Displaying items by tag: timothy potts

Pablo Picasso’s 1907 painting "Femme" will be on temporary display at the J. Paul Getty Museum through March 2015. The painting, which closely relates to Picasso’s famed "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" (1907, Museum of Modern Art, New York), will hang in the Getty Museum’s West Pavilion alongside portraits by Edouard Manet and Paul Cézanne, 19th-century masters whom Picasso greatly admired.

“This work represents a pivotal moment in Picasso’s career, marking the first experiments with fractured space that culminated in his revolutionary painting "Les Desmoiselles D'Avignon" of the same year and the creation of cubism,” says Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Filling vacancies in two of the Getty Museum's most important jobs, museum director Timothy Potts has picked Jeffrey Spier, an American scholar with whom he's had a long professional connection, as its new senior curator of antiquities — the top post at the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades — and an Italian museum director, Davide Gasparotto, as senior curator of paintings based at the Getty Center in Brentwood.

Gasparotto has been director of the Galleria Estense museum in Modena, Italy, for the last two years, and spent 12 years as a curator and art historian at the National Gallery of Parma.

The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles has purchased an early drawing by the Impressionist master Georges Seurat for £2,434,500 ($3,971,643). Regarded as one of the finest drawings ever produced by Seurat, ‘Mendiant hindou’ was expected to fetch between $129,000 and $194,000 at auction. The work comes from the private collection of Jan Krugier, one of the preeminent art dealers and collectors of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Created around 1878-1879 when Seurat was only twenty years old, ‘Mendiant hindou’ illustrates how the artist used light, shadow and gradation to create forms and convey the mood of his subjects. According to Timothy Potts, the director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, the drawing “signifies the beginning of Seurat’s obsession with the effects of light and dark that characterize his mature paintings and drawings.”

In addition to ‘Mendiant hindou,’ the J. Paul Getty Museum holds three masterpieces by Seurat in its collection -- ‘Madame Seurat, the Artist’s Mother,’ ‘Poplars,’ and ‘Woman Strolling.’

Scott Schaefer, the J. Paul Getty Museum’s Senior Curator of Paintings, will retire on January 21, 2014. Schaefer joined the Getty in 1999 after stints at Sotheby’s, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Schaefer, who helmed the Getty’s Paintings department for four years, helped the museum acquire a total of 70 paintings and pastels and five sculptures. Among the most important recent acquisitions are the Getty’s first paintings by Paul Gauguin, J.M.W. Turner’s Modern Rome, and a rare self-portrait by Rembrandt.

Timothy Potts, the Getty’s director, said, “Through his acquisitions, Scott has made an impact on every one of the Museum’s paintings galleries and, in particular, transformed our eighteenth-century French collection. We will miss his discerning eye, keen intelligence and above all his unswerving commitment to the Museum.”

The Getty, which includes the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Research Institute and the Getty Conservation Institute, has lifted restrictions on the use of images that the Getty holds the rights to or are in the public domain. Jim Cuno, the president and CEO of the Getty, made the announcement in a post on The Iris, the Getty’s blog.

Approximately 4,600 images of paintings, drawings, manuscripts, photographs, antiquities, sculptures and decorative arts from the J. Paul Getty Museum are now available in high resolution on the Getty’s website. The Getty Research Institute is currently deciding which images from its collections can be made available under the initiative and the Getty Conservation Institute is working to make images from its international projects available to the public.

Timothy Potts, the J. Paul Getty Museum’s director, said, “The Museum is delighted to make these images available as the first step in a Getty-wide move toward open content. The Getty’s collections are greatly in demand for publications, research and a variety of personal uses, and I am please that with this initiative they will be readily available on a global basis to anyone with Internet access.”

Previously, the Getty’s images were only available upon request, for a fee and carried certain terms and conditions. The images will now be available for direct download on the website, free of charge.