It was an L.A.-fest last night with students from across SoCal gathering at the Getty Center for our annual College Night. This year’s theme was style in our fair city, inspired by the show Herb Ritts: L.A. Style, and students enjoyed free street food (mmm, tacos), checked out a live fashion shoot, toured the Museum behind the scenes, and heard from artist Anthony Friedkin and curator Paul Martineau. Here’s our unofficial top ten from the night.

10. Everyone’s a Supermodel. We all looked and acted just a little more glamorous after emerging from the Herb Ritts galleries.

9. Herb Ritts-Inspired Desserts. Ancho-chile brownies and Rice Krispie treats: a commentary on Ritts’s use of black and white, or just delicious?

8. Your Art on Display. Artist John Divola and college students from SMC, East L.A. College, Pierce, and College of the Canyons collaborated on amazing photographs that were on display in the Entrance Hall. Plus…

7. Your Art Online. Divola invited College Nighters to photograph Things That Are Cool including helmets, skies, and brightly colored shoes. (Did you email your hunt pix to collegenight@getty.edu? You totally should, because they’ll be part of an online artwork.)

6. The Fountain of the Underworld. Students from the Otis College of Art and Design made a mash-up about The Life of Art, including a game of exquisite corpse about a silver fountain that bestows eternal life…in Hell. Which brings us to:

5. Crayons! Students used crayons and colored pencils to add their ideas to the story. When was the last time you reached into a Crayola box?

4. An Otis Student Zine. More awesomeness from Otis, including pics of this bowl doing Internet memes and the first chapter of a mystery novel starring this golden light. (OTIS STUDENTS: We want to read the rest of the story! Will Isabelle find the secret wall light? Why is Grandmother so secretive?!)

3. A Taxidermied Albino Elk. The star of an awesome fashion shoot created by photographer Melanie Pullen, upstaged only by…A Fashion Model with 3-Foot-High Hair. Overheard: “I wasn’t sure if her hair was going to start spewing lava! It was so volcanically rad!”

2. High Fashion Meets Street Food. In the galleries, students chewed on thought-provoking tours about high fashion in art, the L.A. landscape, and famous faces. In the courtyard, they chewed on tacos.

1. For Students, By Students. The student committee members who helped produce the event were proud. One told us, “I just can’t believe we made this happen!”

College Night takes place at the Getty Center each spring. Herb Ritts, tacos, and the fountain of the underworld are here daily.

 
Tags: college, College Night, free events, Herb Ritts, John Divola, Otis College of Art and Design, The Life of Art

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The Getty Center is one of the most-photographed landmarks in Los Angeles, with visitors snapping images of its art, architecture, gardens, and breathtaking views.

In March, the Getty Museum’s education department chose to up the ante with a “Digital Scavenger Hunt” for second-grade students from Hooper Elementary in Los Angeles. The activity was part of photographer John Divola’s contribution to this year’s Getty Artists Program. Each year, the Getty Museum invites one artist to take part in the program, creating and implementing a project of his or her choosing. Divola, known for his photographs of California’s social and environmental landscapes, proposed the Digital Scavenger Hunt in an effort to engage students with the Getty Center site and collection and the act of photography.

Armed with digital cameras, students visited the Getty Center three times, with each visit offering new challenges. Subjects included heads with hats or helmets, gold or silver objects, doors and doorways, plates, bowls, vases, representations of skies, and brightly colored shoes. Each subject was assigned points based on the difficulty of locating it.

The scavenger hunt remains one of Divola’s favorite learning assignments, as it invites students to collaborate and be creative, while encouraging careful looking and attention to details. The goal is to have fun while creating a collective piece of art—a challenge the kids gladly accepted!

First, Museum educator Kelly Williams provided direction to the students. Then they were given their own cameras for the day and began their hunt. Our educators were delighted by the ease with which the kids handled the cameras—turning off the flash when asked, zooming in and out, and setting up unique shots of the scavenger hunt objects. These were some tech-savvy students!

Students eagerly scoured the Getty Center’s galleries for scavenger hunt items. Here, they photographed a painting that depicts the sky and has gold gilding in its frame.

Students were asked to follow a few simple suggestions when they photographed, including filling the frame with the image they selected. One student took her time to set up a shot in the galleries.

Looking beyond the Getty Center walls, students also used the outside view as inspiration.

Finding brightly colored shoes proved to be the biggest challenge, but the students finally found their subject in bright blue sneakers!

Once all the student photos have been collected, they will be combined into a series of large prints that will be displayed at the Getty Center on June 3, 2012. In addition to the Hooper Avenue scavenger hunt, Divola also worked with local community college students on their own hunt, and the results will be displayed at the Getty Center’s annual College Night, happening tonight.

