Friday, June 19, 2026

Pasadena Museum Shows the Friendships Behind a Modernist Movement

[photo credit: Norton Simon Museum]

A Norton Simon focus exhibition drawn from a 1953 Pasadena archive traces the letters and portraits behind Galka Scheyer’s mission to bring the Blue Four to America

A focus exhibition currently at the Norton Simon Museum offers a closer look at the woman whose archive helped make Pasadena an unlikely home for European modernism, and visitors have just over a month left to see it.

“Dear Little Friend: Impressions of Galka Scheyer,” organized by museum curator Gloria Williams Sander, runs through July 20. The show is drawn from a collection of 450 works and 800 documents entrusted in 1953 to the Pasadena Art Institute — which later became the Pasadena Art Museum and, after Norton Simon took over the institution in 1974, the Norton Simon Museum. Rather than display the Blue Four paintings for which the collection is known, the show turns to the portraits artists made of Scheyer and the letters they wrote her.

The Blue Four — Vassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger and Alexei Jawlensky — were European modernists Scheyer spent her life promoting in the United States. The exhibition’s title comes from the affectionate salutation Feininger adopted in his letters to her, according to the museum.

Scheyer, born Emilie Esther Scheyer in 1889 in Braunschweig, Germany, began as a painter. She redirected her life after meeting Jawlensky in 1916, according to the museum’s press release. Through him she came to know the Bauhaus masters Feininger, Kandinsky and Klee. She united the four under the name “the Blue Four” and set out to promote their work in the United States beginning in 1924.

She settled in California in 1925. Her first U.S. show, also called “The Blue Four,” opened at Stanford University that October, according to the museum.

“They banded together and took on the name ‘The Blue Four,'” Williams Sander said, according to a HeySoCal report on the exhibition. “They all had different artistic styles, but they wanted to give her a sort of rubric to help her organize exhibitions.”

The exhibition features portraits and gifts from artists outside the Blue Four — among them Maynard Dixon, Peter Krasnow, Beatrice Wood and Edward Weston. Dixon’s 1925 portrait of Scheyer, inscribed “To Mme Moderne Kunst” — “To Mrs. Modern Art” — is on display, the museum says, alongside a 1934 colored pencil portrait by Wood.

When Scheyer moved to Los Angeles full-time in 1933, her circle expanded to include Wood and collectors Louise and Walter Arensberg, according to the museum. The architect Richard Neutra designed her home and gallery space in the Hollywood Hills.

Williams Sander, who oversees the museum’s Galka Scheyer-Blue Four Archives, also curated the Norton Simon’s 2017 exhibition “Maven of Modernism: Galka Scheyer in California.” Where that show examined Scheyer’s role as a dealer, this one centers on the friendships at the heart of her work.

“Galka Scheyer served as a powerful catalyst for the West Coast art scene, bridging the gap between bold new trends and a growing audience,” Williams Sander said in remarks reported by HeySoCal. “Her work was driven by kinship, not just commerce.”

The photographer Edward Weston once called Scheyer “the ideal ‘go-between’ for the artist and his public,” a characterization the museum cites in its description of the exhibition.

Scheyer died in Los Angeles in 1945. Her archive came to Pasadena in 1953 and has remained here ever since.

The Norton Simon Museum is at 411 W. Colorado Boulevard. It is open Thursday through Monday from noon to 5 p.m., with extended hours to 7 p.m. on Friday and Saturday; it is closed Tuesday and Wednesday. Admission is $20 for adults and $15 for seniors; members, students with I.D. and visitors 18 and under are admitted free. The first Friday of each month, from 4 to 7 p.m., admission is free to all. For more, call (626) 449-6840 or visit nortonsimon.org.

A guided tour of “Dear Little Friend” is scheduled for Friday, June 19, at 1 p.m. The exhibition closes July 20.

Dear Little Friend: Impressions of Galka Scheyer (Exhibition) | Through July 20, 2026 | Norton Simon Museum | 🔗 https://www.nortonsimon.org/exhibitions/2020-2029/dear-little-friend-impressions-of-galka-scheyer