Notes on the last days of the Hollywood Art Center School, and the discovery of the lost works of Nína Sæmundssson.
In early February 2018, I was invited by Elizabeth Lovins to photograph the ceramic studios at the Hollywood Art Center School in the last days before the studios were to be dismantled. Elizabeth wanted to create a document of the school, the first independent art school in Los Angeles, founded by her Grandfather Henry Lovins in 1912. The school, in what would be its final location of many, closed in 2000. Incredibly, the property and studios were still intact 17 years after the Lovins family sold the house, studios, and expansive property just south of the Hollywood Bowl on North Highland Ave. in Hollywood, CA. The lush grounds were sold to a wealthy elderly philanthropist from Los Angeles who understood the significance of the history of the place, and old Hollywood. Since the new owner purchased the property in 2001, she kept it intact as a kind of dollhouse in the Hollywood Hills. She hired a former student of the school and long time friend of Elizabeth to be the caretaker of the massive plot of land. The new owner didn’t spend a single night in the house in the 17 years that she owned it. The fact that she kept the property, house, and studios intact, made her the ideal buyer to preserve the legacy of the art school.
In 2000, Elizabeth and her siblings inherited the property after their grandmother, artist and Director of the school — Mona Lue Lovins’s death. Overwhelmed at the time by the forced sale of the estate, and the incredible burden of storing the contents of the school’s archive and it’s dismantling, Elizabeth was given permission to leave the contents of the art studios intact when the sale of the art school property went through. In the small rooms of the studios, she stored drawings by her grandfather Henry Lovins, a few sculptures by her grandmother Mona Lou Lovins, and works by other students and faculty who studied and taught at the school. After the sale of the property, Elizabeth was able to continue to freely visit the estate, and the new caretaker continued to invite artists to use the studios over the years after the school closed. Due to the friendly arrangement between Elizabeth and the owner, there was no rush to find another location to store the artworks left behind in the studios.
In March 2018, only a few weeks before Elizabeth brought me to the former art school, she learned that the current owner, who was once the ideal keeper of the property, was in the process of selling the estate to developers from New Jersey. Elizabeth’s family legacy was in escrow. With the imminent sale of the property now looming, Elizabeth, who is the executor of the Hollywood Art Center School Archives, would need to find a new home for the artworks that her grandparents, the students, and teachers at the school left behind. She had only a matter of weeks to figure out how to rescue the remaining artworks in the studios, and document everything in its final state.
Elizabeth had been my neighbor from 2002–2014, and a close friend, so I had heard many stories over the years about the school and its current state of being, the shady estate lawyer, and art consultant, among others, who swindled and profited while dismantling the estate, and the many artworks contained within. Sadly, it appears that many of the important works from the estate may have auctioned off at various points in time.
I had been working with Elizabeth and Thomas Lawson, Dean of CalArts School of Art / Editor-in-Chief, East of Borneo on some research and writing about the Hollywood Art Center School since late 2017 when I saw Tom at the opening of the LACMA Pacific Standard Time exhibition that included an early Mayan revival style painting by Henry Lovins. I told Tom a brief story of the school — and of Henry Lovins being the founder of the earliest independent art school in Los Angeles. Tom immediately expressed that he would be interested in writing / publishing a piece in East Of Borneo on the subject. I was thrilled that Tom took interest because rarely does anyone talk about anything of much substance at an art opening, let alone commit to a project they know little about.
Elizabeth wanted to show Tom and his wife Susan Morgan the school in its final state. So, with only a few days left to visit before it closed escrow, she invited them to visit on the day I was to photo document the ceramics studio. Thursday, February 8th. Simultaneously, Brent Rice and Halina Siwolop who work in Hollywood Film production / design, came along with Brent’s boss Jan to look at the contents of the studios. The production crew had arranged to borrow most of the contents of the studios to use as props in a Netflix horror film about the contemporary artworld called Velvet Buzzsaw Directed by Dan Gilroy. It was a serendipitous coincidence that they were just beginning Art Direction and Set Design on the film and needed props, this lined up with Elizabeth’s immediate need of removing and temporarily storing the artworks and furniture.
While photographing the ceramics studio filled with shelves of sculptures by former students and faculty, I kept focusing on a terracotta sculpture of a woman’s head. I kept coming back to it over and over because it stole the attention of all the other ceramic pieces around it and it was so photogenic. To me the piece was clearly the work of a highly skilled sculptor and definitely not student work. It had a very recognizable style of idealism, and it was clearly made in the 1930’s or shortly after. I can best describe it as nothing short of magical. It immediately held a special power for me that I can’t properly describe.
Elizabeth and I returned to the studios a few days later on Feb 11th to pick up some of her grandfather’s artworks and a few other key pieces before the film crew arrived to gather the remaining contents. I said to her, “there is something about that head.” She agreed, and we decided it was too special to leave behind, so we packed it up. Due to our limited space to store all the works, we were limited on what we could take with us that day and what we could not. Because of this, we focused on getting all of the drawings by Henry Lovins and only a few other key pieces. We left the remaining artworks and studio furniture behind to taken out and stored by the film crew for the duration of the film production.
I kept thinking about one of the sculptures, another ceramic head, that we didn’t take. It seemed very fragile, and appeared to have some mold damage. For some reason, it bothered me for days that we didn’t take it with us. I worried about how fragile it was, and I was concerned it would not survive the film production transport.
A few days later, my wife Jennifer and I were driving down Los Feliz Blvd taking the kids to school in the early morning. We were stopped at the stoplight at the Fern Dell Dr entrance to Griffith Park, and I stared off towards a bronze sculpture portrait of Leif Erickson that sits at the entrance to the park. I had seen the sculpture hundreds of times before on the drive, and I always thought it was an interesting piece. I wondered why a monument to the Icelandic explorer that discovered the Americas was at the entrance of my favorite park. I suddenly realized that the head in the studio that we left behind had nearly the same profile as the monument to Leif Erickson. I scared Jen and the kids when I shouted out “OH MY GOD!” The moment I realized it though, was really stranger than that. I had some kind of epiphany linking the head in the park to the head in the studio.
I looked up the sculpture of Leif Erickson on Google to find the name of the artist who made it. It was an Icelandic sculptor named Nína Sæmundsson. When I mentioned this to Elizabeth she told me that Nína Sæmundsson had been a faculty member at the Hollywood Art Center School. Once we knew this, the pieces started falling into place, and we realized how many possible works by Nina were in the ceramics studio, including the terracotta head I was so focused on, and a few other pieces that the film crew had removed from the studios.
So now we are attempting to gather up all the sculptures from the film crew to sort out what are potentially many lost works by Sæmundsson, including what I thought was a cast plaster head that appeared to be a study for Sæmundsson’s portrait bust of the late Hollywood film actress Hedy Lamarr from the 1930’s. Unfortunately, this turned out not to be the case. The head was a cast plaster model or mannequin that did not seem to have any significance. But it led to me doing some research on Lamarr. Lamarr was an actress, as well as an inventor of the technology that led to the invention of Bluetooth and WiFi in collaboration with avant-garde composer George Antheil. She was called “The Most Beautiful Woman in Film” at the peak of her days as a Hollywood starlet. She was said to be so beautiful that the features of Snow White were based on her.
The other sculptures we believe were possibly made by Sæmundsson were four terracotta sculptures, a head of a boy, a bearded man, and the head of a girl (all have been since retrieved by Elizabeth). There was also a fairly abstract terracotta piece that looks like an eternal flame.
By Brett Cody Rogers. Written April 23rd, 2018 — Edited April 7th, 2021
