New Collections: Elyse and Stanley Grinstein Papers 

This entry is part of an ongoing series highlighting new collections. The Archives of American Art collects primary source materials—original letters, writings, preliminary sketches, scrapbooks, photographs, financial records, and the like—that have significant research value for the study of art in the United States. The following essay was originally published in the Fall 2023 issue (vol. 62, no. 2) of the Archives of American Art Journal. More information about the journal can be found at https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/aaa/current.

Papers recently donated to the Archives by the family of Elyse and Stanley Grinstein (1929–2016 and 1927–2014) document the central role the couple played in the Los Angeles art world in the 1960s through the early 2000s. The Grinsteins were cofounders of Gemini G.E.L. (Graphic Editions Limited) with Sidney B. and Rosamond Felsen, and with Kenneth Tyler as master printer. As the collection demonstrates, the Grinsteins were not just patrons of the arts and arts philanthropists, but lifelong friends of the artists they supported.

Testifying to the intimacy of those friendships are postcards, notes, letters, and emails from a long list of artists, including Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, and Hannah Wilke. In a postcard sent from Paris in 1971, Mark di Suvero confides that he misses the Grinsteins and the LA art scene, but announces he is “reading René Char, struggling w/the French. He is so beautiful!” “Roses are red, violets are blue,” serenades Vija Celmins, in a note dating from 1980 playfully addressed to Stan and Ay-Leese, “in all my dreaming, I will include you.” In a 2012 email, Maria Nordman recalls first meeting the Grinsteins forty years earlier, and shares her current anxieties about “the ongoing weather suffering” brought about by global warming. The collection also includes correspondence with Wallace Berman, Judy Chicago, Joseph Cornell, Komar and Melamid, H. C. Westermann, and James Lee Byars, who composed some of his lyrical epistles on red or white tissue paper. Correspondence with friends Tadao Ando and Frank Gehry, along with building plans created by Elyse, relate to her architectural career in the 1980s and 1990s.

Photographs in the collection log the lively receptions the Grinsteins hosted at their home at 441 North Rockingham Avenue, in Brentwood, where New York-based artists occasionally stayed during their residencies at Gemini G.E.L. and where local artists lived for short periods. (The papers also record the house’s own multifaceted history.)

A party in 1969, for example, gave Los Angeles artists an opportunity to meet Patty Mucha and Claes Oldenburg, who had been invited to Gemini to create a multiple related to their recent polyurethane relief Profile Airflow. Other snapshots document gatherings held in honor of Gehry, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and others. Also recorded are the visits of composer Philip Glass and writers William S. Burroughs, Allan Ginsberg, and Timothy Leary, demonstrating the wide reach of the Grinsteins’ hospitality. 

The papers include artist files related to the Grinstein’s collection of contemporary art, including site-specific commissions by Michael Asher, Carl Andre, Daniel Buren, Lloyd Hamrol, and Richard Jackson. Color photographs document the installation of these now dismantled or demolished artworks in and around the Grinstein residence. We see Andre configuring a brick sculpture in the living room, and Serra directing forklifts and cranes to assemble a stack of redwood logs in the yard. These materials now reside at the Archives alongside three of Burroughs’s personal scrapbooks, which the Grinstein family donated in 2017 as part of the William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin Writings.

Because the Grinsteins were such great friends and supporters of artists across the US, their papers offer myriad points of entry for those interested in postwar American art. Moreover, they provide invaluable resources for researchers seeking insight into the crucial role patronage played in this history, particularly in the flowering of the LA art world.

Matthew Simms is the Gerald and Bente Buck West Coast Collector for the Archives of American Art.