After three picture-perfect days of exploration, education, and some really cool photographs, the students agreed: Photography can be used for more than commemorating holidays and special occasions. It’s something that can be used to capture images every day of the year!

 
Tags: arts education, College Night, elementary school visits, Getty Artists Program, John Divola, K-12 programs, museum education, scavenger hunts

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A sampling of the 27,000 prints held in the Research Institute’s special collections went on view this Saturday in the new exhibition The Getty Research Institute: Recent Print Acquisitions. It features selections from four centuries of printmaking, from a rare suite of woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer to experimental lithographs by Paul Klee.

The prints are full of rich detail, tone, and texture that make you want to spend time with them. And now you can, with these wallpapers featuring details from six prints in the show. Your device is about to get a lot more scholarly.

Visit the exhibition webpage to see the uncropped versions of these images and other works in the show.

Man

This posthumous portrait of artist Edouard Gautier d’Agoty was produced by his student Carlo Lasinio, who falsely claimed that d’Agoty was the inventor of color printing. This example required printing four copperplates, each with a separate color, onto a single sheet of paper.

If this wallpaper could talk: “I’m an artist with a sense of style.”

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Woman
Stars sparkle above the Queen of the Night in this captivating vision of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute by architect and designer Karl Friedrich Schinkel, best known for his Greek-revival buildings in Berlin.

If this wallpaper could talk: “With my backlit display, I truly am queen of the night.”

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Faith

Albrecht Dürer spent a decade making the 20 woodcuts in The Life of the Virgin series; the set in the Research Institute is one of the few original 1511 suites that have not been disbound over the years. Here Mary and Joseph begin the long journey for Egypt under the watchful eyes of angels.

If this wallpaper could talk: “The road is long and rocky, but I will finish my dissertation/exhibition/LinkedIn profile.”

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Monsters

Ersatz hieroglyphs and winged gargoyle-like creatures adorn a massive structure projecting from a mossy cave in this design for the opening scene of Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

If this wallpaper could talk: It wouldn’t.

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Nature

A German romantic sensibility suffuses this beautiful and rare print of a split oak tree and a woman in Breton dress. The work expresses a devotion to nature and contemplates life and decay. The foliage and clouds in this detail are full of poetic lines and textures.

If this wallpaper could talk: “Beauty lies in the imperfect. This includes my first drafts.”

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Torment

Prisoners writhe on a platform in this etching from Piranesi’s masterful series The Prisons, which is characterized by torqued perspective and a seemingly infinite array of deliberate lines and hasty scratches. The series displays Piranesi’s technical finesse, which stands apart in the history of art.

If this wallpaper could talk: “I’m trapped in my iDevice, but I like it that way.”

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Fire

Smoke and flame blaze across this luxuriously colored print of an industrial landscape, part of a suite commissioned by a mining coalition. (See another print from the suite on the exhibition webpage.) Workers and a draft horse in the foreground carry on stoically, silhouetted by the orange light of the gutted quarry.

If this wallpaper could talk: “It appears my iPad has caught fire. I may need to leave this meeting early.”

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How-to on iPad or iPhone: Find the image size that best matches your device, then press and hold the image to bring up the “Save Image” option. Now go to Settings > Wallpaper and navigate to the image within the Camera Roll or Saved Photos.

How-to on Android (may vary by device): Find the image size that best matches your device, then press and hold the image to bring up the “Save Image” option. Now go to Menu > Wallpaper > Gallery and navigate to the image within your folders.

These images are copyright the J. Paul Getty Trust; they are provided for personal, non-commercial use only.

 
Tags: Albrecht Dürer, art wallpapers, Getty Research Institute collection, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, GRI, iPad, iPad retina wallpapers, iPhone, iPhone retina wallpapers, prints, special collections

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From Casablanca to Saving Private Ryan, the horrors and heroisms of World War II have provided decades of cinematic material. However, as director Fred Zinnemann masterfully demonstrated, meticulous exploration of the human experience—both immediately before the war (The Seventh Cross, 1944), and after (The Search, 1948)—can be even more revealing.

The Seventh Cross screened last week as the opening film in the Getty Research Institute’s film series Fred Zinnemann: The Cinema of Resistance. The series continues tomorrow night with The Search, which offers one of the most memorable, and underrated, film experiences on the reality of post-World War II Europe. The film was one of the first to be shot amidst the ruins of German cities, including the devastated Nuremberg. It tackled the lingering fears left by war from a child’s nonconformist perspective, as only Zinnemann, himself a well-known nonconformist, could.

