Two pieces brought out from storage complete the story of the Judgment of Paris in a new installation at the Getty Center. More»
The Getty Research Institute is pleased to announce that the Carlhian records are now available for research. This archive enhances the Research Institute’s holdings in the history of decorative arts. Based in Paris, the Carlhian firm acquired and produced furniture, boiseries or… More»
This spring the Museum is offering a feast of tours and courses about food in art. Nancy Real and Lilit Sadoyan, two gallery teachers, agreed to give me a taste. We went straight to the magnificent Machine d’argent by François-Thomas… More»
Tomorrow the J. Paul Getty Museum will place Jackson Pollock’s great Mural (1943) on view. For the last 20 months the painting has been undergoing conservation at the Getty Conservation Institute. The painting — which measures nearly 20 feet wide by eight feet tall — is in the collection of the University of Iowa Museum of Art.
Mural is the first Pollock painting to embrace what we now consider to be the ‘typical’ scale of abstract expressionism, and the painting in which Pollock to his first and most significant step toward his mature style. In 2011, Pollock scholar Pepe Karmel described it on Modern Art Notes as the painting in which Pollock “announces his future as a painter of large, mural-scale paintings that become environments, and furthermore paintings that are in this distinct, all-over style that changes people’s idea of what a painting might be.”
The Getty Conservation Institute has been conserving the painting since August, 2012. The GIF above shows what the painting looked like before the GCI’s treatments, and what it looks like today.
With Mural returning to public view, our current program features Getty conservator Laura Rivers summing up the project and explaining what she and her colleagues have done to the painting and what they’ve learned from it.
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See more images of art discussed on the show.
Mural opens tomorrow!