Tag Archives: Getty Center

Manet’s Later Years

By | |
Comments Off on Manet’s Later Years

Getty Center 
Sepulveda Pass, Los Angeles
November 16, 2019

We drove up to the Getty to see Manet and Modern Beauty, their special exhibition of over 80 works by Edouard Manet, created in the final years of his life.  We had read a preview article about it in the Los Angeles Times, and we were reminded of it by the monthly email newsletter we receive from the Getty.  Meredith’s sister Kathleen met us there.

The works on display included not only oil paintings but also pastels, watercolors, and letters Manet sent to friends that he decorated with small sketches or watercolor images.

The marquee work, Jeanne (Spring), is a beautifully executed painting of a well-dressed young woman who symbolizes Spring.  Manet had originally intended to paint all four seasons, each represented by a woman in seasonal dress. He did not live long enough to finish the project. He did paint Autumn, and that work is displayed near Spring in the Getty exhibit.

We enjoyed seeing images of the artist’s black and white cat Zizi, first eyeing a brioche and then curled up on his wife’s lap, in typical cat pose.

 Manet also painted friends’ dogs, and the portrait of one named “Bob” was included in the exhibition.

As we finished touring the Manet exhibition, we were treated to an outdoor musical and dance performance piece that was part of the Bridge-S series created and produced by Solange Knowles.  On the drive up to the Getty, we had read an article about her production in the Los Angeles Times. 

We stopped for lunch in the museum cafe, then went to see two other smaller temporary exhibitions, Balthazar: A Black African King in Medieval and Renaissance Art and Peasants in Pastel: Millet and the Pastel Revival.

The magi who came to see the infant Jesus are not named in the Gospels; indeed they are not even stated to be three in number.  But legend has filled in the gap, and tradition has it that one of the three wise men came from Africa and was named Balthazar.  We were interested to see how depictions of Balthazar changed over the centuries, and some of the illuminated manuscripts on display were exquisitely beautiful.

The pastel collection only included about a dozen works, but they were very well done.  Jean-Francois Millet came from a peasant family and often depicted rural scenes.  He led a revival in the use of pastels; displayed with his works are some by other artists who followed his lead like Alfred Sisley and Camille Pissarro.

It was a beautiful day; we enjoyed the views both to the east to UCLA and downtown, and west toward the ocean. The Getty Center gardens are beautiful, and we made a mental note to leave time for a tour of the grounds when we next come.

Admission to the Getty is free, but parking costs $20 per car. The price drops to $15 in mid afternoon and to $10 in the evening. The Manet exhibition runs through January 12, 2020.  The Balthazar exhibition ends February 16, 2020, and the pastels run through May 10, 2020.

The Nile Comes to LA

By | |
Comments Off on The Nile Comes to LA

Getty Center
Sepulveda Pass, Los Angeles
August 5, 2018

We headed north, and met up with Meredith’s sister Kathleen at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. We went to see the special exhibition Beyond the Nile: Egypt in the Classical World. The exhibition runs through September 9, and we wanted to be sure not to miss it.

Various pieces of fine and decorative arts are displayed in the special exhibition pavilion. They span nearly two millennia, and the galleries are arranged in chronological order. The theme is cultural exchange in the Mediterranean world, that is how Egypt and the other civilizations around the Mediterranean traded with one another and how their interactions influenced their respective art. The first room displays the oldest pieces, including objects traded between the Egyptians and the Mycenaeans and other items from the Bronze Age. Among the early pieces is a wooden model of a river boat; this piece had been placed in a tomb. Meredith liked seeing a boat full of rowers, although she thought one rower on the port side was leaning back too far relative to the rest of his crew.

The next room shows Egyptian and classical Greek pieces. The gallery which follows features works from the Ptolemaic period. The last several rooms contain Egyptian and Roman pieces, including some from Pompeii and others from Hadrian‘s villa.

The three of us took a docent led tour, which lasted about an hour and was quite informative. After lunch in the museum café, we went back through the Egypt exhibit on our own. We were all interested by two separate ancient papyri with medicinal recipes and magic healing spells. Although the documents are thousands of years old, large parts remain intact and the writing is clearly visible. We saw numerous statues, busts, and other sculpture. One we particularly liked was a basalt sarcophagus made around 600 BC, on loan from the Rijksmuseum. The person entombed in it was a Greek who attained high office in the Egyptian government, so someone who exemplifies the multicultural theme.

We saw several other things at the center. We caught the end of Pathways to Paradise: Medieval India and Europe. There were some truly splendid illuminated religious manuscripts on display. Although that particular exhibit closed after the weekend of our visit, the Getty has an extensive collection of illuminated manuscripts and often rotates them through special exhibitions like this one. There are some ancient Roman and Greek sculptures on loan from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. We found them in the south hall of the South Pavilion. The Santa Barbara museum is undergoing extensive multi-year renovation, and these works are on loan while that work is going on. The Lansdowne Hermes was particularly impressive.

Admission to the museum is free, but parking costs $15. A tram runs up the hill from the parking garage. Handicap access is good. The café offers a selection of cuisines, in a food court type arrangement. Food is good, prices are a little high, as is typical with most museum restaurants.