The literal search of the The Search is the great balancing act of a young, displaced boy, Karel (Ivan Jandl), who has come to associate adult interventions with the evils of the Nazis, searching his memories for clues to his mother;  a mother losing hope in the search for her son; an army engineer (Montgomery Clift in his film debut, with a cooler on-screen presence than James Dean) making what he considers the only obvious choice as he takes the boy under his wing; and a United Nations worker (Aline MacMahon) trying to make everything right again. The search for a boy or a mother can come to an end, but the search within us all to find an end to inflicting harm on future generations does not.

A conversation with director Fred Zinnemann’s son, Tim Zinnemann, and Getty scholar Jennifer Smyth follows the screening. The search continues on April 17 with High Noon (1952) and on April 24 with Julia (1977).

 
Tags: film series, Fred Zinnemann, GRI, Montgomery Clift, movies

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I have the pleasure of running the Getty Villa Teen Apprentice Program (ViTA). Each year our goal is to open the museum from top to bottom to young people interested in the arts and introduce them to the variety of jobs it takes to run a cultural institution. This year, a talented group of eleven students from ten schools around Los Angeles have explored deep and wide within the museum.

Our groups are always eclectic, but never more so than this year, when the mix ended up being funky and fun. To give an example, throughout the year the ViTAs meet staff from around the Museum and learn about their jobs, then turn that knowledge to creative projects. A favorite project this year was to imagine your ideal museum. Here’s a sample of the concepts our apprentices invented:

“My dream museum…would be people’s rooms. I feel like the way people decorate their rooms says a lot about the person. Displayed knick-knacks would include photo montages, pencil holders, books, and journals, just so the visitors could dive into the room owner’s life.” —Lekha Jandhyala

“My dream museum is one detailing the history of American pop culture from the 1900s to present day. The museum would be split into four different sections: Music, Literature, Film & Television, and Everyday Life. Each section would be arranged chronologically and have a collection of photographs, memorabilia, posters, primary documents, interviews, advertisements, and clips from news sources (both paper and digital). I’ve always been really interested in anthropology and the way American culture has evolved, and particularly why certain trends become popular at different time periods.” —Chloe Cipolla

“I would want to create a museum about ossuaries (sites/containers dedicated to holding skeletal remains). The collection would consist of all the decorated skeletons as well as the bone-lined walls that hold them. I would also include the history of each ossuary and the religious/social reasons it was created. I love how many ossuaries are completely forgotten about, and some have turned into myths. Just because I’m picky about these kinds of things: the two colors repeated throughout the exhibit (doorknobs, wall color, carpet, sign) would be black and a dulled gold.” —Ellie O’Neill

“My dream museum would be the history of alternative subcultures and discuss the unique fashion, status, mentality, “code,” music, etc., surrounding each culture. The exhibit would be divided by group, including mods, beatniks, hippies, punks, ravers, emos, street/hip-hop, metalheads, surfers, skaters, greasers, hipsters and “rude boys.” As the visitors walk through each section, they would be able to learn and create through hands-on activities that reflect the subculture best, for example a booth where you can spray-paint and “mohawk” your hair like a punk or get to make “kandi” bracelets like the ravers.” —Emily Dorrell

“My ideal museum would contain art but would also be a work of art in itself. I believe that everything in life can be considered an art form, so my museum would hopefully follow this belief as best as possible. My favorite art tends to be conceptual and thought-provoking, so I would want to make that the concentration throughout my museum. An experience of the senses is also key: For example: a room with work from the impressionist period may have colored walls with a slight tint of yellow to give a light, optimistic feeling. Scents would breeze through the room, reminiscent of the French countryside, helping the viewer envision the dreamy life and intentions of this time: to capture the essence rather than the details.” —Talia Beltran

After exploring the museum through discussions and projects, the teens choose a theme together, then research, write, and present their own tours for the public. Through May 20, on Saturdays and Sundays at 12:00 and 2:00 p.m., the ViTAs will take interested visitors into the galleries to look at objects exploring “Love, Sex, and Desire in the Ancient World.” Since their tours run concurrently with the exhibition Aphrodite and the Gods of Love, the result is a perfectly provocative fit. A few of the apprentices even bravely include controversial pieces like the Sleeping Hermaphrodite in their tours in order to discuss topics of gender and sexuality in the ancient world and today.

