Born in Vienna, Austria, Richard Neutra is primarily known for his Southern California-based architectural practice. He was mentored by Adolph Loos and was inspired to come to the United States after being exposed to the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. After moving to the U.S., Neutra worked with Wright as well as Rudolph Schindler. His American breakthrough came with the Lovell Health House in 1927-1929, and he was subsequently featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s traveling survey of Modern Architecture in 1932.
Richard Neutra’s architecture has been presented extensively in museum contexts. During his early United States career, Neutra was exhibited alongside celebrated architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Miës van der Rohe in the famous Modern Architecture: International Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This exhibition subsequently traveled around the United States and was shown at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Harvard University Fogg Art Museum, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, among other major institutions. Neutra was consistently included in architecture exhibitions over the course of the 20thcentury at the Museum of Modern Art and elsewhere, frequently in the company of major modernist architects—company that soon included Neutra himself.
Neutra’s first major solo exhibition took place at the UCLA Art Galleries in 1958-1959. Organized by Frederick Wight, this retrospective show was also exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Dallas Museum of Art, among others. The Museum of Modern Art held its own retrospective of Neutra’s career in 1982.
In recent years, Richard Neutra’s architecture has played a significant role in how museums and art institutions tell the story of the Southern California modernist aesthetic. His work was included in the Orange County Museum of Art’s Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, And Culture At Midcentury, which traveled widely between 2007 and 2009. Similarly, Neutra’s oeuvre was featured in the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time initiative in both 2011 and 2017.
Aside from the homes and other structures that represent the bulk of his practice, Richard Neutra’s models, designs, and drawings are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, and the Palm Springs Museum of Art.
Neutra continued to design groundbreaking modernist homes of steel and glass around Southern California and its environs. He returned to Europe toward the end of his life, where he designed several of his late projects.