Displaying items by tag: getty research institute

Maurice Tuchman, the first full-time curator of modern art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, has donated his papers to the Getty Research Institute, the GRI is expected to announce Thursday.

Tuchman held the LACMA position from 1964 to 1994 and was responsible for mounting pioneering shows and projects, including the lauded Art and Technology program, which championed emerging light and space artists such as Robert Irwin and James Turrell and paired artists with Southern California technology companies from 1966 to 1971.

The Getty Research Institute announced Tuesday that it has acquired the complete archives of the Margo Leavin Gallery, the influential Los Angeles gallery that represented such artists as John Baldessari, Alexis Smith and William Leavitt, among others, over the years from its opening in 1970 until it closed in 2013.

The Leavin gallery was known as the go-to place to see cutting-edge contemporary art from notable or up-and-coming artists from New York and Los Angeles.

The Getty Research Institute has launched an expanded dealer stock book database that provides free online access to almost 24,000 records created from the Knoedler Gallery painting stock books. Books 1 through 6, dating from 1872 to 1920, are available now; stock books 7 through 11 will be added soon.

Knoedler Gallery in New York was a central force in the evolution of an art market in the U.S. This newly enhanced database can be used to reconstruct the itineraries of thousands of paintings that crossed the Atlantic during the Gilded Age—including many that ended up in major American museums.

How do you archive a performance? Can you put human speech and action under glass and frame it? Stow art that unfolds in three dimensions within acid-free archival boxes, to be filed away in a cool, dark vault?

The conundrum of how best to preserve the history of midcentury American performance art — art created before phones had video cameras — lies at the center of the Getty Research Institute's recently announced acquisition of Robert McElroy's archive. In more than 700 prints and 10,000 negatives, the photographer documented the performative works of Allan Kaprow, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg and other artists whose "Happenings" grew from niche New York art events into a full-fledged pop culture phenomenon.

After releasing about 6,400 high-resolution images for public use without fees or restriction back in August, The Getty Research Institute has released a second batch of works, bringing the total number of images available to approximately 10,000. The initiative is part of the Getty’s Open Content Program, which will make images from the Getty’s illustrious collection available for publications, research and a variety of personal uses.

The works recently made available on the Getty’s site include drawings, watercolors, artists’ sketchbooks, rare prints, architectural drawings and photographs. Before launching the Open Content Program, 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. Officials plan to keep adding works to the Getty’s site until all of the Institute-owned or public domain images are available.    

Getty President and CEO, Jim Cuno, said, “This project goes to the heart of the Getty’s mission to share its collections and research as widely as possible. We look forward to seeing the ingenious, creative and thoughtful ways these images are being used.”

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.   

Upon her death on January 7, 2013 at the age of 91, Ada Louise Huxtable (1921-2013), a pioneering architecture critic, writer and historian, left her entire estate and her archives to the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. The bequest also included an apartment in New York City, a house in Marblehead, MA, and the archives of Huxtable’s husband, industrial designer, Garth Huxtable (1911-1989).  Huxtable served as the architecture critic for the New York Times from 1963 to 1982 (she was the first full-time architecture critic at an American newspaper) and as a writer for the Wall Street Journal.

The Huxtable Archives, which include notes, correspondence, research files, manuscripts, drawings, and photography, will become part of the Getty’s Special Collections holdings. Huxtable, a proponent of historic preservation, will have her own groundbreaking work conserved for the benefit of the public and the field of architecture thanks to her partnership with the Getty.

The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles has acquired a number of 18^th and 19^th century prints by James Ensor (Belgian, 1860 – 1949) and Jean-Jacques de Boissieu (French, 1736 – 1810). An anonymous collector gifted the works to the museum. “Prints are a significant collecting priority for us,” said Marcia Reed, chief curator of special collections at the Getty. The gift will flesh out the museum’s already impressive Ensor holdings and will add a solid representation of Boissieu’s work.

Among the Ensor prints are three hand-colored etchings that are exceptional examples of his work from the 1890s, the period that is considered to be his artistic peak. Two of the three prints were inspired by Edgar Allen Poe stories and bear the skeletons, masks, and crowds of people that Ensor often included in his work. The Getty already has a compilation of Ensor’s correspondence and manuscripts including 100 signed postcards and letters, 16 prints, and his masterpiece, Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 in its collection.

The gift of Boissieu’s work includes 23 etchings that span the artist’s career. Well-known as a painter and draftsman, Boissieu was also a renowned printmaker and was highly regarded for his work during the 18^th century. The collection includes several sheets of Boissieu’s studies of heads – both human and animal.

The Getty Museum plans to host a major, monographic exhibition of Ensor’s work in 2014. The show will include the prints gifted to the Research Institute.

165 years ago, the Knoedler Gallery opened its doors in New York and went on to help create some of the country’s most celebrated collections including those of Paul Mellon, Henry Clay Frick, and Robert Sterling Clark. Throughout the years, top-notch works by artists such as van Gogh, Manet, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Louise Bourgeois, and Willem de Kooning passed through the gallery. When the Soviet government sold hundreds of paintings from the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad in the 1930s, they chose to work with Knoedler to sell paintings by masters like Rembrandt, Raphael, and Velazquez.

Knoedler’s exemplary past is often forgotten as the gallery’s present has been mired in lawsuits and accusations that the company’s former president, Ann Freedman, was in the business of selling fakes. Last year, Knoedler Gallery closed its doors for good.

This week, Los Angeles’ Getty Research Institute announced that it had bought the Knoedler Gallery archive. Spanning from around 1850 to 1971, the archive includes stock books, sales books, a photo archive and files of correspondence, including letters from artists and collectors, some with illustrations. The Getty was interested in Knoedler’s archive because it offers an expansive glimpse into the history of collecting and the art market in the United States and Europe from the mid-19^th century to modern times.

The archive was purchased from Knoedler’s owner, Michael Hammer, for an undisclosed amount. Meticulously preserved, the archive will be available to scholars and digitized for online research after the Getty catalogues and conserves it all.