To give a taste of a young-adult perspective on ancient art, here’s how Tyler Hendrickson frames the first-century A.D. Roman statue of Leda and the Swan shown above:

“Most consider that the fame of this statue is due to its many paradoxes. But what I found interesting is that it was considered more acceptable to depict a swan and a women in the act (albeit suggested), than a man and woman. Times have certainly changed. This statue was found in the 18th century in Rome. It is a copy of a Greek statue whose carving is credited to Timotheos. He was the leading sculpture at the temple of Asklepios. To me, the face of the statue represents the emotion intended by the artist.”

Aurelia Friedman was fascinated by the beginning of the Trojan War, and so chose the Storage Jar with the Judgment of Paris for one of her objects, which she describes:

“This Athenian terracotta vessel depicts the judgment of the Trojan prince Paris, who sits amid three goddesses and their guide Hermes, god of travelers and messengers. Paris’s task is to describe which goddess is the most beautiful: Hera, queen of the gods; Athena, goddess of war and wisdom; or Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty. He has yet to announce his decision in favor of Aphrodite. Thus all eyes are upon Paris as his own gaze turns toward the far right where the goddess of love waits, entirely wrapped in her himation.”

Kelly Bertrando sums up her experience with the program this way:

“The concepts of collecting and preserving art intrigue me. This program allows me to develop a set of valuable working skills in an educational environment. I feel that museums like the Getty Villa are important because they preserve a culture that we may not otherwise understand. By studying the art created during the Greco-Roman periods, modern-day viewers are able to relate to and understand the type of world in which the artists lived. For me, the highlight of the program is the ability to see parts of museums that ordinary visitors do not have the opportunity to see, such as walking through the storage area of the museum and seeing the plans for Aphrodite and the Gods of Love. The Getty Villa ensures that ViTA members have an enriching experience by giving them access to the Getty Villa’s library, staff, and artwork. This program gives you the rare opportunity to see how museums work.”

And the ViTA program gives me a rare opportunity to see how teens work. They never fail to surprise, delight, frustrate, and intrigue me with their creativity, curiosity, and energy.

Interested teens can apply for the 2012-13 ViTA session via our online application—applications are due by 5:00 p.m.

 
Tags: Aphrodite and the Gods of Love, apprenticeships, Leda and the Swan, teenagers, Villa Teen Apprentice Program, ViTA

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What will I wear? Who will be my date? Should we rent a limo?  With prom season approaching, these are questions going through American teenagers’ minds.

This all-American experience of going to prom marks the end of high school and the beginning of adulthood. Between 2006 and 2009, documentary photographer Mary Ellen Mark traveled to 13 high schools to produce Prom, just released by Getty Publications, a fascinating look at dozens of teens from a diverse range of backgrounds on this memorable night.

Mark intentionally chose schools representing varied socioeconomic situations—including an exclusive private academy in Pacific Palisades, an urban public school in Newark, an upper-middle-class suburban school in Austin, and the pediatric ward at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center—to explore the similarities and differences in prom traditions. For example, white middle-class young women in Pittsburgh bought their similar looking dresses at the same local department store, while African American women had custom dresses made, each one a unique creation.

Using a six-foot-tall, 250-pound Polaroid Land 20 x 24 camera, which required special technicians to operate, Mark set up a photography studio at each prom she attended. Her interns scoured the dance floor for interesting subjects.  After being photographed, the students went to another studio where they were interviewed for a documentary by Mark’s husband, Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Martin Bell.  On the film, the students talk about their dates, their high school experiences, and speculate on their futures. You can see a sneak peek of the film at the top of the post.

Quotations from the filmed interviews punctuate the book, which also includes a DVD of the documentary. Some of the students’ statements are comical, while others are deeply touching. The result is a captivating and revealing document of American youth at the beginning of the 21st century.

 
Tags: Martin Bell, Mary Ellen Mark

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The Getty Museum’s most recent painting acquisition, Jean-Antoine Watteau’s The Italian Comedians, is now on view at the Getty Center. It’s installed in Gallery S202 with an array of other 18th-century paintings in the collection, including one by Nicolas Lancret.

Watteau and Lancret were both known for the fête galante, a popular genre of French painting that depicted the outdoor leisure activities of the rich—picnicking, dancing, taking in performances. Watteau popularized this theme, and it may have been his fame as a painter of fêtes galantes that inspired Lancret to join the workshop of Watteau’s teacher Claude Gillot. Lancret probably met Watteau himself around 1712. After Watteau’s early death at the age of 36, Lancret became France’s leading painter of the genre.

These two artists, students of the same master, are now represented by two paintings hanging across from one another in the same gallery. Watteau’s The Italian Comedians and Lancret’s Dance Before a Fountain from about ten years later show two very different views of a day at the park for France’s upper crust.

