1976.
The Stendahl Art Galleries records illuminate moments of high-volume trade in cultural patrimony, particularly in Latin America,
prior to the 1970 UNESCO Convention relating to illicit trade, while also addressing the less dynamic market for modern American
and European art in California and the American West during the twentieth century. Series I. Client and topical files contains
extensive correspondence with institutions, collectors, artists, and dealers, and covers a range of subjects from exhibition
planning, to consignments and sales, to appraisals and authentications. Key institutions represented in the client files include
the Museum of Primitive Art, Museum of the American Indian, the May Company, Stolper Galleries, and Sotheby's. Earl Stendahl's
ongoing friendship with Diego Rivera is well established in this series; other artists present include Anton Blazek, Colin
Campbell Cooper, Alexander Calder, Mary Crane, Armin Hansen, and Millard Sheets. Collectors and dealers of pre-Hispanic and
indigenous American art predominate in this series, and include Robert Woods Bliss, Frederick Dockstader, James Gruener, William
F. Kaiser, Raúl Kamffer, William Palmer, Vincent Price, Nelson Rockefeller, Theodore Schempp, and designer Douglas Snelling.
Stendahl's collecting activities and interests in Latin America can be seen through exchanges with United States Customs agent
Barbara Todd and the United States Department of the Treasury; as well as with local agents, archeologists, and other figures
engaged in the antiquities trade including Raúl Dehesa, Guillermo Echániz, Alejandro Méndez, Samuel Kirkland Lothrop, and
William J. Sheridan.
Series II. comprises extensive photographic documentation of both modern European and American art and pre-Hispanic and art
from other ancient or indigeonous cultures including Amlash, Etruscan, Khmer, and Chumash. These images represent items offered
or under consideration by Stendahl Art Galleries as well as images relating to consignments, appraisals, and authentications.
Also documented are the holdings of some of the most significant American collectors of these items, including Axel Rasmussen,
Louise and Walter Arensberg, and Robert Woods Bliss. Several eminent commercial photographers are credited in the photographs,
most notably Julius Shulman and Floyd Faxon. The influence of the pre-Hispanic aesthetic on twentieth century artists is evident
in an original Man Ray photograph of actress Theresa Wright posed with a chacmool statue, and in several lithographs of Olmec
designs by William Spratling, both found in this series.
Exhibitions of pre-Hispanic and American and European art at Stendahl's gallery and elsewhere are documented in Series III.
through announcements, catalogs, and price lists, often annotated; press clippings and tear sheets record the public response.
Series IV. Administrative and financial files provides insight into the business operations of the gallery, and includes stock
books, consignment books, and inventory records; files related to appraisal and authentication, including correspondence with
Max Friedländer and Hasso von Winning; and financial and legal documentation. Several files contain clippings and reports
relating to ethical and legal issues in the trade of cultural objects, suggesting Stendahl and his colleagues were aware of,
if not unduly concerned with, the murky area in which their business operated.
Series V. comprises family papers representing three generations of the Stendahl family, including Earl, his wife, Edith,
and his son and successor Alfred, among others. Documentation of earlier family business ventures, including Stendahl Chocolates
and Stendahl Puzzles, is present to a limited extent. Also in this series is material generated during the creation of April
Dammann's 2011 book,
Exhibitionist: Earl Stendahl, Art Dealer as Impresario, including manuscript drafts, research notes, and original archival material separated from the larger collection during
the course of Damman's work.
Although the Stendahl Art Galleries partially maintained their records in generalized categories, much of the collection was
unorganized upon arrival at the Getty Research Institute; this material has been integrated into the original order established
by the Galleries when possible, though additional arrangement has been imposed by the archivist. Most folder titles have been
supplied by the archivist; when original folder titles have been retained, they are provided in quotes.
Subjects and Indexing Terms
Art dealers -- Archives
Art dealers -- California -- Los Angeles
Art galleries, Commercial -- California -- Los Angeles
Central America -- Antiquities
Mexico -- Antiquities
Mayas -- Antiquities
Aztec sculpture -- Mexico
Artists -- California -- Los Angeles -- 20th century
Business records
Exhibition catalogs -- 20th century
Gelatin silver prints -- 20th century
Photographs, Original -- Latin America -- 20th century
Cultural property--Latin America
Legal documents
Tonalámatl de Aubin
Rivera, Diego, 1886-1957
Archipenko, Alexander, 1887-1964
Siqueiros, David Alfaro
Feshin, Nikolaĭ Ivanovich, 1881-1955