Neutra Dame
Situated on a ridge along Laurel Canyon, above the flight paths of red-tailed hawks, crows, and the occasional helicopter, the Galka Scheyer House is an overlooked entry in LA’s modernist canon. Built by Richard Neutra in 1934 and featuring a living room that could double as a gallery, the avant-garde “airship,” as its owner affectionally dubbed it, secured Scheyer’s role as a doyenne of the local bohemia. A German Jewish émigré dealer and collector of Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger, and Alexej von Jawlensky (she publicized the tetrad as “the Blue Four” via shows in New York and elsewhere), Scheyer had arrived in Los Angeles from the Bay Area four years prior. A painter herself, she befriended the likes of Diego Rivera, as well as the composer John Cage and photographer Edward Weston, some of whom became fixtures at the home.
From Neutra protégé Gregory Ain, Scheyer commissioned a penthouse addition intended to temporarily house artists. But with her death in 1945, the residency never came to pass. When the house was listed last year, a German businessman and art lover swooped in, pledging to make good on the idea. This summer, Blue Heights Arts and Culture welcomed as its inaugural resident Beatriz Cortez, a sculptor who lost her home in the Altadena fire.
“When I first saw the house, I realized that the space for the gallery was so large and the living quarters were quite small, and I loved that,” Cortez said at a public reception for the opening of Temporary Home, the small exhibition she mounted on the premises for two weeks in July.
Her smoldering steel sculptures, trussed with thick, dauby sutures, look like relics from distant galaxies. Installed at the center of the living room, Ceiba (completed in 2023 with Phillip Byrne and Tatiana Guerrero) appeared like a violent rupture in space-time, its heaving metallic mass contrasting with the anemic chrome legs of nearby lounge chairs. On a side wall, Crow Vision (2025), a mixed- media work that incorporates iridescent feathers, referenced the sharp-sighted scavengers that nest on the property, and also Scheyer’s corvine namesake. (Née Emilie Esther Scheyer, she was affectionately rechristened Galka by Jawlensky, after the Russian word for a jackdaw, a quick-witted, loquacious species of crow.) “Crows,” explained Cortez, “have the ability to see more range than humans. So [they] are able to see each other, and they see many colors.”
Parabolic feeling infused other pieces on display, such as rafa esparza’s Xolotl (2018), an adobe rendition of the shape-shifting Aztec deity of lightning and death that presided, sentinel-like, over Scheyer’s former salon. In the upstairs bedroom used by Cortez, another of esparza’s adobe pieces evoked the colossal Olmec heads of ancient Mesoamerica. On a glazed sliding wall that lets out onto the balcony, Maria Maea collated a chronology of ICE’s LA residency using palm fronds foraged from sites of migrant arrests and disappearances (Then They Came, 2025).
The delicate intervention, said Benno Herz, program director at the Thomas Mann House in Pacific Palisades, who played a role in the creation of Blue Heights, “reinscribes” the rarified domus in the visceral life of the city and thus “shows how powerful the connection between art and architecture can be.”
Currently empty (Cortez has since found more permanent lodgings), the Neutra structure will soon undergo an extensive renovation by Escher GuneWardena Architecture, which is also renovating the architect’s 4,800-square-foot Lovell Health House (1929) as the Los Feliz home of mega-gallerists Iwan and Manuela Wirth. With little more than a quarter of its footprint, the Scheyer House, which was curiously omitted from Neutra’s authorized 1951 catalogue raisonné, is a postage stamp by comparison—a “little dream between little trees,” as Scheyer called it. It was there that she could live as she “always wished to. In a most beautiful natural setting close to a city. With modern rooms and freedom to move about.” Were all Angelenos afforded such freedom.