Greeting you as you enter the exhibition In Focus: Still Life are two beautiful photographs that incorporate dead animals in their compositions. Lorikeet with Green Cloth by Marian Drew includes a parrot on a plate, while Sharon Core’s portrait...
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América Tropical, the only surviving public mural by David Alfaro Siqueiros in the United States, is one step closer to being on view to you and me. At El Pueblo Historic Monument in downtown Los Angeles, project leaders today...
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“Gérôme forged narrative practices that would take the cinema decades to invent,” art historian Marc Gotlieb told a packed auditorium recently in a discussion of The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme, which closes this Sunday. Really? How could a...
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What do you do at the Getty? I manage the Getty Vocabulary Program. You probably want to know what that is! We compile databases of terminology that allow people to catalog art and to retrieve information about it. I’ve...
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“Focus is power,” said theater director Peter Sellars to a packed crowd at the American Association of Museums annual meeting earlier this year. Artworks can make you recognize things you instinctively knew but weren’t able to articulate. They bring...
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I talked to Louis Marchesano, curator of prints and drawings at the Getty Research Institute, about the exhibition Printing the Grand Manner: Charles Le Brun and Monumental Prints in the Age of Louis XIV, now on view at the...
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During a tour of the new exhibition The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme, curator Mary Morton stopped in front of Gérôme’s Snake Charmer and asked the audience, “What do you see?” Murmurs spread through the crowd. One brave little...
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Old media artifacts like silent films are traditionally thought of as being windows into their individual moments in time. But when they portray another era still—like the ancient world—they serve as a kind of mirror, telling the story of...
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How do you hold a “secret exhibition”? In 1957, Los Angeles artist George Herms did just that, setting up his assemblage sculptures among the foundation blocks of a row of demolished buildings in Hermosa Beach. The show wasn’t publicized,...
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Leonardo da Vinci worked for 25 years on a complete guide to the human form that would have transformed the study of anatomy in Europe. But the project was never finished and the notes were all but lost for...
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Spin control—it’s been around for centuries. Louis XIV, king of France from 1660 to 1715, was a master at it, using art—especially the work of his court painter, Charles Le Brun—to create and perpetuate a glorified image of his...
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For six months, I lived up the hill from Sunset and Coronado in Silverlake. I’d go to Mariela’s for burritos—always a little too watery, always with salsa not quite spicy enough, but cheap, and the size of a brick....
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