The white house sits at the very top of a hill overlooking Los Angeles. Glass doors and windows face the city sprawl below. Standing on the terrace, you can see the Pacific Ocean and Catalina Island to the right; to the left are Downtown Los Angeles, the Griffith Observatory, and the San Gabriel Mountains.
Modernist architect Richard Neutra designed the building, which was constructed in 1935 as an art gallery and home for his friend, German art dealer Galka Scheyer.
A place by artists, for artists, with the kind of LA light and view that’s inspired generations of creative Californians – this house, like so many gorgeous Hollywood Hills spaces, has long been closed to the public.
Now that is about to change.
When Galka Scheyer built her house on this hill, it was the only one. By now, many homes have been built along the windy roads. Photo by Kerstin Zilm.
Galka Scheyer came to the United States in 1924 to represent and promote modern art from Europe, particularly by a group of Bauhaus expressionist artists called Die Blaue Vier (The Blue Four): Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, and Alexej Jawlensky.
The San Francisco Chronicle wrote about Galka Scheyer and The Blue Four in 1925. Scheyer found more interest for the artists in Los Angeles. Photo courtesy of Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena.
She appreciated the modern style her friend, architect Richard Neutra, was developing in LA at the time, and commissioned a house from him that she could use as a gallery.
But there was one problem, explains Benno Herz, program director at the Thomas Mann House, who was instrumental in bringing Scheyer’s home back to the public: “He was interested in open floor plans that blur the differentiation between outside and inside. But Galka Scheyer wanted to display art. And to hang art, you need walls.”
Eventually, Neutra designed mobile panels to put into the windows. They added more wall space for exhibits, and could be removed afterwards.
During his research about Galka Scheyer and her house, Benno Herz found this picture of the art dealer and the construction workers in a Los Angeles archive. Photo courtesy of Benno Herz.
Because her home was the first on the hill, a street had to be built to reach it, and Galka Scheyer got permission to name that street. Inspired by the artist group she represented, her choice was Blue Heights Drive.
The city’s artistic avant-garde community soon drove up the unpaved, windy roads to see Scheyer’s exhibitions. Among them were friends like the composer John Cage and stars of the new film industry, like Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich.
“The experimental filmmaker Maya Deren danced in the living room among all the German-speaking emigres and exiles, like Fritz Lang, the director of Metropolis, and Josef von Sternberg,” says Benno Herz.
For lectures and exhibitions, Galka Scheyer removed almost all her furniture from the living room and directed big industrial spotlights toward the paintings. They cast shadows of visitors across the walls like a black-and-white movie playing out above the city lights.
After Scheyer died in 1945 at age 56, most of the paintings she had brought to California that didn’t sell found a home at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena.
Her house became a private home and went through several transformations. Last summer, it came back on the market, and Herz wrote about it for a German newspaper. A German art collector read the story, bought the house, and now will turn it into a home for artists.
Before the renovation starts, he offered to help artists displaced by the Palisades and Eaton Fires.
And that is why, since March, sculptor Beatriz Cortez has lived here in Galka Scheyer’s former home.
Cortez, who creates welded sculptures, lost her Altadena home in the Eaton Fire.
Among her works is a series representing temporary homes, like the one she is living in now.
“I also make spaceships or space capsules, and they are nomadic. They are always changing, and gifts of generosity for others,” Cortez explains. She says it is fascinating that the original owner of the home she’s living in, and its architect Richard Neutra, called this house a spaceship, suspended as it feels in time and space above the city.
“We use similar words, but when she was speaking about a spaceship, she was speaking about the house,” Cortez points out. “I like thinking of the house as a sculpture.”
Benno Herz and Betariz Cortez sit in the sparsely furnished living room that used to function as a gallery for expressionist art from Germany. Photo courtesy of Kerstin Zilm.
Restoration of the home is set to start later this summer. When it is done, the house will open as an artists' residence with events open to the public.
For those who want to learn more about the building’s story, Benno Herz, along with Richard Neutra’s son Raymond Neutra, will talk about Galka Scheyer and her time on Blue Heights Drive at a free documentary screening on June 7, organized by the Neutra Institute for Survival Through Design.