Displaying items by tag: Getty Museum

Earlier this month at Sotheby’s London, the Louvre paid £965,000 ($1.44 million) for a Betrayal of Christ, the left wing of a French renaissance triptych by Dreux Bude Master (probably André d’Ypres). The larger central panel, a Crucifixion (below) has been in the Getty Museum since 1979, and the right panel is in the Musée Fabre. The three panels were briefly displayed together at the Art Institute of Chicago for a 2011 exhibition.

The Getty Foundation has announced a second round of grants for its Keeping It Modern conservation initiative, funding the study of exceptional architecture including Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple in Oak Park, Ill., and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius' residence in Lincoln, Mass.

Grants totaling more than $1.75 million have been awarded to 14 buildings, built in the 20th century in eight countries including India and Brazil....

There's a moment in "Mr. Turner," the captivating Mike Leigh movie about the last years in the life of audacious British painter J.M.W. Turner, when the artist is having a heated discussion at the same time that he's busily painting a picture. Concentration ricochets back and forth between canvas and conversation, like a furious ping-pong game.

Turner (Timothy Spall), agitated and sputtering, suddenly turns and spits on the canvas, rubbing the saliva into fresh, wet paint with his thumb. Without skipping a beat, he resumes with brush and palette knife.

"Mr. Turner" is the most convincing cinematic portrayal of an artist since "Basquiat" nearly 20 years ago. Leigh, like the earlier film's director, artist Julian Schnabel, understands that when it comes to making worthwhile art, the only workable attitude is: Do whatever it takes.

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.

One of the Taft Museum of Art's best-known paintings – "Europa and the Bull" by Joseph Mallord William Turner, circa 1845 – goes on display next month at the Tate Britain, one of London's foremost museums.

It will be there through Jan. 25, before traveling to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco as part of the exhibition "Late Turner: Painting Set Free."

Los Angeles’s Getty Museum is saving about 2,500 gallons of water per day thanks to its decision to shut down most of its fountains and pools of water as part of an effort to conserve water during California’s ongoing severe drought, reports the Los Angeles Times.

Some museum visitors have been sorry not to be able to experience the striking water features at the Getty Center in Los Angeles and the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, but the museum believes that saving water is more important. California governor Jerry Brown has made two emergency declarations this year, which, while voluntary, call on the state’s residents to do their part to limit water use during the drought.

One of the Getty's most prized ancient artworks is hanging in a legal balance this week in Italy's highest court, leaving the L.A. museum's leaders feeling as if they have landed in a Franz Kafka tale, a judicial and bureaucratic nightmare they can neither understand nor escape.

But unlike a hapless Kafka character, the Getty has an inkling as to why its nearly life-size statue, known as "Victorious Youth" or the "Getty Bronze," is back in a maze of judicial and investigative proceedings. And rather than suffer passively, the Getty — the world's richest art institution, with a $6-billion endowment — may well draw a line.

The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles has announced that it will voluntarily return a 12th-century Byzantine illuminated New Testament to the Monastery of Dionysiou in Greece after learning that it had been illegally removed from the monastery over 50 years ago. The Getty acquired the manuscript in 1983 as part of a “large, well-documented” collection.

The Getty conducted research into the manuscript with the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, which brought to light a 1960 monastery record that said that the work had been illegally removed. The report of the manuscript’s disappearance was never made public and no information was released to law enforcement officials or to any databases of stolen art.

The illuminated New Testament is currently on display at the Getty as part of the exhibition “Heaven and Earth: Byzantine Illumination at the Cultural Crossroad” and has been featured in 14 other shows at the museum. The Getty will return the manuscript to Greece after the exhibition closes on June 22. 

As of last month, the Getty Museum did not have a single image by Herb Ritts in its extensive photography collection. Now it has 69 black-and-white images by the late L.A. fashion photographer valued at close to $1 million, acquired from his foundation in a single transaction that was part gift and part purchase.

Getty associate curator Paul Martineau says the change reflects his own interest in fashion photography as well as a commitment by the department to “strengthen its holdings in the area.”

Ritts, who died in 2002, helped to popularize a certain high-drama, high-contrast, starkly beautiful style associated with the 1980s, before fashion photographers began working so hard to make models look realistic, trashy and bedraggled. This acquisition includes some recognizable images, such as an early portrait of his friend Richard Gere smoking at a gas station (done when Ritts was still a Lucite furniture sales rep) and theatrical shots of supermodels like Cindy, Christie and Naomi.

Want to know more about the painting you are standing in front of while visiting the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles? Grab your smartphone and snap a picture of it, says Google.

The team behind Google Goggles, the company's image search and recognition engine, has "Goggles-enabled" the entire permanent collection at the gallery so users can discover much more about the painting than just the small amount of information that fits on the plaque beside it.

"You can use the Google Goggles app on your phone to take a photo of a painting from the collection and instantly access information about it from the Getty's mobile-optimized website and the rest of the web. It's possible to fit only a small amount of information on the wall next to a painting but visitors with Goggles can now enjoy the full story online," explains Google in a post on the Official Google Blog.

Using Google Goggles and a web-connected Android or iOS smartphone users can read or listen to commentary from artists, curators and conservators.