The mythology of artistic greatness tends to privilege the spark of creative genius over hard work, sacrifice, and experimentation. Traditionally, the biographies of famous artists have described naïve talents who achieved notoriety only after being fortuitously discovered. By contrast,...
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The Harald Szeemann Archive and Library, one of the most important private research collections for modern and contemporary art in the world, is coming to the Getty Research Institute—and we couldn’t be more excited. Szeemann was the most influential...
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The well-coiffed elite of the time relished a good card game.
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Have you been called to acts of service? Did you answer the call? Saint Francis of Paola, who lived in the 1400s, was called. Two moments of divine intercession are paired in The Vision of Saint Francis of Paola...
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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...
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As a fourth-grade teacher, I take every opportunity to integrate art into the classroom. So when I was asked to be on the Teacher Advisory Group for the new Performing Arts in Art curriculum for K–12 teachers, I was...
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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...
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It is the week of return—of the vernal equinox, and of the shooting stars—the blue blue-violet alliums in Robert Irwin’s Central Garden at the Getty Center. We’ve been waiting. In late-ish February, green shoots began rocketing from the rich...
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Writing the gallery label for a painting can sometimes feel like an art form in itself, a kind of circumscribed descriptive poetry not unrelated to haiku. How, in fewer than 100 words, do you capture the essence of an...
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The intriguing exhibition The Secret Life of Drawings—closing this Sunday at the Getty Center—unveils hidden clues to unfinished works on paper, undiscovered sketches, and details of the artist’s craft. It also reveals that making damaged art look presentable can...
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The relationship between the individual tree and the scene or the event depicted is what is interesting to see and to understand. Each photo tells a unique story. Trees are sometimes so old, they have seen so much. Trees don’t wait for the photographer to be beautiful or expressive, they just are.
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The new exhibition Brush & Shutter: Early Photography in China uses photographs, along with a few paintings and other artistic media, to tell a largely unknown story about China. In the second half of the 19th century, when China...
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