“I still cannot believe why the people all around the world—the public people, I mean, the governments or UNESCO, the UN, the others involved in the culture or in humanity—why they do nothing to preserve Palmyra, to stop the attack of the militants of Daesh.”
By the 3rd century CE, the ancient city of Palmyra, also known as Tadmur in Arabic, was a global crossroads, where caravans from Mesopotamia, Persia, China, Rome, and Europe exchanged both goods and beliefs. During the Roman era, Palmyra flourished, with its unique, cosmopolitan culture reflected in elaborately decorated buildings and monuments. That ancient legacy continues today; Palmyrene residents maintained their culture and identity while living alongside well-preserved archeological ruins for centuries. Tragically, in 2015, ISIS militants destroyed many of those important historic sites, including the Temple of Bel. There are no firm plans yet for restoring the ruins and surrounding municipality as the Syrian civil war drags on.
In this episode, Waleed al-As’ad, former director of antiquities and museums at Palmyra, discusses the ancient and the contemporary city, as well as the possible future for the site. His father, Khaled al-As’ad, preceded him as director and was publicly executed for refusing to cooperate with ISIS. Waleed is currently living in France, a refugee of Syria’s civil war. This conversation coincides with the relaunch of the Getty Research Institute’s online exhibition Return to Palmyra, which features a written interview with Waleed.
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.
“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.
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
“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.
“After you have the institutionalization of the discourse of nationalism, a Chinese bronze that is buried in the ground belongs to the ancient Chinese nation. So now anyone who removes this artifact is a thief.”
From the 1790s to the 1930s, archaeologists from Europe and North America removed tens of thousands of art objects, manuscripts, and antiquities from China and dispersed them among museums and university collections outside Asia. This removal of artifacts took place with the permission and cooperation of local officials, but growing nationalism following the 1911 Revolution led Chinese scholars to view this activity as theft. According to historian Justin Jacobs, however, retroactively labeling it as “plunder” is overly simplistic.
In this episode, Jacobs unravels the shifting cultural, economic, and diplomatic meanings and values assigned to Chinese artifacts by examining the archaeological expeditions of Aurel Stein, Paul Pelliot, and Langdon Warner in northwestern China, especially around the city of Dunhuang. He pays special attention to the possible motivations of the Chinese bureaucrats and laborers who assisted them. These complicated stories are explored in Jacobs’s new book, The Compensations of Plunder: How China Lost Its Treasures.
Reflections: Kelly Jane Smith-Fatten on Michelangelo
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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.
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. In a new podcast feature, we’re asking members of the Getty community to share short reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. We’ll be releasing new recordings every other Tuesday. I hope you’ll find these stories about our daily lives—from laundry on the line to a dog at a scholar’s feet—thought provoking, illuminating, and entertaining.
KELLY JANE SMITH-FATTEN:
Hi, I’m Kelly Jane Smith-Fatten and I’m a gallery educator.
The past few months, I have been thinking about Study of a Mourning Woman by Michelangelo Buonorroti. It’s a drawing of a woman draped in heavy cloth, made using a quill pen and dark brown ink. The woman’s head is covered in the cloth as well, and she tilts her head slightly down, towards her arms which are folded over her chest, with one hand coming up to her face and covers part of it. It’s as though she’s cradling herself in her arms.
This work has taken on special meaning to me. It was on view in the Michelangelo exhibition that had opened at the Getty just before the pandemic hit. I was fortunate enough to visit that exhibition a few times before the stay at home orders, and it was just magical. I was inspired. I planned to keep learning and spend more time in the galleries, but of course, the museum closed abruptly in March.
At home, I wanted to see if drawing from the image of Mourning Woman on my computer screen could continue the exploration and magic of what it was like to experience the drawing in person. Drawing from drawings is a way to look really closely and learn about what the artist did on paper. Anyone can do this. It doesn’t matter what your drawing comes out looking like, it’s the act that allows you to discover more about the object.
We gallery educators always encourage this in the galleries, but I wasn’t sure what it would be like online. So I pulled up the artwork and began drawing, zooming in really close to see the details of Michelangelo’s line work: where he chose to draw lines closer together or further apart, or where he left the paper clear of ink to create a sense of light.
Eventually, this experiment led to drawing classes I led over Zoom with volunteer docents, focused on Study of a Mourning Woman. They wondered who might the woman be, what she was feeling internally, and how her gestures and the drapery of the fabric expressed that feeling. Their questions and interpretations showed me that there are so many possibilities within this one drawing.
It has become a kind of friend, as can happen with art sometimes. I connect the posture and emotion of the Mourning Woman with how I’ve felt now and then during this exceptional time.
But drawing from this object, I am reminded of Michelangelo’s words to his student: “Draw Antonio, draw Antonio, draw and don’t waste time.” To me, these words are a hopeful reminder that art matters, what we do now matters.
CUNO: To view Michelangelo Buonarotti’s Study of a Mourning Woman, made about 1500–1505, click the link in this episode’s description or look for it on getty.edu/art/collection.
At Home with the Arensbergs and their Avant-garde Art Collection
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“The Arensbergs’ staging of the art in their collection, it’s both playful, but like chess, it is really serious business.”
