Artifacts to Art: Collecting Ancient America in Midcentury L.A.
Andrew D. Turner, Mary E. Miller, and Khristaan D. Villela.
Yale University Press London, imprint Getty Research Institute, 2026, 176 pp., 63 colour and 29 B/W illustrations, 2 maps. Paperback £26. ISBN 9798887120287.
by Tom Stammers
This incisive but extremely wide-ranging book covers the development of the market for ancient American art in early twentieth-century Los Angeles. Compared to the efflorescence of excellent recent writing about the market for ‘tribal’ or African art, Mesoamerican antiquities- what used to be called pre-Columbian, in Eurocentric parlance- remain underexplored. And yet this book points out how enthusiastically they were embraced by key American collectors- including Robert Woods Bliss at Dumbarton Oaks, Nelson Rockefeller and Walter and Louise Arensberg, the great patrons of Marcel Duchamp. In keeping with the California setting, Hollywood was also enthralled; there are wonderful photographs of celebrities’ interiors, including Billy Wilder and Irving Stone, and we learn how these objects pop up in the plots of films from North-by-Northwest to Funny Face.
At the centre of the account is Earl Leopold Stendahl, the dealer who built a huge empire from trading in these artifacts. The book has been written from the archives donated to the Getty by Stendahl’s grandson in 2017, and they reveal an enterprising but entirely unscrupulous character. Stendahl began as a chocolatier until he realized that the paintings on the walls shown of his Downtown restaurant, the Black Cat Café, might be a better source of revenue than his much-hyped line of desserts. Setting up his first gallery in the Ambassador hotel in 1921, Stendhal specialized at first in selling undemanding American landscapes, branching out to show the celebrated Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siquieros. It was through contemporary Mexican painting that he came to early American antiquities, forming a partnership from 1935 with Guillermo Echániz, a bookseller based in Mexico City. Over the next decade Echániz would surreptitiously transfer hundreds of objects to Stendahl, who sold them on at hugely marked-up prices. Echániz received $250 for the fresco looted from Teotihuacan that Stendahl cleaned up and presented to Bliss for $10,000.
Stendahl displayed these works in his new gallery on Wilshire Boulevard in 1944, a temporary ‘museum’ of pre-Hispanic art reconstructed in detail here in chapter 3. The authors reconstruct the trajectory of the objects depicted in the original photographs, both originals and fakes, which were always a major part of the market, from Colima dogs to reclining Chacmool sculptures. Actor Edward Robinson allegedly told Stendahl: ‘Earl, you’re an old bandit, but you do get good things.’ Chapter 4 traces Stendahl to his house gallery in Hollywood- located next door to the Arenbergs, his
great clients- where he made the case to view former ethnographic curiosities instead as expressive works of art, the perfect complement to a modernist décor.
Although with a fluent and breezy tone, the book is also a grim document of the reckless looting and destruction that scarred temples across Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras. Despite the introduction of patrimony laws in Mexico, it was perfectly legal to import ancient objects across the US border until 1972. The book complements the work of the Getty’s Pre-Hispanic American Provenance Initiative (PHAPI), and the study could not be more timely in light of wider debates about the traffic in antiquities from ‘source countries’, networks of collaborators and criminality across borders, and the prospects for restitution (such as the return by Yale of materials from Hiram Bingham excavations at Manchu Picchu to Peru in 2018). An engrossing, sobering, read.
