Beanie Babies founder Ty Warner was converting his toy-making fortune into a luxury real estate empire in 2000, he bought the historic Four Seasons Biltmore Santa Barbara hotel and a spectacular adjacent seaside conference center property. The more than $160 million he spent for this breathtaking Central Coast pair also bought him a stellar exemplar of Bauhaus art: the monumental 1981 sculpture Walk in Space Painting, by Herbert Bayer.
The sculpture apparently disappeared from its idyllic lawn above Butterfly Beach in 2024, which has Bayer’s granddaughter asking: What happened to this once-
cherished masterpiece?
“I would like to know what their motivation was and why they decided that it was OK to destroy this work of art without consulting with the family,” artist and documentarian Koko Bayer says in an interview with THR.
Private and famously press-averse, Warner has a current net worth of $6.6 billion, according to Forbes, which he amassed during the frenzied 1990s collectible plush toy phenomenon. He was the subject of two recent films — the HBO documentary Beanie Mania (2021) and the Zach Galifianakis-led Apple feature The Beanie Bubble (2023) — both of which depicted Warner’s eccentricities and cutthroat business tactics. Warner shuttered the Biltmore during the pandemic in 2020, but its continued closure has stirred much local controversy.
The colorful 40-foot-diameter Walk in Space Painting sculpture was constructed of concrete and custom-glazed brick in a shallow circular pool on a palm tree-lined lawn in Montecito. It was the final work personally overseen by Bayer, then 81, an Austria-born polymath and lifelong adherent of the creative principles of the Bauhaus School, the convention-smashing interwar German institution where he studied and taught alongside trailblazing artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee in the 1920s. Bayer left the Bauhaus in 1928 for Berlin, where he forged a successful design career until he was blacklisted by the Nazis and included in their notorious “Degenerate Art Show” in 1937, though his legacy is complicated by the fact that he did take earlier Nazi commissions. He fled to New York in 1938. After a three-decade stint in Aspen, Colorado, he settled in Montecito — blocks away from the eventual Walk in Space Painting site — in the mid-1970s as health issues forced him from the mountains to sea level. He died there in 1985.
When Bayer completed Walk in Space Painting, the property was owned by the Atlantic Richfield Co. (ARCO), which used it as an executive training retreat. A decade earlier, ARCO had commissioned Bayer to design a sculpture for what is now City National Plaza in downtown Los Angeles. The work, known as Double Ascension, would become Bayer’s most famous piece, a staircase to nowhere that prominently appeared in such films as Marathon Man and Pretty Woman.
Though less well known, Walk in Space Painting is considered among his most important works. He spent 20 years perfecting the sculpture’s design and exploring the concept of a “walk-through painting.” Built on a $147,000 budget, Walk in Space Painting had six freestanding walls evocative of Bayer’s canvases and eight stepping stones across its pool.
“It’s the piece that brings many aspects of Herbert’s career into focus in three dimensions,” says Bayer expert Bernard Jazzar, who has curated exhibitions at the Resnick Center for Herbert Bayer Studies, a museum devoted to the artist on the Bayer-designed campus of the Aspen Institute, where I manage educational programs.
Koko Bayer has filmed footage of most of her grandfather’s major sculptures and earthworks since 2019 for an in-progress documentary. But the Denver-based filmmaker could not get substantive responses from Warner’s reps about accessing the Santa Barbara property to shoot Walk in Space Painting. “It was just a black hole,” she says.
In May, a pair of Bayer fans attempting to view the sculpture from over a short brick wall on the backside of the property alerted Koko Bayer that the sculpture had disappeared. She flew to Santa Barbara to investigate and found Walk in Space Painting was indeed gone, apparently ripped from the ground and replaced with a roughly sodded lawn.
“My stomach just dropped,” she says. “It was so sad to see this gorgeous thing just not there. It was like losing a member of our extended family.”
The last known photo of Walk in Space Painting is dated January 2024.
THR’s attempts to reach Warner reps for comment via phone, email and text message were unsuccessful. Koko Bayer also has been met with continued silence.
“The not knowing is somehow worse than knowing what actually happened,” she explains.
While the Biltmore and Walk in Space Painting properties on Channel Drive have remained dark for more than four years, Warner’s reps have been tangling in recent months with local authorities for land use approvals that would renovate and reimagine the historic Biltmore property for a proposed July 2025 reopening.
The fury of the Bayer family is the latest conflict to arise from Warner’s luxury ventures around Santa Barbara, which have included environmental concerns about expanding his Sandpiper Golf Club into a protected California red-legged frog habitat and settling a class action suit filed by long-furloughed hotel employees at the Biltmore.
Koko Bayer does not believe the sculpture could have been removed without destroying it. Archival photos of its 1981 construction show intricate in-ground foundation systems for its water features and freestanding walls. No demolition permits have been recently issued for the Walk in Space Painting property, according to the Santa Barbara County planning and development department, and no work at all has been permitted on the site since 2009.
If the piece was indeed destroyed, Warner may have broken the law. Attorney MJ Bogatin, an expert in federal and state art preservation law and a board member of California Lawyers for the Arts, notes the California Art Preservation Act of 1979 affirms an artwork’s moral right to exist for 50 years after the artist’s death and that a case can be brought up to three years after its destruction is discovered.
Paul Hobson, a San Diego artist who assisted Bayer during the completion of Walk in Space Painting, holds out hope that the piece could live again. Bayer designed his sculptures with such specificity that the plans could be executed again by others, he says: “Why not rebuild?”
Koko Bayer would welcome the prospect. “I would love to see this Hollywood ending, where somehow this wrong gets righted and a new version of this sculpture gets built somewhere in Santa Barbara, where people could see and interact with it.”
This story appeared in the Jan. 3 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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