Reflections: Kelly Davis on Timothy O’Sullivan

Getty Art + Ideas
Getty Art + Ideas
Reflections: Kelly Davis on Timothy O’Sullivan
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We’ve asked members of the Getty community to share short, personal reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. These recordings feature stories related to our daily lives.

This week, metadata specialist Kelly Davis longs for a hike in the Sierras as she views an 1871 photograph by Timothy O’Sullivan. To learn more about this work, visit: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/40204/.

Over the next few weeks, look for new recordings every other Tuesday.


Transcript

JAMES CUNO: Hi, I’m Jim Cuno, president of the J. Paul Getty Trust. We’ve asked members of the Getty community to share short, personal reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. This week Kelly Davis discusses a Timothy O’Sullivan photograph.
KELLY DAVIS: I’m Kelly Davis, a metadata specialist at the Getty Research Institute. When I moved to California around six years ago, I started spending a lot of time outdoors, particularly in the Sierra Nevada mountains, a few hours drive north of Los Angeles. What draws me to the Sierras, besides the exercise and adventure, is how timeless they feel, almost like they’re entirely still as the world goes on around them.
An 1871 Timothy O’Sullivan photograph of an alpine lake in the Sierras looks like so many I have taken myself—jagged peaks frame an ice blue lake (even in black and white, you can tell the lake is blue), with tall pines and a boulder field to complete the scene. I could swear I’ve been in this exact spot, though it’s unlikely I have, with thousands of lakes just like this in these mountains. It’s really the feeling that the photo elicits. It makes me feel like I’m standing right there.
Ironically, though, I’m not the intended audience for such a picture, living a century too late. Photography had arrived in the US by 1839 and it didn’t take long for the government and private citizens to stream west with their cameras, documenting landscapes for map-making purposes, but also as a tool of colonialism, hoping to entice settlers. Photos of dramatic Western landscapes—shockingly different from the landscapes out East—quickly permeated mainstream culture.
Before I moved to LA, I had spent my whole life on the East Coast. I thought I knew what mountains were, but hiking in the Sierra makes it clear that I had no idea. Even though I’ve seen these vistas myself, O’Sullivan’s photographs have the same effect on me I imagine they had 150 years ago—I gasp. And I am immediately taken back to my last visit, while dreaming of my next.
Last summer, I was training to hike Mt. Whitney, the tallest mountain in the contiguous United States, standing over 14,000 feet high in Sierra crest. I spent all summer obsessed with the mountains and hiking every weekend. But then fire season rolled around, and by the date of my planned trip, the Sequoia Complex fire had burned 100 thousand acres through National Parks and Forests, including the Inyo National Forest, where Whitney sits. I drove to Lone Pine anyway, the gateway town to Whitney, and I even started up the trail, only to turn around from reports of smoke ahead. The day I was supposed to summit, the National Forests in California closed entirely, and I knew any summit attempt was out of reach for some time.
As I wait to get back to these mountains, I’m pleased to have O’Sullivan’s early images of my beloved peaks around to look at. While so much has changed in the populated world since the 1870s, this mountain landscape has remained largely the same. It brings me peace to know that after all the trials of the past year, there will be views like this waiting for me on my next visit to the Sierra.
CUNO: To view Timmothy O’Sullivan’s photograph Alpine Lake, in the Sierra Nevada, California, from 1871, click the link in this episode’s description, or look for it on Getty.edu/art/collection.

Lives of Leonardo da Vinci

Getty Art + Ideas
Getty Art + Ideas
Lives of Leonardo da Vinci
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“He was a great artistic personality, crucial for the development, in some way, of what we think as the modern science. But he was not alone.”

Leonardo da Vinci died more than 500 years ago, but he is still revered as a genius polymath who painted beguiling compositions like the Mona Lisa, avidly studied the natural sciences, and created designs and inventions in thousands of journal pages. Even during Leonardo’s lifetime, contemporaries marveled at the artist’s great skill and wide-ranging pursuits, but many also noted his perfectionism and difficulty completing projects. Since his death, the legends surrounding his life and personality have continued to grow. Today Leonardo’s story inspires novels and his work brings record-breaking prices, demonstrating his enduring relevance and mystique.

In this episode, Getty curator Davide Gasparotto discusses early accounts of Leonardo’s life and how they shaped our understanding of the artist. Passages from these biographies were recently collected in the Getty Publications book Lives of Leonardo da Vinci.

