When posh Parisians in the mid-18th century greeted the day, their morning ritual wasn’t anything like our hasty shower, breakfast, and dash out the door. Their toilette, or ritual of rising and dressing, was an hours-long activity of luxurious pampering,… More»
Peering up at a giant sculpture, I often wonder: How do artists construct such massive creations? Here’s a peek at the journey, from artist’s conception to the Getty Center’s doorstep, of the larger-than-life Boy with Frog, which was installed yesterday… More»
Julio César Pérez Hernández, architect and author of Inside Cuba, visits the Getty Center this Thursday to talk about Cuban architecture in conjunction with the exhibition A Revolutionary Project: Cuba from Walker Evans to Now. Evans’s photographs of Cuba from… More»
Most museum galleries have certain things in common. For one, the works are spaced a restful distance apart from one another on the wall. For another, they’re typically organized by school or theme. The focus might be, say, on fashion… More»
Update—We’ve posted video excerpts from Patrick McGovern’s talk. See below for his discussion of Midas Touch, here for Chateau Jiahu, and here for Theobroma. What ancient brews were served at the funeral feast of King Midas, or his father Gordius,… More»
Players of backgammon, bridge, and bingo might feel a keen camaraderie with the prosperous Parisians of the 1700s whose sumptuous world is brought to life in the current exhibition Paris: Life & Luxury. The well-coiffed elite of the time relished… More»
In the emerald-green galleries of the exhibition Spirit of an Age: Drawings from the Germanic World, I was drawn to a cluster of quiet drawings that convey beautiful stories: miraculous healings, heroic quests of medieval knights, momentous coronations. These are… More»
George Hein, a leading authority on museum education whom the Museum’s Education Department invited as a guest scholar this spring, says that museums are inherently educational. The professor emeritus in the Graduate School of Arts and Social Sciences at Lesley… More»
Mighty sieges and human follies. The bravado of warriors and the rages and schemes of gods. The Iliad, one of the best-told epics of all time, will be heard aloud again when some 150 volunteer readers recite the ancient Greek… More»
Whether he planted his tripod in India, China, Japan, Korea, or Burma, the Italian-born photographer Felice Beato always portrayed a country’s culture through a distinctly Western lens. The Museum’s current exhibition of his work, Felice Beato: A Photographer on the… More»
Echo Park in 1895: Snow-capped peaks in the distance and rolling countryside all around