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 [...]
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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, [...]
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Tags: Christy Turlington, fashion, fashion photography, Herb Ritts, Mark McKenna, photographs
How does the museum collections catalogue, traditionally made for print, fit into today’s world of apps, e-books, and iPhones? It turns out that going digital requires a profound rethinking of the ways in which art historical content can be interactively organized, created, and maintained, yet museums lack models for moving collection catalogues online. Through the [...]
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Tags: books, catalogues, digital publishing, iPad, online publishing, Online Scholarly Cataloguing Initiative, OSCI
Antoine Watteau is famous for his theatrical pictures of the 18th-century French megarich at their elegant balls and fêtes galantes. Theater of a different kind figures in The Italian Comedians, a beautiful and poignant painting that has just joined the Getty Museum’s collection. Characters from Italy’s improvisational comedy tradition greet us in full costume: rakish Scaramouche in his [...]
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Tags: 18th-century art, Antoine Watteau, French art, Getty Museum collection, paintings collection, recent acquisitions
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When you hear the word “Gothic,” what comes to mind? Black-lipstick-wearing teens? Cathedrals with flying buttresses? What about lavender pudding or torta bonissima? Students at the Getty learned what tickled the Gothic sweet tooth at a culinary course that featured desserts from the Gothic era, where participants were treated to an afternoon of Gothic manuscripts, [...]
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Tags: cooking, culinary workshops, Getty Museum, Gothic, Gothic Grandeur, Manuscripts, museum education, Nancy Real, Robin Trento
I find auctions terrifying. Mesmerizing, but terrifying. When a major early Renaissance portrait drawing came up for auction at Sotheby’s in New York a month ago, my stomach was in my mouth. It was the sort of drawing one hardly ever sees at auction: a very rare, early Florentine portrait drawing of exceptional quality and [...]
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Tags: auctions, Italian art, Piero del Pollaiuolo, recent acquisitions
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One of my favorite acquisitions of the past five years in the Getty’s manuscript collection is the Northumberland Bestiary (Ms. 100), featured currently in the Gothic Grandeur exhibition. A bestiary is a kind of medieval encyclopedia of animals. In addition to physical and behavioral descriptions, however, there is also commentary about each animal as a [...]
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Tags: animals, animals in art, bestiaries, Getty Museum collection, Gothic art, Gothic Grandeur, illuminated manuscripts, Northumberland Bestiary
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The current exhibition Gothic Grandeur features a number of works illustrating the Apocalypse, the last book of the Bible that recounts Saint John’s vision of the end of time. This leaf comes from a manuscript of the 1200s made in Spain, which had a long tradition of producing impressive and expressive Apocalypse manuscripts. The image [...]
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Tags: apocalypse, Gothic art, Gothic Grandeur, illuminated manuscripts, The Manuscript Files
On January 8 sculptor John Mason opened his studio and shared insights into his creative process with us and a group of eager participants. The event was part of “In Studio,” a program we in the Museum’s Education Department organized featuring six artists whose work was included in the exhibition Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents. The [...]
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Tags: ceramics, In Studio, John Mason, Pacific Standard Time, PST, PSTinLA
Did you receive a Valentine’s card today? Take a second look at those cartoon Cupids. They derive, in their own way, from ancient Greece and Rome, but might not be so cute as they first appear. Then as now, Cupid’s presence denotes passion and desire, and our word “erotic” comes from Eros, his Greek name. [...]
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Tags: ancient art, Aphrodite, Aphrodite and the Gods of Love, Cupid, Eros, Getty Museum collection, Herakles, mythology, traveling exhibitions
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