Getty Presents “Stendahl’s World: Marketing Ancient Mexico and Modern Art in Los Angeles”

Drawn largely from the Stendahl Art Galleries Archive, the exhibition traces the career of Earl Stendahl (1887–1966), a dealer whose influence extended from California Impressionism and European Modernism to the promotion of Mexican antiquities and pre-Hispanic art.

After decades of selling California landscapes and introducing artists such as Diego Rivera, Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso to Southern California audiences, Stendahl turned his attention in the mid-1930s to the art of ancient Mexico. With a flair for promotion and publicity, Stendahl approached art dealing with the instincts of an entrepreneur. Through traveling exhibitions, department store partnerships, celebrity collectors and even Hollywood product placement, he helped create a new market for pre-Hispanic art in Los Angeles and beyond.

At the same time, the exhibition reveals the more complex consequences of this growing market. As demand increased, archaeological sites across Mexico suffered extensive looting and depredation. Through archival records, photographs, correspondence and sales documents, visitors gain insight into the networks of dealers, collectors, middlemen, museums and consumers that shaped the movement of these objects across borders and into collections. By examining these histories through a contemporary lens, the exhibition invites visitors to consider how attitudes toward collecting, cultural heritage and antiquities have changed over time.

The exhibition resulted from the Getty Research Institute’s Pre-Hispanic Art Provenance Initiative, which uses archival and provenance research to reconstruct the histories of ancient American objects and illuminate the complex networks of ownership, exchange and collecting that continue to shape understanding of art and cultural heritage today. The Pre-Hispanic Art Provenance Initiative also produced searchable databases of the Stendahl Gallery inventory books and family letters, spanning the years 1940–1970, which feature references to thousands of art objects, museums and individuals, and are freely available to the public without restriction. These resources complement decades of research in the provenance of Western art objects, also freely searchable in the Getty Provenance Index.

“Movements of thousands of ancient Mexican objects, constituting lost provenance information, can now be documented through the Getty Research Institute, revealing lost histories of the 20th century,” said Mary Miller, senior curator. “I’m proud of this work to create context and open possibilities for new meaning and memory in the 21st century.”

“Stendahl’s World: Marketing Ancient Mexico and Modern Art in Los Angeles” is curated by Mary Miller, senior curator, and Khristaan Villela, associate director of dissemination and external affairs at the Getty Research Institute. Accompanying the exhibition, Getty Publications will release “Artifacts to Art: Collecting Ancient America in Midcentury L.A.”, an accessible volume exploring Stendahl’s role in the pre-Hispanic art market and its lasting impact on museums, collecting practices and the field of art history.