A $10,000 Forgery and the Dealer Behind LA's Museum Collections

In 1947, the Minneapolis Institute of Art paid $10,000 for a "King Chak Mool" — an ancient Chacmool sculpture that toured Europe from 1958 to 1960 and became a cornerstone of the museum's collection. A decade later, a specialist confirmed the truth: the sculpture was a forgery.

The story of that forgery, and of the dealer who placed it, appears in Artifacts to Art: Collecting Ancient America in Midcentury L.A. (2026), written by Andrew D. Turner, Mary E. Miller, and Khristaan D. Villela. The Getty Research Institute, which houses the archive at the center of the book, published the volume.

The book's focal point is the Stendahl Art Galleries of Los Angeles. As the authors document, the gallery drove the illegal looting, smuggling, and sale of pre-Hispanic objects to a Los Angeles clientele. Earl Stendahl, the dealer at its center, had, in the authors' account, little regard for the cultural histories he exploited.

A 1940 photograph by Man Ray captures the world Stendahl served. In it, Academy Award-winning actor Teresa Wright poses misty-eyed beside an ancient Chacmool sculpture, its head contorted toward the viewer. The image offered a refreshed vision of modernity to Hollywood stars and to a growing clientele of collectors and museums seeking pre-colonial art from ancient Mesoamerica.

How did artifacts become art?

The book explains the shift that reclassified "pre-Hispanic" artifacts from anthropological items of study into art objects that museums and private patrons could collect. Turner, Miller, and Villela identify the forces that collided to create this market:

• Revered international museums
• Hollywood actors
• Looters operating across Mexico

The Stendahl galleries sat at the junction of all three. The gallery's archive, now held at the Getty Research Institute, allowed the authors to conduct what their publisher calls five years of groundbreaking research into the dealer's dealings. The book's non-chronological chapters map how these markets formed and overlapped.

What does this change for LA's museums?

The book addresses a question many curators in Los Angeles have long asked: why does the city hold so much cultural heritage of ancient Central and South America in its collections? The answer, the authors argue, runs through dealers like Stendahl, whose supply chains stretched from looters in Mexico to museum halls and Hollywood homes.

The Minneapolis forgery shows the scale of the trade — and its risks. An object could pass through a major museum, tour European exhibition venues, anchor a collection for a decade, and still be a fake.

With the Stendahl archive now open to sustained scholarly scrutiny, further attributions and repatriation claims against midcentury American collections seem likely to follow.