Provides a history of the buildings that have housed the Getty Museum collections, overviews the collections themselves, and offers a biography of J. Paul Getty
This revised and updated J. Paul Getty Museum Handbook of the Collections includes many major objects that recently have been added to the collections, as well as the more familiar masterpieces frequent visitors have become acquainted with over the years from the antiquities, drawings, manuscripts, paintings, photographs, and sculpture and decorative arts holdings. Among the notable new accessions is a major collection of modern and contemporary sculpture, a 2005 gift from the Fran and Ray Stark Trust. Moreover, the new edition of the Handbook marks the historic moment at which the Museum commences operating on two sites simultaneously--the dazzling Getty Center on a hilltop in Brentwood and the magnificently reimagined Getty Villa in Malibu, devoted to Western antiquities. Readers who have not been among the millions of visitors to the two sites will find this Handbook an inducement for paying a visit; for those who have seen the collections, it will help them recall the experience and enrich their recollection.
The original Getty Museum, housed in a replica of a Roman Villa on a site overlooking the Pacific Ocean, is one of Los Angeles's most treasured landmarks. Closed for almost ten years while renovations were made to the building and the site itself was transformed into a center for the study of antiquities and conservation, the Getty Villa is now set to open late in 2005. The Getty Villa is a lively history of the Getty Museum, its renowned antiquities collections, and its growth from a small museum in a ranch house in Malibu to its first home in a building designed to replicate what we know of the Villa dei Papiri, an ancient Roman villa partially uncovered in Herculaneum. Most engagingly, this book records the ten-year adventure in reconfiguring a beautiful, but topographically challenging, site into one that could continue to accommodate the splendid Museum building and also provide for an outdoor theater, laboratories for conservation work and research, offices for staff and visiting scholars, and an education program for adults and children. This is a story of architectural imagination, geographical challenges, and legal hurdles, all of which have resulted in a truly unique and beautiful site. The story is an enlightening and rewarding one for anyone interested in architecture and in the difficulties posed by building on a grand scale in the twenty-first century. Beautifully illustrated throughout, the book includes 250 reproductions of works of art, photographs of both the old and the new Getty Museum, site plans, and architectural elevations.
This beautifully illustrated work brings together more than one hundred objects from the J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection of European decorative arts. Included here is a generous selection of French and Italian furniture from the mid-sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Masterpieces by André-Charles Boulle, Bernard (II) van Risenburgh, and others reveal the virtuoso craftsmanship that makes these objects such compelling examples of the furniture maker’s art. Many of the Museum’s finest pieces of porcelain, glass, and tin-glazed earthenware are also represented. Tapestries from Gobelins and Beauvais, bronze firedogs from Fontainebleau, and a lathe-turned ivory goblet of astonishing complexity from Saxony are among the other highlights of this handsome volume.
Inside the Getty takes readers on a tour from the Getty Villa to the Getty Center, from the Museum’s original home in J. Paul Getty’s house to the many labs, libraries, and galleries that fill the Center in Brentwood today. Readers will discover more about the history and daily operations of this institution. The second edition refreshes the illustration program with more recent photography and brings the text up to date with new information about some of the Museum’s most prominent new acquisitions, the Getty Research Institute’s holdings, the work done by the Getty Conservation Institute and the Getty Foundation, and changes to Getty operations site-wide.
J. Paul Getty began to collect French decorative arts in the 1930s and continued to do so until his death in 1976. The Museum’s collection has continued to grow since then at a rapid pace and contains over three hundred individual pieces at the time this book is published. This volume illustrates fifty of them. The selection represents a cross section of the collection, which covers the period from approximately 1660 to 1800. In the eighteenth century it became fashionable in Parisian society to decorate the interiors of houses with Far Eastern materials such as lacquer and porcelain. This taste was catered to by the marchands-merciers, members of a guild who combined the functions of the modern interior decorator, the antique dealer, and the picture dealer. These men devised highly ingenious settings for Far Eastern porcelains to adapt their exotic character to the French interiors of the period. Information about them and their clientele has been used in cataloguing the Getty Museum’s collection of mounted oriental porcelain, which is large and of high quality. This book is not a catalogue, nor is it a mere picture book or checklist. Each piece has been chosen because it represents a particular aspect of the crafts involved in the production of objects that were made by Parisian craftsmen for the crown, the nobility, and the rich bourgeoisie. The pieces are arranged in chronological order. Translations of the French archival extracts, an index, and a concise bibliography have been provided.
In his candid and witty autobiography, famed tycoon J. Paul Getty invites readers to glimpse the twentieth century from the vantage point of a man who lived, as he puts it, "through the most exciting and exhilarating - and most turbulent and terrible - eight decades of human history." Whether describing how he amassed his staggering fortune, recounting conversations with intriguing personalities of the day, or frankly discussing his marriages and liaisons, J. Paul Getty sets the record straight - once and for all. He even speaks honestly about his notorious stinginess and the bizarre problems faced by the impossibly wealthy.
The Getty Museum’s collection of postclassical European glass represents a well-defined chapter within the history of the medium. These objects—which range in date from the late Middle Ages to the late seventeenth century—originated in important Italian, German, Bohemian, Netherlandish, Silesian, and Austrian centers of production. The sixty-eight pieces presented in this catalogue include vessels made to resemble rock crystal or chalcedony; glass blown into unusually large or remarkably refined shapes; and glass decorated with ornament that is intricately applied, elegantly enameled, or gilded. Each object is described in detail, including provenance, bibliography, and relevant comparative examples. An introductory essay traces the history of European glass from classical times to the present.
The mosaics in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum span the second through the sixth centuries AD and reveal the diversity of compositions found throughout the Roman Empire during this period. Elaborate floors of stone and glass tesserae transformed private dwellings and public buildings alike into spectacular settings of vibrant color, figural imagery, and geometric design. Scenes from mythology, nature, daily life, and spectacles in the arena enlivened interior spaces and reflected the cultural ambitions of wealthy patrons. This online catalogue documents all of the mosaics in the Getty Museum’s collection, presenting their artistry in new color photography as well as the contexts of their discovery and excavation across Rome's expanding empire—from its center in Italy to provinces in southern Gaul, North Africa, and ancient Syria. The free online edition of this open-access catalogue, available at www.getty.edu/publications/romanmosaics/, includes zoomable high-resolution photography, embedded glossary terms and additional comparative images, and interactive maps drawn from the Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire. Also available are free PDF, EPUB, and Kindle/MOBI downloads of the book, CSV and JSON downloads of the object data from the catalogue, and JPG and PPT downloads of the main catalogue images.