Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio is one of the most admired painters of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Known for his powerful, dramatically lit compositions, Caravaggio depicted violence and the human form with a degree of realism unprecedented at the time. He was among the most famous painters in Rome—but not only because of his skill as an artist. Caravaggio was also notorious for his wild life and shocking temper. After being sentenced to death for murder, he fled Rome and died in exile at age 38 . Three biographies written in the decades after his death constitute nearly all that is known about the enigmatic artist.
In this episode, Getty curator and expert on Italian painting Davide Gasparatto discusses Caravaggio and the role these early biographies, by Giulio Mancini, Giovanni Baglione, and Giovanni Pietro Bellori, played in defining Caravaggio’s legacy.
As we all
adapt to working and living under these new and unusual circumstances caused by
the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve asked curators from the Getty Museum and Getty
Research Institute to share short reflections on works of art they’re thinking
about right now. These brief recordings feature stories related to our daily lives—from laundry on the line to a dog at a
scholar’s feet. Over the next few weeks, look for new recordings every Tuesday.
This week
features photography curator Mazie Harris discussing Walker Evans’s Washington Street, New York City / Wash
Day (ca. 1930).
JAMES CUNO: Hi, I’m Jim Cuno, president of the J.
Paul Getty Trust. As we all adapt to working and living under these new and
unusual circumstances, we’ve asked curators from the Getty Museum and Getty
Research Institute to share short reflections on works of art they’re thinking
about right now. We’ll be releasing new recordings on Tuesdays over the next
few weeks. 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.
MAZIE HARRIS: My name is Mazie Harris. I’m one of the
photography curators here at the Getty, and working at home these days I feel
like all I do is laundry and dishes non-stop. So I find myself appreciating all
the more this photograph by Walker Evans.
It looks like the photographer walked between two buildings
and glanced up to see these crisscrossed lines of laundry hanging out to dry. There’s
such delight in this sort of, it’s just like an everyday occurrence. And, I
don’t know, looking at laundry dry seems like it would be just devastatingly
boring and yet Evans makes it look like a lively musical score. The fabrics
bellow in the wind, the sweet string of socks swaying against each other in the
bottom left corner. It evokes full lives and loving labor. It’s all here
illuminated and abstracted against a blank sky.
Photographers have such an incredible ability to make the
mundane visually interesting. Photographs remind us to look, look, look, to
look carefully. To be observant. And I’m grateful to be reminded of that as I
pull yet another load of laundry from the washer or endlessly plunk dishes into
the drainer by the sink. This photograph reminds me to try to find beauty in
even the most banal places.
CUNO: To view this photograph by Walker Evans, titled Washington Street, New York City /
Wash Day and made around 1930, click the link in this episode’s
description or look for it on getty.edu/art/collection/.
Museum Directors on COVID-19 and Its Impact on Museums, Part 2
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The
onset of the COVID-19 pandemic was swift and confusing, with breaking news and information
about the virus changing seemingly by the hour. Around the world, art museums,
as community gathering sites, have had to face difficult decisions. In this
two-part series, six museum directors discuss the pandemic and its
repercussions for their institutions. These candid, insightful conversations
address wide-ranging topics, from the resources that museum directors are
drawing on to philosophical exchanges about the role of museums in society.
This episode features Matthew Teitelbaum of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Ann Philbin of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and Timothy Potts of the J. Paul Getty Museum.
Museum Directors on COVID-19 and Its Impact on Museums, Part 1
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The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic was swift and confusing, with breaking news and information about the virus changing seemingly by the hour. Around the world, art museums, as community gathering sites, have had to face difficult decisions. In this two-part series, six US museum directors discuss the pandemic and its repercussions for their institutions. These candid, insightful conversations address wide-ranging topics, from the logistical challenges of when to close and how to reopen to philosophical exchanges about the role of museums in society.