Lancret paints the well-to-do audience at their leisure, dancing by a fountain, cooing in couples, and generally enjoying an amorous day in the park. Even the dogs appear to be in love.

Watteau presents a compassionately rendered troupe of actors who have just finished performing in the park for an upper-class audience like Lancret’s. The central figure, an actor dressed as the popular character Pierrot, reaches into his pocket, urging the ladies and gents in Lancret’s scene to reach into their pockets and make a donation.

 
Tags: 18th-century art, Antoine Watteau, fête galante, French art, installation, Nicolas Lancret, recent acquisitions

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Van Gogh’s Irises is now available for your personal art collection, along with Turner’s Modern Rome, Rembrandt’s The Abduction of Europa, and over 3,000 more artworks from the J. Paul Getty Museum.

We’re excited to join 134 other museums, from the White House to the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar, newly included in Google Art Project, a free online cornucopia of world art where you can meander the galleries of great museums, zoom in on 30,000 artworks, and build your own collection.

The virtual Getty features 3,325 objects, among the most of any museum on Google Art Project. You can learn more about each work and zoom in on high-res images we shared for the project, then group them into galleries around your interests—music, reading, and dogs, for example.

You can also glide through the Getty Center’s galleries in a virtual tour captured by Google’s street-view trolley, a wheeled camera that looks like a hipster ice cream cart but serves up artistic goodies instead of edible ones. The museum-view experience of the paintings galleries features clickable “floating labels” that invite you to explore the history and meaning of each artwork, listen to audio commentary, and locate its origin on a map.

And don’t miss Rembrandt’s The Abduction of Europa in a gigapixel image, which lets you crawl over the painting’s deeply textured surface in astounding detail—closer than you could with your naked eye. (A behind-the-scenes glimpse of the Rembrandt photo shoot here.) An encounter with art’s physicality, delivered in pixels.

 
Tags: Getty Museum collection, Google, Google Art Project, Rembrandt, technology, The Abduction of Europa

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When Herb Ritts created this image, it was touch-and-go whether he would get his crew and model off the El Mirage lake bed before a storm swept through.

Mark McKenna, now executive director of the Herb Ritts Foundation, was Ritts’s camera assistant and told me about the “swing shot,” or what was off-camera that day, in his interview for the audio guide that accompanies the exhibition Herb Ritts: L.A. Style, opening tomorrow.

Ritts was not an early bird (is anyone?).  McKenna chuckled, “If you’re going to start hair and makeup at six o’clock in the morning, right off the bat you’re just setting up a brutal day for everybody.” Instead they began in the afternoon, with a chef grilling chicken and music in the background. He recalls the sense of “play” in the air, despite the prominent client, Versace.

Colleagues often describe Ritts as a perfectionist, but one who was still committed to keeping his crew happy, respected, and well-fed. He believed the more play involved, the better the photographs. McKenna recalls him as “an incredible director of people…not just telling them what to do, but getting them to step in and be a part of the process.” This stood in stark contrast to other photographers with whom he’d worked, who often created a tense environment that drained the fun from the set—and the pictures.

On this day, Ritts was in his element. Out in nature, full sun, with a minimal but talented team and a gorgeous supermodel at his disposal, Ritts could have created an interesting photograph just by posing Christy Turlington on the parched ground in her Versace gown. Instead, Ritts was always after something with more visual “pop,” as he called it, so he and the prop stylist continued to experiment.

As Turlington hid fistfuls of fabric in front of her, off-camera the crew tied the outer corners to light stands on either side. They weighted the stands down with sandbags until—suddenly—the desert wind churned past and blew up the cone of fabric like an inside-out balloon. Ritts seized the moment and captured startling image you see above. Turlington appears as a kind of goddess; encircled by a graphic halo, in a space of pure timelessness.

Ritts knew right away that this shot was it: eye-catching and balanced, projecting strength and sophistication. It features hallmark elements of his work: a simple background and high contrast between light and dark. Even the shadows have an elegant drape over her body. (“It’s not where you place the light, it’s where you place the shadows,” in the words of fellow photographer and director Matthew Rolston, who also discusses this image in the audio guide.)

Minutes after this picture was taken, dark clouds rolled in. The team scrambled to pack up before the dry lake bed became, well, a lake. In my interviews with Ritts’s friends and colleagues, including models Cindy Crawford and Tony Ward, and actor Richard Gere, some of my favorite parts were these behind-the-scenes stories. Listen for yourself on the audio guide accompanying the exhibition and on the exhibition website and tell us what takes you by surprise.

 
Tags: Christy Turlington, fashion, fashion photography, Herb Ritts, Mark McKenna, photographs

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