Walter Conrad Arensberg - Legacy

Legacy

In the 1940s the Arensbergs began to look for a permanent home for their collection. In 1941, a group around actors Vincent Price, Edward G. Robinson, Fanny Brice, and Sam Jaffe tried to get the collection to stay on the West Coast, for the Modern Institute of Art in Beverly Hills. In 1944, the Arensbergs signed a deed of gift with the University of California, Los Angeles, which included the stipulation that the University build an appropriate museum to house the collection in a specified time frame; their friend and fellow collector Galka Scheyer subsequently signed a similar agreement. By the fall of 1947 it was obvious that this condition would not be met and the contract was nullified. In 1939, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's board turned down a gift of avant-garde works from the collection.

The Arensbergs then began negotiations with numerous other institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Denver Art Museum, Harvard University, the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (Mexico, D.F.), the National Gallery, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art, Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Minnesota. The Arensbergs eventually dropped their demand that the recipient of the collection also provide for the continuance of the Francis Bacon Foundation. After protracted discussions and many visits from Director Fiske Kimball and his wife Marie, the Arensbergs presented their collection of over 1000 objects, including correspondence, ephemera, clippings, writings, personal and art collection records, and photographs documenting the couple's art collecting activities as well as their friendship with many important artists, writers and scholars, to the Philadelphia Museum of Art on December 27, 1950.

In 1949, Daniel Catton Rich and Katherine Kuh organized the first public exhibition of the Arensberg collection, held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1949. For the exhibition Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York in 1996, the Whitney Museum of American Art partially recreated the interior of the Manhatttan apartment of the Arensbergs.