This episode features Max Hollein of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Kaywin Feldman of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and James Rondeau of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Moving a Hundred-Year-Old Series Online: Getty’s Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum
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How do you reimagine a century-old reference series for the digital age? In 1919, a French archaeologist started the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, or CVA, with the ambitious goal of cataloging every ancient painted vase in the world. Nearly 400 volumes, compiling some 100,000 vases, have been published to date by museums, making the CVA one of the most important resources for researchers working on ancient Greek art and culture. Getty’s most recent addition to the CVA is the first born-digital, open-access volume of this essential series.
In this episode, Despoina Tsiafakis, the author of Getty’s new CVA volume and the director of research at the Athena Research and Innovation Center in Greece, speaks with Getty curator David Saunders and Getty digital publications manager Greg Albers about the history of the CVA and the process of bringing the series to a new digital platform.
Sustainably Preserving Cultural Heritage with Larry Coben
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Cultural
heritage sites around the world are under threat not only from catastrophic
events like war and natural disasters but also from daily use and lack of resources.
In 2010, archaeologist Larry Coben founded the Sustainable Preservation
Initiative (SPI) to address the challenge of preserving sites in areas of great
poverty. He pioneered an approach that provides training and support to
communities living near cultural heritage sites, empowering them to turn
preservation into economic opportunity. SPI now works in Peru, Guatemala,
Jordan, Turkey, Tanzania, and Bulgaria.
In this episode, Coben discusses his unusual path from lawyer and energy executive to archaeologist, sharing the work that inspired his innovative approach to cultural heritage preservation.
African American Art History at the Getty Research Institute
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One of the many outcomes of the civil rights movement of the 1960s was the start of serious academic study of art of the African diaspora, including by African American artists. The Getty Research Institute has launched an initiative committed to collecting materials related to this field, beginning with plans to acquire the Betye Saar archive in fall 2018. And in summer 2019 Getty worked alongside the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and the MacArthur, Ford, and Mellon foundations to acquire the archives of the Johnson Publishing Company, including more than 4.8 million images from Ebony and Jet magazines.
In this episode, LeRonn Brooks, associate curator at the Getty Research Institute, and Kellie Jones, Columbia University professor and senior consultant on the Getty’s initiative, discuss the evolution of the study of art by African Americans and other artists of the African diaspora, the urgency of preserving critical archival materials, and their plans for the future of the initiative.
A Half-Century of Prints with Sidney Felsen of Gemini GEL
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In
1966, at the age of forty-one, Sidney Felsen moved from the world of accounting
to that of art, founding the artists’ workshop and fine-art print publisher
Gemini GEL in Los Angeles. With Gemini GEL, Sidney quickly got to work with
some of the biggest artists of the twentieth century: Man Ray, Josef Albers, Jasper
Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg, to name a few. And Gemini GEL continues its
work with new generations of artists, including Julie Mehretu, Tacita Dean, and
David Hammons.
In this episode, Felsen talks about how Gemini GEL got started and grew into the organization it is today, sharing stories about the artists he’s worked with along the way.
What was the world like from 500 to 1500 CE? This period, often called medieval or the Middle Ages in European history, saw the rise and fall of empires and the expansion of cross-cultural exchange. Getty curator Bryan C. Keene argues that illuminated manuscripts and decorated texts from Africa, Asia, Australasia, the Americas, and Europe are windows through which we can view the interconnected history of humanity. In this episode, he discusses his recent book Toward a Global Middle Ages: Encountering the World through Illuminated Manuscripts, highlighting the challenges and opportunities of the emerging discipline known as the Global Middle Ages.
The Philanthropy Philosophy of Getty Foundation Director Joan Weinstein
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Since its inception, Getty has recognized philanthropy in the arts as vital to its mission, with the Foundation as one of its four main programs, alongside the Museum, Research Institute, and Conservation Institute. From its early grants to other LA institutions to its robust, strategic, international grantmaking program today, the work of the Getty Foundation has grown and evolved since it began in 1985.
In
this episode, Foundation director Joan Weinstein discusses how the philosophy
behind the Foundation’s grants has shifted alongside changes in the field, how it
impacts art and art history around the globe, and what she anticipates for its
future.
