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Exhibitions |
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December 2, 2008 |
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Please Be Seated: A Video Installation by Nicole Cohen
Daily through January 11, 2009
South Pavilion, Plaza Level, Getty Center
Internationally recognized video artist Nicole Cohen (American, b. 1970) explores the intersection of historical interiors, the social behaviors they conditioned, contemporary popular culture, and fantasy. Her project for the Getty Museum focuses on the Museum's collection of French seating furniture and its original and museological contexts. Viewers are invited to engage in a participatory experience, forming personal, imaginative narratives through video projections that render the chairs virtually accessible.
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Tango with Cows: Book Art of the Russian Avant-Garde, 1910–1917
Daily through April 19, 2009
Research Institute Exhibition Gallery, Getty Center
Drawing principally from the Getty Research Institute's superb collection of Russian modernist books, Tango with Cows: Book Art of the Russian Avant-Garde, 1910–1917 brings into focus a brief, but tumultuous period when Russian visual artists and poets, including Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Kazimir Malevich, Alexei Kruchenykh, and Velimir Khlebnikov, challenged Symbolism and revolutionized book art. They fabricated pocket-sized, hand-lithographed books and juxtaposed primitive and abstract imagery with a transrational poetry they called zaum'("beyonsense"). The exhibition traces the avant-garde's use of the materials of their book art—imagery, language and its sounds, design, graphic technique—to convey humor, parody, and an intriguing ambivalence and apprehension about Russia's past, present, and future.
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In Focus: The Landscape
Daily through January 11, 2009
Center for Photographs, Getty Center
Like painters and draftsmen before them, photographers turned to the landscape as a source of inspiration after the invention of the medium was announced in 1839. Since then, changing artistic movements and continual technical advancements have provided opportunities for camera artists to approach the subject in diverse and imaginative ways. This exhibition, which is drawn exclusively from the Getty's collection, brings together the work of over 25 innovative photographers who have left their mark on the history of the genre, including Gustave Le Gray, Alfred Stieglitz, and Robert Adams.
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A Light Touch: Exploring Humor in Drawing
Daily through December 7, 2008
Museum Galleries, Getty Center
As a result of its immediacy, drawing has for centuries been used to lampoon human character, ridicule physical characteristics, and satirize behavior. While some drawings were intimate objects viewed by individuals or small groups of people, others were transferred into prints with a wider agenda. Different drawing media (watercolor, pen and ink, etc.) often highlight diverse aims and effects. This exhibition will include works by Leonardo da Vinci, Urs Graf, Giambattista Tiepolo, Francisco de Goya, Thomas Rowlandson, and Pierre Bonnard, and will explore brands of humor, from wicked caricatures to wry observations of social injustice.
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Dialogue among Giants: Carleton Watkins and the Rise of Photography in California
Daily through March 1, 2009
Center for Photographs, Getty Center
Dialogue among Giants presents the photographs of Carleton Watkins (American, 1829–1916) in the context of the birth and evolution of photography in California. The exhibition considers the social, political, economic, and artistic developments in California between the time of statehood in 1850 and the mid-1880s. It includes approximately 150 works, from daguerreotypes by unknown makers to mammoth-plate photographs by Watkins and his contemporaries.
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The Belles Heures of the Duke of Berry
Daily through February 8, 2009
Museum Galleries, Getty Center
The Belles Heures of John, Duke of Berry is one of the most beloved books of the Middle Ages and one of the most sumptuous. Painted by the Limbourg brothers when the art of manuscript illumination in France reached new heights of elegance and sophistication, the book, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will be presented with its individual leaves unbound. The resulting display offers a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the visitor to walk through the book to view all of its major miniatures, a unique gallery of paintings of sublime beauty.
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Sur le motif: Painting in Nature around 1800
Daily through March 8, 2009
West Pavilion, Plaza Level, Getty Center
During the late 1700s and early 1800s European artists made a formal practice of working outdoors in the clear, pure light of the Italian countryside, transcribing the atmosphere and depth of picturesque landscape views. Originally intended as studies for more formal, idealized studio paintings, the sketches they created are today considered highly satisfying works of art in their own right. This concise survey exhibition features recent acquisitions by artists such as Jean-Victor Bertin, Jean-Joseph Xavier Bidauld, Camille Corot, Simon Denis, and Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, supplemented by loans from local collections.
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December 16, 2008 |
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Captured Emotions: Baroque Painting in Bologna, 1575–1725
Daily, December 16, 2008 - May 3, 2009
Exhibitions Pavilion, Getty Center
In the late sixteenth century, a small group of artists from Bologna changed the course of art history. This exhibition tells the extraordinary story of the Carracci family, who reinvigorated the art of painting with tremendous energy and vitality. Their achievement set standards that remained authoritative for more than two centuries. A selection of key works by the Carracci and their followers brings this artistic triumph to life. Twenty-seven of them—most never exhibited before in North America—are on loan from the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, one of the world's premier collections of old master paintings. This exhibition has been co-organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.
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December 23, 2008 |
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Drawing the Classical Figure
Daily, December 23, 2008 - March 8, 2009
Museum Galleries, Getty Center
Mastering the depiction of the human figure has long been a cornerstone of an artistŐs training. This survey of drawings from the 1300s to the 1800s examines how the rediscovery classical sculpture influenced the ways in which artists rendered the human form. A selection of Italian, Flemish, Dutch, Swiss, French, and British drawings illustrates the powerful aesthetic, philosophical, and political forces that informed the representation of the classical figure.
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January 27, 2009 |
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In Focus: The Portrait
Daily, January 27 - June 14, 2009
West Pavilion, Terrace Level, Getty Center
Since its invention, photography has forged a revolution in documentary evidence and artistic representation, especially in the realm of portraiture. A more democratic, inexpensive medium than most traditional artistic media, photography made portraits available to a wider public. This exhibition, drawn exclusively from the Getty Museum's collection, presents the evolution of the genre from commissioned portraits to intimate views as well as those reflecting social concerns. Works by such photographers as Félix Nadar, Edward Steichen, Walker Evans, and Nan Goldin are included.
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February 24, 2009 |
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German and Central European Manuscript Illumination
Daily, February 24 - May 24, 2009
North Pavilion, Plaza Level, Getty Center
Highlighting masterworks from the Ottonian, Romanesque, and Gothic periods, this exhibition features manuscripts and leaves from the Museum's holdings of German and Central European illumination. Illustrating the artistic achievement of one of the greatest epochs of German and Central European art, the selection show how manuscript illumination continued to flourish, even after the invention of the printed book in the 1400s.
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March 3, 2009 |
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Tales in Sprinkled Gold: Japanese Lacquer for European Collectors
Tuesday March 3, 2009March 3 - May 24, 2009
North Pavilion, Plaza Level, Getty Center
The Mazarin Chest and the Van Diemen Box (now in the collection of Japanese art at London's Victoria and Albert Museum) were made in about 1635 for European patrons. These beautiful and important examples of Japanese export lacquer are the centerpieces of this exhibition, which also includes a selection of lacquer objects that provide history and context. Tales in Sprinkled Gold marks the completion of a major research and conservation project on the Mazarin Chest that was partially funded by the Getty Foundation.
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March 31, 2009 |
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Made for Manufacture
Tuesday March 31, 2009March 31 - July 5, 2009
Museum Galleries, Getty Center
For both economic and creative reasons, many Renaissance and Baroque artists made drawings for sculpture and decorative arts. Such designs are appreciated not only for their aesthetic merit, but for how they were actually used. This exhibition comprises drawings for three-dimensional objects to be made in a variety of media, including metal, wood, glass, ceramic, and stone, with particular attention paid to how the form of a design reflects an object's function and how two-dimensional drawings were transferred to three-dimensional works of art.
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Taking Shape: Finding Sculpture in the Decorative Arts
Tuesday March 31, 2009March 31 - July 5, 2009
West Pavilion, Plaza Level, Getty Center
Focusing on the sculptural aspects of the decorative arts, this exhibition explores the rich plasticity of objects intended for functional or ceremonial use. In addition to sculpture, it showcases astonishly inventive works of art, such as furniture, light fixtures, and accessories for the hearth from the Getty Museum and Temple Newsam, a historic country house near Leeds, England. Nearly forty extraordinary works from England, France, Holland, and Italy—executed in the exuberant Baroque and Rococo styles popular during the 1600s and 1700s—are featured. Taking Shape: Finding Sculpture in the Decorative Arts has been co-organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
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Paul Outerbridge: Command Performance
Tuesday March 31, 2009March 31 - August 9, 2009
West Pavilion, Terrace Level, Getty Center
Paul Outerbridge Jr. (American, 1896–1958) burst onto the New York art scene in the early 1920s with photographs that were visually fresh and decidedly Modernist. He applied his talent for the formal arrangement of objects to the commercial world and was a visionary for his use of color. This exhibition brings together nearly one hundred photographs from all periods of Outerbridge's career, including his Cubist still life images, staged magazine photographs, and controversial nudes.
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May 19, 2009 |
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Walls of Algiers: Narratives of the Colonial City
Tuesday May 19, 2009May 19 - October 18, 2009
Research Institute Exhibition Gallery, Getty Center
The city of Algiers, legendary for its white walls cascading to the azure sea below, reflects the turbulent history of colonial occupation. Walls of Algiers: Narratives of the Colonial City, an exhibition featuring this city's urban fabric, is drawn from diverse 19th- and 20th-century visual sources collected over the last two decades by the Research Library at the Getty Research Institute. The exhibition will map, for example, an itinerary of the Casbah and the European quarters through vintage postcards, as well as juxtapose the long-tradition of staged Orientalist representations of "indigenous" people with photojournalist coverage from the Algerian War. More than a colonial capital, Algiers served as a testing ground for urban renewal with its walls extending metaphorically across the Mediterranean to take part in the search for modernity.
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Exhibitions |
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December 1, 2008 |
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Jim Dine: Poet Singing (The Flowering Sheets)
Daily through February 9, 2009
Museum, Floor 2, Getty Villa
This exhibition presents new works and poetry by Jim Dine based on ancient Greek sculptures in the Museum's collection. The first contemporary art project at the Getty Villa, this installation illustrates the continuing influence of antiquity on living artists.
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December 18, 2008 |
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Reconstructing Identity: A Statue of a God from Dresden
Daily, December 18, 2008 - June 1, 2009
Museum, Floor 2, Getty Villa
This exhibition examines the restoration history of a Roman statue from the Dresden State Art Collections. Since its discovery in the 1600s, the figure has been successively restored as Alexander the Great, Bacchus, and Antinous in the guise of the wine god. Damaged in World War II, the sculpture was recently reassembled by Getty and Dresden conservators.
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The Getty Commodus: Roman Portraits and Modern Copies
Daily, December 18, 2008 - June 1, 2009
Getty Villa
The Getty's marble bust of the Roman emperor Commodus was acquired in 1992 as an Italian work of the 1500s, but specialists later proposed that it may be from the second century A.D. Putting the object in context with Roman portraits and modern copies from the Mannerist and Neoclassical periods, this exhibition shows how curators and conservators have determined the sculpture's date.
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Fragment to Vase: Approaches to Ceramic Restoration
Daily, December 18, 2008 - June 1, 2009
Museum, Floor 2, Getty Villa
Exploring contemporary issues in vase restoration, this exhibition provides a behind-the-scenes look at how Getty conservators assemble ancient pottery fragments into understandable forms. It illustrates how technical innovations, scholarly contributions, and aesthetic choices combine to reveal the original design and iconography of ceramic masterpieces.
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March 19, 2009 |
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Carvers and Collectors: The Lasting Allure of Ancient Gems
Thursday March 19, 2009March 19 - September 7, 2009
Museum, Floor 2, Getty Villa
Carved gemstones have captivated connoiseurs of every age, from antiquity to the modern period. The exhibition Carvers and Collectors: The Lasting Allure of Ancient Gems brings together remarkable intaglios and cameos carved by ancient master engravers along with some of the outstanding works by modern carvers that they have inspired. The gems will be displayed together with material from later periods that evinces their importance through the ages—illuminated manuscripts, rare engravings from early catalogues, cabinets designed to house collections of gems, and other works of art in diverse media to illustrate the lasting allure of these masterpieces in miniature.
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