Third Blog-iversary

By | |
Comments Off on Third Blog-iversary

May 23 marks three years we have been writing this blog. In the first two years most of our entries chronicled outings we took with Meredith’s mother, Margaret. Once she had moved back to Los Angeles, we started a routine of visiting her and taking her out to lunch and then a museum or historic site. Often we finished the visit by meeting up with Meredith’s sister for coffee. After a while we thought, why not write about those trips? It gave us a chance to review the museums and also to write about our interactions with Margaret.

Over the past three years, we have written 85 posts, counting this one. The museum featured most often was the Getty Center in the Sepulveda Pass. Margaret preferred historical and archeological exhibits to art museums, per se; when the Getty featured special exhibitions of that sort we tried to take her to them. Our favorite museum restaurant is Zeidler’s Cafe at the Skirball Museum, also in the Sepulveda Pass.

Margaret passed away in June of last year. Two months ago, on what would have been Margaret’s 80th birthday, Meredith met up with her sister Kathleen and our oldest daughter to scatter Margaret’s ashes. Meredith plans to post a page here, eventually, with photos of Margaret’s life.

What are we doing in Year Four? Going forward, we continue to post as we visit places and things strike our fancy.

  • Meredith plans to be in Tennessee for the total solar eclipse in August and will write an entry about it.
  • We are looking forward to the Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA collaboration running from September 2017 through January 2018 at dozens of museums around Southern California. We went to a number of the exhibitions in the original Pacific Standard Time collaboration, which predated our blog, and we will definitely seek out some of these new exhibitions.
  • Time permitting we want to see the Paul Simon exhibition at the Skirball, which is running currently and will be there until September 3, 2017.

If you have any places you want to see written up, mention them in the comments or contact us directly.

Getty — Cave Temples

By | |
Comments Off on Getty — Cave Temples

Getty Center
Sepulveda Pass
May 15, 2016

We took Margaret to the Getty Center, primarily to see the new exhibition, the Cave Temples of Dunhuang: Buddhist Art on China’s Silk Road. History is one of her main interests, and she had very much enjoyed the Silk Road exhibit at the Natural History Museum when we saw it several years ago, in our pre-blog period, so this exhibit was a “must see.”

Getty_05152016A

We first heard about this exhibition through the Getty 360 email newsletter which the Getty sends us each month, and we then saw an Associated Press article about it in the San Diego Union Tribune: Getty Center Recreates Elaborate Chinese Caves. It runs through September 4, 2016.

The caves of Mogao near Dunhuang were carved out in stages over nearly a millennium from the 4th to the 14th centuries, by Buddhist monks and others. The cave temple complex served those traveling on the Silk Road. The area is situated in northwestern China, on the eastern edge of the Gobi Desert, north of Tibet and south of Mongolia. Roughly half of the approximately 1000 caves have some decoration, and many of those feature elaborate and beautiful religious sculptures and paintings. Many caves fell into disuse during the Ming Dynasty of the 14th to 17th centuries, and the complex seems to have been used only as a local religious center after that. Sand drifted over the site and obscured many of the grottoes and the wooden facades of the cave entrances decayed. Early in the 20th century, Wang Yuanlu, a Daoist monk, discovered tens of thousands of ancient documents and other artifacts that had been sealed in one of the caves. In 1943 the Dunhuang Academy was established to explore and conserve Mogao. Since the 1970s the caves have become a tourist attraction, and the number of visitors has made conservation a critical need. For the last decade, the Getty Conservation Institute has worked with the local institute to stabilize, preserve, and restore some of the cave paintings.

The Getty exhibition has three parts. In the Research Institute building, which we visited first, are displayed actual historical artifacts such as sculptures, parchments, paintings, and drawings. Margaret particularly enjoyed a large embroidered silk tapestry showing a life-sized Buddha, called the Miraculous Image of Liangzhou. It was made around 700 A.D. (It enjoyed a shout out in the AP article linked above.)

Right next to that exhibition there is a small movie theater showing The Cave 45 Virtual Immersive Experience, a short film in 3-D of one of the restored caves, explaining the details of the statuary and the paintings in that particular cave.

The third part of the exhibition is a tent that has been set up especially for this purpose on the entrance plaza at the Getty Center, right near where the trams drop arriving visitors. Within that tent are replicas of three of the cave temples, with docents available to answer questions.

Getty_05152016C

Due to capacity limits, there is timed entry to the replica cave tent. We had the bad luck to time our visit to coincide with a very large group from Riverside which had blocked out some time in the early afternoon. When we first tried to get timed tickets, right after lunch, we were told there would not be any given out for an hour and a half, so we went off to look at the new Rembrandt (see below). When we came back, the earliest timed tickets we could get would have had us waiting at the Getty for nearly an hour and a half, and Margaret was already fatigued at that point. We asked at the information booth if any accommodation could be made for her, given her disabilities, and a supervisor helped us to the front of the line both for the replica cave and the movie, with just a short wait for each. He was gracious and helpful; we were relieved and grateful. If we had been there on our own the wait would not have mattered, and we could have toured other galleries in the meantime, but Margaret has very limited stamina these days.