The 1913 Armory Show of avant-garde European art sparked a life-changing fascination with collecting in Louise and Walter Arensberg. The couple quickly became influential participants in New York’s bohemian art scene. In 1921 the Arensbergs moved to Los Angeles, where they spent the next few decades building a vast and idiosyncratic art collection in their Mediterranean Revival home in the Hollywood Hills. Works by Duchamp, Picasso, and Brancusi lived alongside pre-Columbian sculptures, eclectic antique furnishings, and thousands of rare books by and about the philosopher Sir Francis Bacon. The riotous display of art in their home excited and overwhelmed visitors—everyone from members of the public to important artists of the day.
The Arensbergs’ LA story, including their art-filled house, is the focus of the book Hollywood Arensberg: Avant-Garde Collecting in Midcentury LA,published by Getty Publications. In this episode, coauthors Mark Nelson, partner at McCall Associates and designer of this book; William H. Sherman, director of the Warburg Institute, London; and Ellen Hoobler, associate curator at the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, discuss the Arensbergs and their obsessive approach to collecting and displaying art.
We’ve asked members of the Getty community to share short reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. These recordings feature stories related to our daily lives.
This week, educator Alice Doo remembers her own California childhood and reflects on the relationship among art, change, and American history through a Dorothea Lange photograph. To learn more about this work, visit: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/128393/.
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. In a new podcast feature, we’re asking members of the Getty community to share short reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. We’ll be releasing new recordings every other Tuesday. I hope you’ll find these stories about our daily lives—from laundry on the line to a dog at a scholar’s feet—thought provoking, illuminating, and entertaining.
ALICE DOO: My name is Alice Doo and I work in our Museum education department. These past few months have been a period of reflection and of learning and unlearning. Learning about my own privilege and my biases and unlearning the racism that is embedded in the American history that I’ve been taught, the culture I am told to value, and the government system that I am expected to trust.
The outpouring of art and photographs on social media responding to police violence, institutional injustice, and protests made me think about how history is being documented. I’m reconsidering the impact art can have capturing pivotal moments and informing our understanding of the world.
I’ve recently revisited a powerful and striking photograph of a painful moment in our nation’s history. It’s called Pledge of Allegiance, Raphael Weill Elementary School, San Francisco by photographer Dorothea Lange. It’s part of Lange’s series documenting Japanese American citizens on the West Coast and their forced relocation and internment, or imprisonment, during World War II.
In this photograph, my eyes are centered on this young girl in her buttoned coat, holding her paper bag lunch in her left hand and resting her right hand over her heart. She is reciting the pledge of allegiance as she stands alongside her classmates. Her eyes look forward, maybe at the American flag or the teacher leading this morning classroom ritual of patriotism. FDR had signed Executive Order 9066 just a few months before on February 19, 1942. Based solely on racial prejudice, it forced over 120,000 Japanese and Japanese American citizens, like this young girl, to be evacuated from their homes and imprisoned in rural concentration camps for the remainder of the war.
Dorothea Lange opposed the forced relocation and internment, but she accepted the commission of the US government to document it. Her photographs were then hidden from view for decades because they highlighted the injustices taking place.
I find a personal connection with this young girl as an Asian American woman born and raised in California. I had the same bob haircut as a kid and I grew up reciting this same pledge in Elementary school. I share the experience of all the children in this photograph who were taught to stand at attention and pledge their allegiance to flag and country without understanding that if you are Black, Indigenous, or a person of color, “liberty and justice for all” has for most of history not fully represented or protected you.
Today, I’m encouraged by the images and art inspiring social change that I see being created, especially by those who have been largely underrepresented, excluded and oppressed throughout US history. With social media and other online platforms, artists of color now have more avenues to amplify their own perspectives and visual narratives of what’s happening in our world.
CUNO: To view Dorothea Lange’s photograph Pledge of Allegiance, Raphael Weill Elementary School, San Francisco, taken on April 20, 1942, click the link in this episode’s description or look for it on getty.edu/art/collection.
Japanese American Photographers in 20th-Century LA
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“It’s really quite astonishing how often, in looking at some of the works of these Japanese American photographers, how simple the subject is, and yet how graceful its rendition is.”
At the turn of the 20th century, the Japanese population in Los Angeles was growing rapidly. At the same time, photography was becoming more affordable, accessible, and popular. Scores of Japanese Americans were avid photographers in this period, and by 1926 the community was active enough in LA to form a club, the Japanese Camera Pictorialists of California, centered in the Little Tokyo neighborhood. However, as the US entered WWII and the military displaced and incarcerated Japanese Americans from the West Coast, their community splintered. These photographers were forced to leave behind their cameras, negatives, and photographs, many of which were destroyed. As a result, much of the history of this group was lost or forgotten for decades, until the early 1980s, when art historian Dennis Reed began working with Japanese American families to preserve and display these artworks.
Getty recently acquired 79 photographs by Japanese Americans from the Dennis Reed collection as well as 75 additional photographs from the families of these artists. In this episode, Virginia Heckert, curator in Getty’s Department of Photographs, discusses these works and the history of this artistic circle.
