Do artworks have an inner life? You might think so when you visit a new exhibition opening today at the Getty Center. The Life of Art: Context, Collecting, and Display presents the life stories of four objects made to serve beauty and function, offering you the chance to examine them closely to understand how they [...]
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Tags: exhibition design, French art, furniture, gallery design, interactive features, iPad, porcelain
The Research Library at the Getty Research Institute has recently finished digitizing historic catalogs of the library of Łańcut Castle in Podkarpackie, Poland, and making them available to the U.S. Consul General in Krakow and the director of the Łańcut Castle Museum. The digitization is part of the Research Institute’s ongoing work to make items [...]
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Tags: digital publishing, Getty Research Institute collection, Lancut Castle, Poland, Research Library
The current exhibition Gothic Grandeur abounds with images in the margin. These charming and often humorous additions, called marginalia (Latin for “things in the margins”), were introduced to manuscript illumination during the Gothic era. In the lower border of this French Gothic devotional book, three boys play a board game; in the illuminated initial in [...]
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Tags: games, Gothic art, Gothic Grandeur, illuminated manuscripts, medieval art, Middle Ages, The Manuscript Files
Andy Warhol was asked by the Polaroid Corporation in 1979 to create a series of works promoting its new product—a giant 800-pound camera that produced instant large-scale color photographs almost three feet tall and two feet wide. Warhol produced ten final images, four of them self-portraits, including the one shown here, which is featured in [...]
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Tags: Andy Warhol, Facebook, Images of the Artist, Masterpiece of the Week, photographs, Polaroids, Pop Art, self-portraits
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One of my favorite details from the current exhibition Gothic Grandeur comes from a French psalter of the early 1200s. A hallmark of Gothic art was an increasing sensitivity to the natural world, which led not only to a new physical naturalism in images, but also to a new psychological realism. Here, a malicious demon [...]
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Tags: devils, Gothic art, Gothic Grandeur, illuminated manuscripts, medieval art, Middle Ages, The Manuscript Files
As I was recently working on the archive of the German art dealer Alfred Schmela, I discovered an unusual mailing sent by American postminimalist artist Richard Tuttle. Addressed to Alfred Schmela and his wife Monika in Düsseldorf, Germany, it was sent from New York on October 13, 1978. Laid into a handmade envelope are 27 [...]
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Tags: Alfred Schmela, artists' letters, contemporary art, Getty Research Institute collection, modern art, Richard Tuttle, Treasures from the Vault
Just in time for New Year’s Eve, the unruly figures in James Ensor’s massive painting Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 have sneaked off the canvas and into bottles across Los Angeles. They’re the cast of characters in a new performance work by French artist Mathis Collins. Mathis was in L.A. last month to exhibit [...]
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Tags: art inspires art, bottle stoppers, Christ's Entry into Brussels, contemporary art, Getty Museum collection, James Ensor, Mathis Collins, New Year's Eve, performance art
On the opening page of the Abbey Bible, the first image we encounter is this roundel containing a scene of the Nativity of Christ. According to Christian tradition, late in her pregnancy Mary traveled with Joseph to Bethlehem for a census, where they were turned away from the inn because there was no room. In [...]
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Tags: Abbey Bible, Christianity, Christmas, Gothic art, Gothic Grandeur, illuminated manuscripts, medieval art, Middle Ages, nativity
Man Ray’s black and white portraits are widely celebrated, but two recent acquisitions by the Getty Research Institute shift the focus back on the famous photographer, providing a revealing picture of the often private artist. The first acquisition, a compact but rich archive, contains hundreds of letters, over 50 photographs by Man Ray—some of them [...]
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Tags: aphorisms, artists' books, diaries, Getty Research Institute collection, GRI, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Paris
Many know Lyonel Feininger as an accomplished painter, printmaker, and caricaturist whose work is forever linked to the Bauhaus movement. He was Walter Gropius’s first faculty appointment to the Weimar art school in 1919, and he helped shape an artistic movement that would influence artists for decades to come. Despite Feininger’s fame within the Bauhaus, [...]
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Tags: Andreas Feininger, Bauhaus, German art, Lyonel Feininger, modern art, photographs, T. Lux Feininger
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