Galka Scheyer, born Emilie Esther in Braunschweig, Germany, in 1889, dreamed of becoming an artist. In 1915, she saw a painting by Alexei Jawlensky that changed her life. She became his dealer—and eventually the dealer and passionate advocate for three other European modernists: Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, and Vassily Kandinsky. She called her artists the “Blue Four” and moved to California, in 1924, to promote them. Scheyer hosted salons out of a Richard Neutra house in the Hollywood Hills. She befriended John Cage, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Beatrice Wood, and Edward Weston, and spent two decades building the West Coast art scene almost by force of personality. When Scheyer died in 1945, she left her collection of 450 artworks and 800 documents to what eventually became the Norton Simon Museum, in Pasadena. The museum is now presenting an intimate exhibition drawn from that bequest, and contains portraits given to Scheyer by the artists themselves, illustrated letters, correspondence, and ephemera.
—Elena Clavarino