For images, transcripts, and more, visit getty.edu/podcasts.

Reflections: Casey Lee on Gerard ter Borch

Getty Art + Ideas
Getty Art + Ideas
Reflections: Casey Lee on Gerard ter Borch
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We’ve asked members of the Getty community to share short, personal reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. These recordings feature stories related to our daily lives.

This week, curator Casey Lee reminisces on learning to crochet and sew as she considers a 17th century drawing by Gerard ter Borch of a young girl making lace. To learn more about this work, visit: www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/285052/.

Over the next few weeks, look for new recordings every other Tuesday.


Transcript

JAMES CUNO: Hi, I’m Jim Cuno, president of the J. Paul Getty Trust. We’ve asked members of the Getty community to share short, personal reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. This week Casey Lee discusses a drawing by Gerard ter Borch.
CASEY LEE: Hi, I’m Casey Lee, curatorial assistant in the drawings department at the J. Paul Getty Museum.
With the chill in the air, which is maybe only cold to someone living in LA, I find myself spending more time inside and finding ways to keep my hands busy, either with a crochet hook and yarn, or needle and thread. Taking up different craft projects, I think about a drawing in our collection: A Lady and a Child Making Lace by Gerard ter Borch.
In this drawing, made when the artist was just twelve years old, the young Ter Borch captures an intimate moment between a woman and a young girl, maybe even the artist’s own step-mother and half-sister. They are seated with their backs to the viewer. The woman turns her head slightly, watching the young girl work at her side. The child is absorbed in her task, her little lap propping up a lacemaking pillow with bobbins that look like cat’s-tails keeping her threads in place.
The girl’s industry wonderfully reflects Ter Borch’s own artistic development. Ter Borch started learning how to draw from his father at around the age that children now enter kindergarten. In this drawing of the woman and girl, made when today’s child would be finishing elementary school, Ter Borch captures small and delightful details: he contrasted the smooth restraint of the woman’s hair combed under a cap with the child’s escaping ringlets, and he sensitively suggested the turn of the woman’s face by depicting just the tip of her nose and with a small flick of his brush, her eyelash. He did this all in the fairly unforgiving medium of ink, which is difficult to correct or erase. His father was clearly impressed, and wrote the date along the top, commemorating his son’s achievement.
When I think about this drawing, I think about how adults try to impart skills that will shape children as they grow: the patience they find to teach the young and the pride they feel when they watch them succeed. Like Ter Borch’s father, and the woman in this drawing, my parents and grandparents helped me gain skills that challenge my creativity and manual dexterity. When I was around the age of the girl in the drawing, I learned how to crochet under the gaze of my mother and grandmother. Whenever I feel isolated from them, I rely on the lessons they patiently taught me to help feel connected.
I take comfort in thinking about how – like loops in a chain – generations pass down their knowledge.
CUNO: To view Gerard ter Borch’s 1629 drawing A Lady and a Child Making Lace, click the link in this episode’s description or look for it on getty.edu/art/collection

Preserving LA’s History

Getty Art + Ideas
Getty Art + Ideas
Preserving LA’s History
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“We’re proud that Los Angeles, which is a city that’s sometimes derided as a city that doesn’t care about its history or doesn’t care about historic preservation, we think we’re finally exploding that myth once and for all.”

In 1962 Los Angeles passed one of the first and most forward-thinking historic preservation ordinances in the United States, which called for a complete survey of the city to identify cultural monuments. Nearly 40 years later, however, the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) found that only 15 percent of the city’s 465 square miles and 880,000 legal parcels had been assessed. A few years after that, the city created the Office of Historic Resources and, together with the GCI, organized a citywide survey of landmarks. They cataloged everything from architecturally significant buildings to iconic plants and natural features to sites of historic events for many of the city’s ethnic and racial communities. The website HistoricPlacesLA, built on the GCI’s open-source Arches platform, makes these findings available to the public and provides a resource for city planners, researchers, movie producers, and residents.

In this episode, Ken Bernstein, principal city planner and manager at the Office of Historic Resources, City of Los Angeles, and Tim Whalen, the John E. and Louise Bryson Director of the Getty Conservation Institute, discuss the importance of documenting LA’s cultural heritage, the process involved in this work, and the value of ongoing surveys of the city.

For images, transcripts, and more, visit getty.edu/podcasts.