Getty Art + Ideas

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 short recordings feature stories related to our daily lives. This week, Getty drawings curator Stephanie Schrader considers the upside-down world of An Enchanted Cellar with Animals, made by Cornelis Saftleven around 1655 to 1670. To learn more...

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...

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...

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...

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 add...

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 addres...

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 a...

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 commun...

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 alongsid...

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...

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 hi...

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...

From his childhood in Australia spent reading about the ancient world to his current role as director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Tim Potts has always thought globally. Potts’s broad experiences as a PhD student at Oxford, banker at Lehman Brothers, and director at the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia, Fitzwilliam in England, and Kimbell in Texas have shaped his approach to the Getty’s c...

Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) was a prolific printmaker whose work explored painful themes such as hunger, poverty, and death. To achieve her powerful results, she employed a wide range of printing techniques and created numerous drawings and working proofs as part of her process. A new exhibition at the Getty Research Institute, Käthe Kollwitz: Prints, Process, Politics, showcases her working method...

Southern California has always faced wildfires, but in recent years the threat has grown. Both the Getty Center and the Getty Villa are situated in the Santa Monica Mountains and surrounded by brushland, making them particularly vulnerable to the increased fire risk. In October 2019, the eponymous “Getty Fire” roared through the Santa Monicas near the Getty Center for days. But the Getty staff wer...

At the start of the twentieth century, American printmakers portrayed the modernizing world around them, from towering skyscrapers and deserted city streets to jazzy dance halls and boisterous movie theaters. Many of these printmakers were recent immigrants to the United States, and many were women—that these groups in particular could make careers as artists is indicative of the immense social ch...

French painter Édouard Manet is perhaps best known for his large scale paintings like Olympia and Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, both of which stoked controversy when they were first displayed. But in later life, with his health deteriorating, the artist shifted his focus to luscious still lifes, delicate pastels and watercolors, and portraits of social types like the parisienne or the dandy. The exhibi...

One of the most successful artists of the Italian Renaissance, Titian was the master of the sixteenth-century Venetian school and admired by his royal patrons and fellow artists alike. Several of his contemporaries, including the authors and art theorists Giorgio Vasari, Francesco Priscianese, Pietro Aretino, and Ludovico Dolce, wrote accounts of Titian’s life and work. In this episode, Getty assi...

Today on Art + Ideas, we’re bringing you an episode from Getty’s new podcast, Recording Artists . In season one, Radical Women, host Helen Molesworth uses archival interviews to explore the lives of six women artists—Alice Neel, Lee Krasner, Betye Saar, Helen Frankenthaler, Yoko Ono, and Eva Hesse. Molesworth also speaks with contemporary artists and art historians to make sense of what it meant—a...

Ray Kappe’s buildings, frequently featuring extensive spans of glass and warm wood, are known for their embrace of their often unusual sites and the California landscape. But Kappe’s impact on Southern California extends well beyond his own architectural practice. His work as an educator and as founding director of the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) ensure that Kappe’s uni...

From painted cave temples in China to pyramids in Egypt to earthen cathedrals in Peru, the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) works globally to conserve artworks, architecture, and cultural heritage sites. An integral part of this effort is conducting scientific research, developing tools and educating and training professionals to manage conservation projects in situ. In this episode, John E. and...

This episode commemorates the hundredth anniversary of the opening of the Bauhaus, the influential school founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany. Revered for its experimental art and design curriculum, the Bauhaus sought to erode distinctions among crafts, the fine arts, and architecture through study centered on practical experience and a variety of traditional and experimental medi...

Since the Ice Age, humans have been using their imaginations to create objects of great artistry and skill, many of them destined for spiritual or religious functions. Exploring the stories these objects tell and the shared narratives they reflect helps us to understand the nature of belief and the complex relationship between faith and society. In this episode, former British Museum director, Nei...

Impressionist painter Edgar Degas (1834–1917) is well known for his gauzy paintings of dancers, his motion-filled images of horses, and his striking portraits. But the artist also lived a fascinating life—from a privileged upbringing to family bankruptcy, from defending Paris alongside Manet during the Franco-Prussian War to feuding with the same artist over a portrait. Getty Publications has rece...

Buried by the 79 AD eruption of Vesuvius and rediscovered in the 1750s, the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum is one of the best-preserved ancient Roman villas. This expansive waterfront home of Rome’s elite contained bright wall frescoes, bronze and marble statues, delicate mosaics, and a library of over one thousand papyrus scrolls that were uniquely preserved by the volcanic debris. The Villa dei...