Although the Chinese cave art was the main focus of our visit, we did make time to see another new exhibit, The Promise of Youth: Rembrandt’s Senses Rediscovered. The Getty owns several Rembrandt paintings and has a couple others on long term loan, but the one which is currently the center of attention is on short term loan only until August 28, 2016. It is called The Unconscious Patient (Allegory of the Sense of Smell) and is one of a series that Rembrandt painted as a young artist illustrating the five senses. See more about the series, and photos of the paintings, on the Getty’s website: here. This painting, illustrating the sense of smell, is displayed between paintings illustrating touch and hearing. The backstory is one of those stranger than fiction stories; the painting was recently rediscovered, and its owners did not know it was by Rembrandt. We read the story of its discovery in an article in the Los Angeles Times. Adjacent to the three “senses” paintings are the museum’s other Rembrandt works.

Getty_05152016B

Admission to the Getty is free, but those arriving by private car pay $15 to park. Parking is at the foot of the hill, and visitors ride trams up to the entry plaza. There were ample handicap spaces in the garage, and accessibility is generally good throughout the center. Finding the elevators is sometimes a little challenging, but all levels of the exhibit buildings can be reached either by elevator or (within the Research Institute exhibit space) by ramp. As we noted, the staff was very helpful with accommodating Margaret, so we give them high marks for disability services.

The café is arranged as a food court with half a dozen stations offering a wide selection of food. The food is good, and the prices are reasonable for a museum cafe. There is also a sit down restaurant.

Getty Center — Bronzes

By | |
Comments Off on Getty Center — Bronzes

Getty Center
Sepulveda Pass
September 13, 2015

We took Margaret to the Getty Center to see the special exhibition Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World. The exhibition runs through November 1, 2015. The Getty has gathered many bronze sculptures of the Hellenistic period, from 323 to 31 B.C., some on loan from museums in the Mediterranean world. The exhibition presents a wonderful sampling of Hellenistic art of portraiture and the human form. Each piece was accompanied with a good write up explaining where it was found, when and how it was made, and what the salient details are to look for in it. The museum’s website offers an excellent gallery of images of the pieces in the exhibition. We were both very impressed with the seated bronze statue of the tired boxer in the center of the second area of the exhibition space. Margaret liked the two very similar statues of athletes in the middle room. Their large size and fine detail make each statue an outstanding piece in its own right, but they are also interesting because they are clearly made from the same master model.

Getty_bronzes_plaza

After the bronzes we took a short walk through the exhibit about Renaissance artist Andrea Del Sarto and his workshop. We caught that exhibit on its final day. It was interesting because it included both drawings and paintings, giving an idea how the masterworks were put together.

At the end of our stay we took a stroll through the 19th century European painting area of the permanent collection, including the Impressionist paintings. Bob likes the Sisley landscape depicting the road from Versailles to St. Germain; Meredith never tires of Monet’s painting of snow dusted wheat stacks in the morning sun.

We ate in the museum café, a food court style cafeteria that is less expensive than the museum restaurant upstairs. Margaret had a salad, and we each had Mexican dishes. The food was good. There was not much of a crowd. Perhaps the Sunday attendance is lighter than Saturday.

Admission to the Getty Center is free. The only cost to get in is $15 per car to park. If one arrives by public transport, then there is no cost.

Getty_hike

We had a bit of an adventure leaving. The trams between the parking garage and museum had broken down. We had the choice of taking a shuttle bus or walking down the hill. We chose to walk. That is not an option we have ever seen offered before so wanted to take advantage of the opportunity. It took us a little more than 15 minutes, and the walk gave us a chance to enjoy the views out over the pass.

Getty Center — Turner

By | |
Comments Off on Getty Center — Turner

Getty Center
Sepulveda Pass
March 8, 2015

We went to the Getty Center primarily to see the special exhibition J. M. W. Turner, Painting Set Free. We first stopped in the museum café, though, and had some sandwiches. It was a beautiful sunny and clear day, so we seated ourselves near the windows and had a good view of the gardens and the surrounding hills while we ate.

We then went to the Research Institute building on the Getty campus, to see a special exhibition of art associated with the First World War: World War I: War of Images, Images of War. There were propaganda images from all the major countries involved in the war, both Allies and Central Powers. They were also drawings by artists caught up in the war, illustrating the horrors of war and its aftermath. At the end of the exhibit short video clips were running, from silent movies made soon after the end of the war. Those videos recreate the battlefield, as imagined by filmmakers soon afterwards. That exhibition closes on April 19, 2015, and we had been planning to see it for quite a while, since we are both interested in history generally and the history of World War I in particular.

Getty_Turner_MB&RA

We then went on to the special exhibition building. The Turner exhibition focuses on the last decade and a half of his life. We both liked his nautical paintings, particularly Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth, which is the iconic painting used in the museum’s poster for the exhibition. Also of interest were the series of watercolors he did while traveling in Europe. He used those as studies to show potential patrons, who could then commission a larger oil painting of the subject. The watercolors themselves were well done and capture the imagination although they are smaller and simpler than his oil paintings. