When you look at sculpture in the Getty Museum’s galleries, you wouldn’t guess that some of the pedestals are somewhat unusual. Under their polished veneer, they’re engineered to protect art from the movements caused by earthquakes.
Many museums in California and other parts of the world, including Italy, Greece, and Japan, are located in areas prone to seismic activity—and their collections have suffered a great deal as a result. The Getty has devised pioneering mechanisms that safely stabilize vulnerable artworks.
Working closely with our conservators, we created this animation demonstrating technology the Museum uses to mitigate earthquake damage to vulnerable objects. How do the earth’s movements during an earthquake affect intrinsically unstable works of art? And what can be done to protect them? Hold onto your seats and watch.
Tags: antiquities conservation, Conservation, conservation science, earthquake, earthquakes, Getty Museum collection, Sculpture, seismic mitigation, video
In this time of uncertainty, art can bring pleasure to the eye, nourishment to the mind, and also solace to the heart. A work that does just this is Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Making Fritters (Les Beignets), an enchanting drawing from about 1782 that the Getty Museum recently acquired.
Making Fritters (Les Beignets), Jean-Honoré Fragonard, about 1782. Brown wash over graphite, 9 11/16 x 14 3/4 in. The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012.4
It depicts a happy scene in a rustic cottage interior, where a large family hums with pleasure and anticipation as a young mother leans over the fire, making beignets (the French equivalent of doughnuts) in a frying pan. No less than five babies struggle over, stare at, or steal the hot treats that are stacking up in a bowl in the foreground. A little spaniel patiently observes the cooking, surely with the hope that it might get its share too.
Babies and beignets: A gaggle of youngsters make a grab for newly prepared fritters stacking up in a bowl in the foreground.
As mom cooks fritters over the fire, a well-mannered spaniel looks on with high hopes.
Making Fritters shows Jean-Honoré Fragonard (French, 1732–1806) at the height of his powers as a draftsman, with his virtuosic, inimitable drawing style that pulses with spirit and energy. Using quick graphite lines, Fragonard first sketched his complex and animated composition. He then applied loose brown washes with a brush in subtle gradations, which are still incredibly fresh for a drawing that was made some 230 years ago.
Far from being literally descriptive, the brushwork often doesn’t follow the webs of graphite lines of the underdrawing, thereby creating two interconnected and complementary layers of dynamic media. What’s more, the sheet is full of tiny flecks of white paper intentionally left blank in order to illuminate the composition with sparkling highlights. The artist’s ingenious technique is wonderfully illustrated in the eyes of his figures: he successfully conveys their emotions with mere dots of ink. In sum, Fragonard is a master of suggestion through very economical means.
Fragonard combines complex webs of graphite lines, loose washes, and flecks of blank paper to achieve a style that pulses with spirit and energy.
Making Fritters is an outstanding example of the kind of autonomous drawings that Fragonard made of playful, happy, and wholesome families in the late 1770s and early 1780s. His interest in childhood and families partly came from his own experience as a father, but it had philosophical and literary underpinnings too. A number of contemporary writers, most notably the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Swiss, 1712-1778), preached that the family was the social unit on which the strength and vitality of a nation depended. Rousseau celebrated the joys of domestic life and claimed that it was the best antidote to immorality. His stance contrasted with the libertinage that we tend to associate with much of the 1800s in France. While it’s impossible to know whether Fragonard fully agreed with Rousseau’s familial ethos, at least it is clear that the draftsman found genuine inspiration in his subject!
The drawing will find great company in the Getty collection, which houses other fine French 18th-century examples of happy rustic scenes, such as Gabriel de Saint-Aubin’s Country Dance and Jean-Baptiste Le Prince’s Russian Craddle.
Fragonard’s Les Beignets is currently showcased in the Getty Center’s West Pavilion (Gallery 104), alongside another recently acquired drawing, Piero del Pollaiuolo’s Portrait of a Young Man.
Jean-Honore Fragonard's Making Fritters (right) hangs alongside Piero del Pollaiuolo's Portrait of a Young Man at the Getty Center, Gallery W104. Magnifying glasses invite visitors to look closely.
Tags: drawing, drawing techniques, French art, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Old Masters, recent acquisitions
Teachers in the Art & Language Arts program join education specialist Veronica Alvarez to discuss Jean-Joseph Carriès's Self-Portrait as Midas.
I’ve always appreciated art, but creating art never seemed like something I could do. Creating a drawing or painting was what talented people did, not me.
Professionally, I first became involved in art 10 years ago when I left the practice of law to become a teacher at Canterbury Elementary School. I included art activities in the classroom and took many art workshops at local museums so I could bring the ideas I learned into my classroom.
Still, it wasn’t until I participated in a summer seminar at the Getty Museum’s Art & Language Arts program that I started to believe that I, and not just my students, could create art and make it a part of my life. I loved learning about different artists and artistic styles, but I particularly loved the program’s many hands-on art activities. After all, how better to inspire our students to creativity than to experience it ourselves?
After the summer with Art & Language Arts, I enrolled in a 14-week course in figure drawing at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. I’d never taken an intensive art class before—but now I’m hooked. Next month I’ll start another 14-week course on advanced figure drawing.
In short, I’ve become an artist.
Untitled, a figure drawing by Paula Rucker
The culminating event of the 2011–12 Art & Language Arts program took place on April 14 (see photos on our Art & Language Arts blog), and I returned to the Getty Center to present a lesson focused on a topic that has always been a favorite of mine, Impressionism.
I began my lesson by showing Wheatstacks by Claude Monet. Utilizing the questioning techniques I learned from the Art & Language Arts program, I helped students to observe the painting and come up with descriptive words and phrases about the artwork. One student said the wheatstacks in the painting looked like muffins. Another said the painting made them feel cold and lonely. I then had the students use the descriptive words and phrases to create a cinquain poem about the work of art. Later, students created their own Impressionist-style paintings with cotton swabs and tempera paint and wrote cinquain poems to accompany their own works of art.
The students’ excitement in creating their own original work was contagious. They had so much fun sharing their artwork and poems with their classmates. But this time, I knew exactly what they were feeling—because I’m an artist, too. We’re all artists, just waiting to give ourselves permission to create.
Tags: ALA, Art & Language Arts, arts education, K-12 programs, teachers, visual arts
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PSTinBerlin: The Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, with the Kunst in Los Angeles banner flying high (at right)
Pacific Standard Time officially ended in Los Angeles on March 31, but it continues nearly 6,000 miles away in Berlin.
Pacific Standard Time: Kunst in Los Angeles 1950–1980 opened at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin on March 15th. With double the space of the Getty Center exhibitions Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture and Greetings from L.A.: Artists and Publics—which we curated with our GRI colleagues Glenn Phillips and Catherine Taft—and with many new works added, the show was reconceived for the German venue.
Conservators and preparators from the J. Paul Getty Museum install John Mason's 1957 sculpture Vertical Sculpture, Spear Form at the Martin-Gropius-Bau. Artwork © John Mason
L.A. art under Berlin skies: crated artwork gets a lift into the galleries of the Martin-Gropius-Bau.
Entering the Martin-Gropius-Bau galleries, you leave 21st-century Berlin behind and enter Los Angeles of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Visitors are greeted by a large-scale version of Louis Hock’s three-channel film installation Southern California and Ed Ruscha’s 18-foot-long artist’s book Every Building on the Sunset Strip splayed out in a vitrine. A selection of Dennis Hopper’s photographs dots the walls nearby, giving a flavor of the L.A. sensibility.
Major new additions for the Berlin presentation include Sam Francis’s monumental 24-by-36-foot painting Berlin Red, which was painted in Los Angeles as a commission for the Neue Nationalgalerie in 1969, and Edward Kienholz’s series of sculptures Volksempfängers (People’s Wireless), which are installed in the Schliemann Saal room, a gallery that originally housed archeologist Heinrich Schliemann’s discovery of Trojan gold and other spoils in the late 19th century.
Single-artist galleries are devoted to the work of James Turell, Robert Graham, Larry Bell, and Bruce Nauman, and 50 Julius Shulman photographs supplement the exhibition, giving visitors a taste of the Los Angeles built environment.
The exhibition was positively reviewed in the German and European media, and while some critics fell back on the oft-repeated cliches of “California cool,” many offered meaningful reappraisals of art made in Southern California in the postwar era.
And the visitors to the show? Many were drawn in by David Hockney’s idealized notion of sunny California and its swimming pools, but almost as many were intrigued by the work of lesser-known artists such as De Wain Valentine and Ron Davis.
Artist De Wain Valentine with Rani and Andrew in the Martin-Gropius-Bau galleries, in front of Valentine's monumental polyester resin sculpture Red Concave Circle. Artwork © De Wain Valentine.
Artist Fred Eversley with Andrew at the Martin-Gropius-Bau
We were part of a large contingent of Angelenos in Berlin for the opening, which included many of the artists, such as Charles Arnoldi, Larry Bell, Judy Chicago, Ed Moses, and Fred Eversley. A lively artists’ panel moderated by Research Institute curator Rani Singh gave the audience a sense of the personalities and long-shared histories of the group. The California contingent was also treated to a behind-the-scenes tour of Berlin’s Museuminsel (Museum Island) by Peter Klaus Schuster, director emeritus of the Berlin State Museums, and Research Institute director Thomas Gaehtgens. Both art historians contributed essays to the new German publication Pacific Standard Time: Kunst in Los Angeles 1945–1980.
Berlin has been Los Angeles’s sister city since 1967, and the two metropolises share a spirit of artistic energy and a legacy of fearless experimentation. It’s the perfect place for Pacific Standard Time to continue its journey.
Tags: De Wain Valentine, GRI, John Mason, Julius Shulman, Pacific Standard Time, PST, PSTinLA
Self-portrait by photographer Camille el Kareh, taken in Lebanon in the 1920s. Arab Image Foundation/Mohsen Yaminne Collection. Photo © Arab Image Foundation
We treasure our family photos because they are reminders of meaningful memories. The same can be said of the photographic collections held by institutions, for they represent who we are and where we have been.
When photographs become damaged or lost—whether an institutional collection or the photographic heritage of an entire country or region—we lose a tangible reminder of the memories they embody. The loss or destruction of these resources can also have serious implications for our collective history.
In the Middle East, awareness of the importance of preserving photographic collections has grown in recent years. Along with this new awareness comes the recognition of the need for more information about these collections and for local expertise in the preservation of this heritage to secure it for future generations.
Left: Lady who came with Hussam El-Dine Mustafa for a screen-test - Rollei films in Egypt, Cairo, 1957. Photo: Van Leo / Van Leo Collection © Arab Image Foundation. Right: Albert Khayat posing with a friend in a painted set-up of the DHP train. Lebanon, Beirut, 1930. Photo: Jules Lind / Georges Khayat Collection. Photo © Arab Image Foundation
The Getty Conservation Institute has joined with the Arab Image Foundation, the Art Conservation Department of the University of Delaware, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art to address these issues. Together we have formed the Middle East Photograph Preservation Initiative (MEPPI) with a program to identify and assess photographic collections in the Middle East—from North Africa and the Arab Peninsula through Western Asia. MEPPI will also provide training opportunities for local professionals and work towards raising the visibility of the collections.
MEPPI course in Beirut, Lebanon. Photo: Tram Vo
Three courses will be offered through MEPPI, and the first was a training workshop in Beirut last November. Participants from eight different countries—Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, and Syria—were introduced to key concepts and practices in the identification, preservation, and display of photographic material. The workshop also provided an opportunity to network with other professionals from the region and learn about other collections.
Participants are now in the distance mentoring part of the course, which consists of self-study with mentors. Throughout an eight-month period, they will remain in contact with the instructors, who provide advice, guidance, and additional information to assist them in their work with their collections. During this phase the participants also have projects to be carried out in their own institutions.
The first assignment was to raise awareness and support for the photographic collections within their respective institutions through presentations for colleagues and decision makers.
MEPPI Beirut participant giving a presentation to colleagues about the workshop and the distance-mentoring assignments.
A number of participants reached out to an even broader, more public audience. Mohammadreza Tahmasebpour, an independent researcher from Iran, shared a selection of images from the Golestan Palace Museum archives and other private collections through a moderated online slideshow on the Internet. Clare Davies from the Qasr el Boubara Institute for Historical Research in Egypt, and Ibrahim Abdel-Fattah from the Grand Egyptian Museum, presented a public lecture earlier this year at Contemporary Image Collective in Cairo on Egypt’s photographic heritage.
The next assignment is to conduct a survey of the environment and housing conditions for an institution’s photograph collection. In September a final follow-up meeting will take place in Morocco, which will allow instructors and participants to review the progress made over the previous months.
The second of the three courses that are being offered through this initiative will start in November in Abu Dhabi. Applications for MEPPI Abu Dhabi 2012 are now available to all qualified personnel from the region, with a deadline of May 27, 2012.
Tags: cultural heritage, GCI, heritage conservation, MEPPI, Middle East, Middle East Photograph Preservation Initiative, photographs conservation
“Never allow yourself to feel anything, because you always feel too much.” —Marlon Brando
“Only the gentle are ever really strong.” —James Dean
Beyond fitting, this weekend’s concluding film series What Becomes a Legend offers the increasingly rare opportunity to screen A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955) in all their haunting glory. Only a few years apart, these two films succeeded in extracting moving-portraits (literally) of two men, iconic images of masculinity and rebellion—Marlon Brando and James Dean.
Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). Photo: Photofest/Warner Bros. © Warner Bros.
Both films use an excellent cast and great, tragic storytelling to their best advantage—highlighting the insecurities of a damaged woman in a A Streetcar Named Desire and the never-ending disconnect between teens and their parents in Rebel Without a Cause. Yet the lone, overwhelming images lingering in our minds and culture are those of Brando’s Stanley Kowalski and Dean’s Jim Stark. Though it’s easy to group these two legendary portrayals into the same category now, they are perhaps better viewed in contrast with each other. Brando’s black-and-white performance harks back to the theater, while Dean’s colorful CinemaScope hints at the youth culture here to stay.
James Dean as Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Photo: Photofest/Warner Bros. © Warner Bros.
Brando’s Kowalski and Dean’s Stark are the yin and yang of postwar male angst. While the sweat-and-grease-covered Brando distracts himself from a pregnant wife and a complicated sister-in-law with card games and bowling lanes, the red-leather-jacketed Dean is forced into knife fights, racing stolen cars, and trying to make his parents understand. Even if they were to play the same roles, you quickly understand that Brando’s rough exterior is suffocating the child within, while Dean’s tender tendencies are holding back the desperate man inside, for a while at least. However, it’s still not that easy to simplify what these portrayals bring to the screen, “Brando the soul and Dean the heart” as some have described.
Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). © Warner Bros.
One thing no one can deny either of them is a raw, burning intensity, rarely seen in actors since. Brando balances brutish tactics with a seeping pain the audience can’t truly take in all at once. And Dean, despite the smoothness of his efforts in protecting others, cannot contain the despair that’s tearing him apart. Maybe these portrayals remain dear to us not because they’re trying to present a flawless ideal—far from it—but rather, because they are flawed…just like us. Though I’ll admit, few can make inner suffering look as good as they could. Time will tell how much longer Brando’s brute and Dean’s rebel will persist in our collective psyche.
James Dean and Natalie Wood in Rebel Without a Cause (1955). © Warner Bros.
The What Becomes a Legend film series complements the Getty Museum exhibitions Portraits of Renown: Photography and the Cult of Celebrity and Herb Ritts: L.A. Style. Other legends on view this weekend are Brigitte Bardot in And God Created Woman (1956) and Elvis Presley in Jailhouse Rock (1957) with lines such as “That ain’t tactics, honey…it’s just the beast in me.”
Tags: film series, free events, Herb Ritts, James Dean, Marlon Brando, movies, Saturday programs
“Then appears a singular being having a man’s head atop the body of a fish,” Odilon Redon. Plate V in The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1888, lithograph. 17.7 x 12.5 in. (sheet). The Getty Research Institute, 2011.PR.30
My job as research assistant to Marcia Reed, chief curator at the Getty Research Institute, and Louis Marchesano, curator of prints & drawings, might be described as “research becomes eclectic.” In addition to investigating a wide array of potential acquisitions across the period of A.D. 1500 to the present, I’ve spent much of the past eight months researching the diverse prints now on view in The Getty Research Institute: Recent Print Acquisitions (through September 2). I’ve always struggled to pick a “favorite” historical period or artist, and honestly this job only makes that more difficult!
Inevitably, however, there are particular artists whose work I find especially appealing. I have recently become immersed in the graphic work of Odilon Redon (French, 1840–1916) thanks to working on an additional display featuring his prints in the West Pavilion of the J. Paul Getty Museum, which went up at the same time as the GRI print show.
In darkness and light: View into the gallery of The Getty Research Institute: Recent Print Acquisitions. Odilon Redon's print Lumière occupies its own spotlit nook on the tenebrous back wall (far right, in frame).
It seems that every modern period and place produces an auteur whose visions veer toward the realms of the strange, the dreamily dark, and the surreal. During the first half of his career Redon filled this role, gaining acclaim for creating bizarre and haunting visuals based on literature and his own imaginary scenarios. Flaming eyeballs float before a mountain range; fishlike creatures sport huge human heads and tiny hands; a giant man pauses outside a window while two small figures gesture towards him. Redon made these visions concrete via the lithograph, exploiting that medium’s ability to achieve dramatically contrasting blacks and whites.
But then, in a gradual and eventually definitive shift, Redon seems to have truly embraced the belle in Belle Epoque. Around 1890, he began producing fewer black and white lithographs (belles in their own ways, of course) in favor of lighter, more woozily ethereal and Edenic imagery rendered in luminous, deep colors, as demonstrated beautifully by a pastel and pencil drawing in the collection of the Getty Museum.
Baronne de Domecy, Odilon Redon, about 1900. Pastel and graphite on light brown laid paper, 24 x 16 11/16 in. The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005.1
Redon’s colorful work retains a certain odd dreaminess, but more in the sense of a fantastic daydream than an otherworldly nightmare. With recent acquisitions of Redon prints by the GRI, visitors to the Getty can now glimpse both sides of Redon: the dark and the light.
Redon experimented obsessively with the tonal extremes of the lithograph, seemingly in the hopes of articulating—via literal lights and darks—the range and particularly the extremes of psychological experience. Unlike woodcuts or intaglio prints such as etching and engraving, lithography is a planar medium in which the artist doesn’t have to incise a metal plate or cut into a plank of wood. The method is much closer to drawing, in that the artist works with a greasy crayonlike tool on a flat surface (most often a stone, hence the “litho”). In this way the artist determines which parts of the stone the equally greasy ink will cling to, and can then make multiple impressions from one design.
Having begun his artistic endeavors with charcoal drawings he called “noirs” because of their intensely dark tones, Redon’s lithographs pick up where his early drawings left off. He was extremely exacting when it came to overseeing the printing of his work, and made sure that each impression’s blacks were sufficiently (and by sufficiently, I mean really) dense. Some of the prints almost have a three-dimensional quality. The GRI’s newly acquired prints by Redon were created during this period: 1888’s 10-print portfolio The Temptation of Saint Anthony and 1893’s standalone print Lumière. The acquisition joins several Redon letters in the collection, which includes the carte-de-visite shown below.
Odilon Redon, annotated carte-de-visite thanking Jules Bois for sending him a book on the occult, 1891. The Getty Research Institute, 87-A556
Redon loved literature, and was an active member of the Parisian Symbolist literary circles during the 1870s and 1880s. He often created series of prints based on literary works, and was drawn to darker subjects; one of his favorite authors was Edgar Allan Poe. Knowing this, a friend gave him a copy of Gustave Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony, a work which even today often garners the descriptor “trippy.” Equal parts play and novel (yet impossible to actually stage), Flaubert’s exhaustively researched text dramatically recreates a night in which Anthony, alone in the desert, experiences a variety of temptations orchestrated by the Devil. There are, of course, women; there are scientists; there are numerous false gods and prophets; and the Devil himself makes an appearance.
The project seemed to have haunted Flaubert, who published three separate versions of it over the course of his career. As part of my research I read the final 1874 version of the book that guided Redon’s prints—my first taste of Flaubert—and I can affirm that it is quite unlike anything I’ve ever read! I got the sensation of diving into the database of an incredibly brilliant, encyclopedic mind, and feeling the seams about to burst with arcane knowledge; yet there is an intense control with which the near-psychedelic visions are dispensed in the text.
The sheer abundance of ancient references in what is a rather slim work is mind-bending, and each sentence seems to contain multiple possibilities for a visual imagining. With lines like “…first, a puddle, then a prostitute, the corner of a temple, the figure of a soldier, a chariot with two rearing white horses,” Flaubert could keep any artist bent on capturing the essence of Saint Anthony very busy, and Redon eventually published three separate suites of prints inspired by lines from Flaubert’s text.
The GRI’s is the first suite issued, and this particular copy was originally owned by André Mellerio, a major collector and eventual biographer of Redon (you can see Mellerio’s diamond-shaped stamp on the lower right of the prints). The first print shown below, Plate VI, was Redon’s personal favorite; in it, Death, crowned by roses, hovers amidst an impenetrable and seemingly infinite black. Even in the final lithograph of the series, Plate X, when Anthony sees the face of Jesus Christ in the rising sun and realizes that he has survived the night of torment, the intense black of that night remains palpable beyond the rays of the sun.
“This is a skull with a crown of roses. It resides atop a woman’s torso of pearly whiteness,” Odilon Redon. Plate VI in The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1888. Lithograph, 17.7 x 12.5 in. (sheet). The Getty Research Institute, 2011.PR.30
“And in the same disc of the sun shines the face of Jesus Christ,” Odilon Redon. Plate X in The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1888. Lithograph, 17.7 x 12.5 in. (sheet). The Getty Research Institute, 2011.PR.30
As I mentioned, the entire suite is now on display in the Getty Museum, hung on the wall adjacent to James Ensor’s amazing painting Christ’s Entry into Brussels (completed in 1888, the same year Redon issued his prints). For an added bonus, we’ve also hung four prints by Max Ernst from his suite Natural History (1926) beside Redon’s Saint Anthony.
“Les eclairs au-dessous de quatorze ans,” Max Ernst. Plate XXIV in Histoire Naturelle (Natural History), 1926. Collotype. The Getty Research Institute, 88-B28429. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
“L’évadé,” Max Ernst. Plate XXX from Histoire Naturelle (Natural History), 1926. Collotype. The Getty Research Institute, 88-B28429. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
In addition to illustrating Redon’s influence on the Surrealists, the group of artists with whom Ernst was associated, the pairing also exposes some intriguing thematic connections. Utilizing collages made from traces of real-world objects (captured via pencil rubbings called “frottages”), the 34 collotype prints in Natural History depict a primordial world untouched by man. One of Anthony’s greatest temptations is the desire to escape from human consciousness by becoming a creature existing in a pre-human world like the one Ernst depicts, graced by God but free of temptation and sin—or to become pure matter, free of all consciousness. Anthony laments,
“Would that I had wings, a carapace, a shell, – that I could breathe out smoke, wield a trunk, – make my body writhe, – divide myself everywhere, – be in everything, – emanate with all the odours, – develop myself like the plants, – flow like water, – vibrate like sound – shine like light, – assume all forms- penetrate each atom – descend to the very bottom of matter, – be matter itself!”
Just this small sampling of Flaubert’s text reveals its hallucinatory and exhilaratingly visual qualities, which Redon captures so well. You can see the entire set through the GRI’s Digital Collections.
In Lumière, the other Redon print recently acquired by the GRI, things lighten up, as the title (“Light”) suggests—but only a little.
Lumière, Odilon Redon, 1893. Lithograph, 24.6 x 17.8 in. (sheet). The Getty Research Institute, 2011.PR.25
The viewer becomes a double voyeur, left to contemplate the two small men in the foreground as well as the large meditative head outside the window that they seem to be discussing. Linked to dreams and imagination, Redon’s subject illustrates his shared interest in the Symbolist’s exploration of forces mystical, occult, and spiritual. The “meaning” of the print seems open to the viewers’ own deciphering. Maybe the “pensive head” (as Redon initially called the print) represents the illumination or light that the individual thinker can cast upon society. At the same time, this individual (and especially the artist, Redon may be saying by extension) must always exist outside the collective. The print was made in an edition of 50, and as soon as the printing was complete, it was available at the Librairie de l’art independent, where proponents of mysticism and symbolism gathered (and no doubt came up with many other interpretations of this print!).
If you’d like to do some of your own deciphering, I encourage you to come see these prints in person. It’s amazing just how vibrant a work on paper composed of only blacks and whites can be—reproductions do not do Redon’s masterful prints justice. And while you’re there, amongst so many wonderful examples from Western printmaking, you, like me, might have to add a few onto your ever-growing list of “favorites.”
“Lumière” is on view at the GRI as part of the show “The Getty Research Institute: Recent Print Acquisitions,” while all ten prints from “The Temptation of Saint Anthony” are installed in the J. Paul Getty Museum (both through September 2, 2012).
Tags: 19th century painting, Getty Museum collection, Getty Research Institute collection, Gustave Flaubert, Max Ernst, Odilon Redon, prints, Symbolism
“Therefore, when laughter-loving Aphrodite saw [Anchises], she loved him, and terribly desire seized her in her heart. She went to Cyprus, to Paphos, where her precinct is and fragrant altar, and passed into her sweet-smelling temple. There she went in and put to the glittering doors, and there the Graces bathed her with heavenly oil such as blooms upon the bodies of the eternal gods—oil divinely sweet, which she had by her, filled with fragrance.”
—Homeric hymn, tr. H.G. Evelyn-White
The goddess of love, beauty, and desire, Aphrodite was also mistress of the seductive arts, perfume primary among them. Accustomed as we are to the aromas of car exhaust and air-conditioned buildings, to us the ancient world would perhaps be most overpowering in terms of smell. Sweating men and animals and their waste filled a city’s streets, making it vital to set off sacred spaces as well as those of luxury by making them smell sweet. Fragrance was everywhere in the ancient world, from scented oils used to adorn the body to incense burnt in homes and temples.
A visitor at the Spicy Scents activity checks the scent of labdanum, a favorite base note for ancient perfumes.
Perfumes had many uses and meanings: they could be holy, used in the worship of the gods or the burial of the dead; they could be a symbol of status and superiority, used by athletes, aristocrats, politicians, and royalty; they could be medicinal, used to relieve ailments of the lungs or skin. In ancient Egypt, Greece, and across the Roman Empire, perfume was part of ritual, beauty, and commerce—much as it is today.
I investigated this ancient art to create Spicy Scents, a hands-on spring break activity for Villa visitors. Here’s a primer on how ancient fragrances were made, followed by a DIY tutorial on how to make your own perfume, ancient-style. (Here’s the handout from our spring program with how-to instructions and an ingredient list.)
A Short History of Ancient Perfumes
I wanted to mimic as closely as possible the way perfumes would have been made in the ancient world, so I had to find out how that worked. Written sources describing ancient perfuming making are vague at best, though some writers such as Theophrastus (Greek, c. 270–285 B.C.) in his book On Odors and Pliny the Elder (Roman, A.D. 23–79) in his Natural History include lists of ingredients for perfumes, as well as some discussion of techniques and tools.
Tablets from Knossos, Crete, document oil deliveries to be processed by perfumers, and tablets from Mycenae, Thebes, and Pylos mention the work of perfumers. Visual sources of information were a little more helpful—the ancient Egyptians depicted perfume making, and humorous Roman frescoes from Pompeii and Herculaneum showing bands of cupids in perfume shops mixing scents are known. One of these is on view at the Villa in Gallery 207, Women in Antiquity, where we also have many exquisite perfume containers—an industry in itself in the ancient world.
Wall Fragment with Cupids and Psyche Making Perfume, Roman, A.D. 75–100. Plaster and pigment, 14 15/16 x 22 1/16 in.
Two aryballoi (perfume bottles). Left: Perfume bottle in the Shape of a Ram, Greek, 640–625 B.C. Terracotta, 3 3/4 in. high. Right: Aryballos, Gallo-Roman, 70-–00 A.D. Bronze and champlevé enamel, 4 1/8 in. high
Archeology provides richer information, showing that in ancient Egypt, Palestine, and the Roman Empire, temples almost always had perfume factories nearby producing the great quantities of fragrances they needed. A 2003 archeological find at Pyrgos on Cyprus, the island where Aphrodite first stepped foot on land after her birth at sea, discovered a perfume-making workshop from circa 1850 B.C., the oldest one in the world. (The leader of this archeological dig is giving a lecture in June here at the Villa.)
My first discovery was that in the ancient world oils were used as the carrier medium for perfumes. In modern perfume making, an alcohol is usually the carrier medium, with essential oils added for fragrance combined with fixatives, coloring agents and preservatives. Alcohols evaporate much more quickly than oils do, thus dispersing scent into the air more rapidly. An ancient perfume would therefore be more subtle, and you’d have to be closer to the skin of the wearer to feel its heady power.
To start the creation of your own perfume, you’ll need some olive oil and a mortar and pestle.
In the age of Greece and Rome, the abundance of olive oil made it the most popular oil for the perfume industry, though other oils such as almond were popular as well. Cheaper oil was better (and still is) because it has less of its own scent to compete with the fragrant materials.
To impart fragrance, plant-based ingredients were used, including flowers, leaves, seeds, woods, resins and gums. Animal-derived ingredients were also common, such as musk and civet, which are the glandular oils produced by the musk deer and the civet cat, as well as ambergris, a strange substance secreted and occasionally expelled by sperm whales. These aromas tend to be pungent and even unpleasant in their natural states, but act as fixatives in combination with other scents, accentuating them and making them last longer without imparting their own scents to the mixture.
As in ancient times, today more expensive perfumes still use mostly natural products—essential oils gathered from flowers, spices, and fruits, while cheaper ones are made from synthesized oils that approximate these natural scents.
The Art of Layering Scents
A perfume is made by layering scents according to how volatile they are, that is, how easily they evaporate. Top notes evaporate quickly—they are the first scent you smell in a perfume. Middle or heart notes form the main body of a perfume. Base notes are fixatives—they hold and blend the other ingredients, and they stay on the skin the longest, so you always smell them in combination with the other aromas of the perfume.
Animal-derived scents were the most precious base notes of the ancient world, as they still are today. Natural musk is almost impossible to come by now, and civet and ambergris are likewise fairly rare, so I had to settle for more common, but no less authentic base notes for our perfume-making activity: frankincense, myrrh, and labdanum. All are resins, or plant sap.
Frankincense tears, myrrh, stick cinnamon, and rose petals
Frankincense and myrrh can be purchased in their raw form of small nuggets, which you can grind and add to the olive oil into which they melt to lend their scent. Labdanum is a viscous, sticky tarlike substance in its resin form. You can also purchase the essential oils of any or all of these substances.
Labdanum resin, rumored to be a main ingredient in Julius Caesar’s favorite cologne.
Even as an essential oil, labdanum is thick, black, and sticky. To make your own perfume, only use one of the three though, and only a little of one at that—4 to 5 nuggets or 2 to 3 drops of the essential oils in 2 ounces of olive oil. These scents are strong and can overpower your final perfume. For a man’s cologne, you might choose two, or a little more of one.
For middle notes we used some scents that are still well-known in modern perfumery: rose, cinnamon, benzoin (more commonly known as styrax in the ancient world) and calamus (called by many names by ancient writers, including sweet flag or sweet rush). Rose and cinnamon were a favorite combination for the heart of a perfume. Rose petals can be added directly to the olive oil mixture; no more than 1 to 3 petals though, or the rose will overwhelm your final mixture. Cinnamon can be added by breaking up the sticks into small pieces, or even by shaking ground cinnamon into your oil. This combination makes a sweetly spicy scent, altered this way or that by the base note—atop frankincense’s piney smell it is more spicy, atop myrrh’s gentle warmth the rose can shine, and atop labdanum’s pungency, the cinnamon really pops.
Sweet rush and styrax. Styrax, also known as benzoin, is still a major ingredient in perfumes.
My personal favorite is styrax, a deep, vanilla-y scent that is, like the base notes, a tree resin. It also can be purchased in its raw form, though it’s expensive that way. The essential oil is a honey-like liquid that can be added to the olive oil using a coffee stirrer to gather and then drip it into your perfume. I also love sweet rush. The root of the calamus plant, which can be ground and added, sweet rush has a strong, light, sweet smell, like gold for the nose.
At the perfume-making workshop, our top notes were spices you’ll recognize from your own kitchen: anise, the seed that gives licorice its distinctive scent; marjoram, the cousin of oregano that the ancient Greeks associated with joyous occasions like weddings; and coriander, the seed of cilantro. We advised visitors to use liberal amounts of these lighter scents so they would not get lost under the power of the heartier middle and base notes. Anise and coriander need to be lightly ground, while marjoram leaves can be added straight to your olive oil.
A favorite recipe of many was myrrh, rose, styrax, and marjoram for a warm, sweet perfume. Those who liked spicier scents might mix frankincense with cinnamon and a little sweet rush, then top it off with anise and coriander. Brave souls experimented with combinations of sweet and spicy, layering labdanum under styrax and cinnamon, topped with marjoram.
Heat, Steep, and Complete
To complete your perfume, heat your oil mixture by pouring the oil and other materials into a glass or ceramic dish, heating water in a pot to boiling, turning the heat off and sitting the dish with the oil into the water as it cools. This process draws the essential oils from the materials and can be repeated more than once. The mixture should then steep for at least 24 hours, at which point it can be strained—cheesecloth lets you wring the oil out while keeping all bits of ground materials out of the final mixture.
I’d love to hear from our visitors who did the activity with us at the Villa. How did your final perfumes turn out? Or if you try this at home, let us know what the results are. Were they what you expected?
May Aphrodite sweeten your skin with fragrant oils so that you taste a little of her power!
A canopy to protect the mural América Tropical, weighing 73,000 pounds and boasting an impressive 90-foot span, is lifted aloft by a construction crane and set into place.
Construction for the shelter, viewing platform, and interpretive center that will surround América Tropical, the only surviving public mural by David Alfaro Siqueiros in the United States still in its original location, is moving forward. The mural, located on the second-story wall of the Italian Hall on Olvera Street in the El Pueblo historical Monument, has been covered for nearly its whole life. A joint project by the City of Los Angeles and the Getty Conservation Institute, with funding from the Getty Foundation, is working to bring the mural back to public view after almost 80 years.
The project had a very visible presence in the sky above Main and Olvera Streets Tuesday as the canopy to protect the mural, weighing 73,000 pounds and boasting an impressive 90-foot span, was lifted aloft by a construction crane and, after some tough work, set gently into place. The massive steel-framed canopy structure is covered in a high-tech white fabric often used to cover stadiums, a combination of fiberglass and polytetrafluoroethylene (better known as Teflon) that stands up to the elements and gives it an otherworldly appearance.
Construction crews worked all day on Monday to set up two massive cranes and a specially built metal frame to support the canopy and prevent it from torquing while in the air. Given the size of the canopy and frame, the construction foreman told me that the crane first required enough ballast to stabilize the crane and counterbalance the canopy—about 300,000 pounds of ballast, in fact.
A workman carefully maneuvers the canopy to protect the mural América Tropical.
On Tuesday morning, after checking and rechecking their calculations, the construction crew gave a cheer as the massive structure lifted into the air and swung there for a moment. Gusts of wind threatened to postpone the lift, but the crew was finally able to get the canopy up, past the trees and lightposts, turning and swinging it over the top of the viewing platform and rooftops, then lowering it onto two massive poles sunk deep into the ground to support it.
Standing on the viewing platform and watching the canopy sway overhead was an amazing experience—several onlookers likened it to a beautiful spaceship.
The white structure was carefully aligned, which took some time, and then finally bolted into place. Crews still have a few days of work ahead, securing and welding the canopy and working out other final details. Given the complicated planning and maneuvers required to turn, lift, and secure the canopy, it was a great feat of engineering that it all went so smoothly.
The canopy to protect the mural América Tropical, nearly installed.
It’s also an exciting turning point in the América Tropical project, an ongoing public-private partnership between the City of Los Angeles and the Getty, and Tuesday’s efforts gave excitement about the project a big lift as well! The canopy is now visible from Olvera and Main Streets and highlights the recent progress of the project to provide the public with access to Siqueiros’s mural, which is slated to go back on view this fall, 80 years after it was first unveiled by the artist. One of the great Mexican muralists of the 20th century, Siqueiros painted América Tropical in 1932 on the second story exterior wall of the Italian Hall.
The mural depicts a Mexican Indian tied to a double cross with an American eagle above him as revolutionary soldiers—one aiming at the eagle—close in. Controversial from the start, within a few months the mural was partially whitewashed, and within a decade completely covered. The work was virtually forgotten until the 1960s, when the rise of the Chicano mural movement brought a renewed interest in América Tropical. We’ll update you on The Iris as the project moves toward its final unveiling this fall.
The canopy to protect the mural América Tropical, after installation.
The construction consists of the new protective shelter spanning the south wall of the Italian Hall—including the canopy as well as sun shades on each side to protect the mural from direct exposure to sun and rain. A rooftop platform also has been constructed across from the mural to allow public viewing access. In the next month or so, the installation of the roll down screen that will protect America Tropical from direct sunlight, rain, and other damage, will be installed. The screen will have an image of the mural printed on it, so that even when the screen is lowered at 4:00 p.m. daily to prevent it from fading in the sunlight that hits the mural wall, it will still have a visible presence.
Due to the early whitewashing and ongoing exposure to the elements, the mural has deteriorated and its colors have become faint. The GCI already has carried out extensive research, documentation, and conservation treatment, including plaster stabilization, cleaning, and consolidation on the work. GCI scientists also have conducted scientific studies to identify the materials used by Siqueiros to create the mural. Additional conservation work by the GCI team will take place over the summer, with the goal to honor and protect that which remains from Siqueiros’s own hand, not to restore (or repaint) the work.
Following the completion of the project, the GCI has committed to maintaining and conserving the mural for the next decade. The long-term stewardship of the mural will rest with the City of Los Angeles.
Architectural firm Brooks + Scarpa is overseeing the design and construction of the shelter, platform, and an interpretive center to help the public learn more about Siqueiros and his artwork for the city of Los Angeles’s Bureau of Engineering.
Tags: America Tropical, Conservation, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Getty Conservation Institute, murals
Fountain, possibly by Jean Leroy. French, 1661-63; changes 1698 and 1758-62. Silver, 2 ft. 1 5/8 in. high. The J. Paul Getty Museum, 82.DG.17
This silver fountain, featured in the exhibition The Life of Art and our current Masterpiece of the Week tours, is a survivor of one of history’s greatest meltdowns. Created in France in the 1660s, it was brought to England by 1694 and thus spared the mass melting of silver ordered by Louis XIV in 1701 to replenish the French royal treasury, which had been depleted by wars.
Lavish fountains such as this one—which is decorated with an ostentatious display of acanthus leaves and a boy riding his pet dolphin—symbolized a taste for luxury among France’s rich and fashionable. As opulent water vessels, fountains stood on buffet side tables in palatial dining halls. In the mid-seventeenth century, French table manners had become more refined. By the end of the century, each guest had his or her own matched fork, spoon, and knife known as a couvert. Servants would carry these utensils to silver fountains, where valets would wash them.
It’s difficult to imagine all the glint and reflection of countless objets d’art created by French silversmiths ending up as some fifty tons of bullion.
Though spared from being melted down into coins in France, the fountain underwent many changes in England. A silversmith replaced the fountain’s original handles with smaller ones, and the fountain’s owner had one side engraved with “his and hers” coats of arms. The square base, which sports a Greek key design, is an eighteenth-century replacement, as is the spigot with the French fleur-de-lis symbol. You can explore the fountain’s artistry in greater detail in an online interactive here.
I wonder, had King Louis XIV spared all his and his aristocrats’ silver, would it have made an enormous difference to the royal treasury? Was Louis’s short-term gain worth art’s long-term loss? And what luxury item could we do without to support a national cause?
Tags: coats of arms, Louis XIV, Masterpiece of the Week, silver, The Life of Art, tours
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