In a time when great private collections are largely out of reach and their owners fingered as friends of pedophiles or owners of weapon firms, a new book, Hollywood Arensbergs, published yesterday by the Getty, tells refreshingly of a couple who were deeply devoted to artists, intensely private, and who managed to amass one of the more diverse high quality collections of the 20th century, largely out of sight of all but their closest friends and neighbors. Alongside works by the great masters like Matisse and Miro in their house in Los Angeles was a pre-eminent collection of mid century modern art, African and Pre-Columbian art. Described by a reporter who visited the house at the time, "these gentle, gracious...hosts...are at home with this art, as unself-conscious and unpretentious about it as one's grandmother."

Marcel Duchamp was one their closest friends and he helped build their collection. Picabia, Charis Weston, and others came to visit. (Richard Neutra did an addition to the Spanish revival home designed by the architect of Graumans chinese theatre.) This is where the infamous double wedding of Man Ray and Juliet Browner and Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning took place. The celebrated names in the text are dropped like pearls instead of inserts on Page Six. The photographs are intimate and feel about as close to the now de rigeur virtual tour as can be imagined.

Though their apartment in NY was also legendary, in Los Angeles, which had first drawn them for both the weather and the relative anonymity, their home became the tightly knit center of the creative class. Reading about Walter and Louise made me yearn for a time when art was not an asset class but something that just simply made your heart sing. Alas, however the LA museums were not smart enough to retain the art collection and so the Arensberg collections are now scattered: the art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Walter's collection devoted to the oeuvre of Sir Francis Bacon at the Huntington Library. The book is a project of the Getty. So in a belated sense, the Arensbergs have come home.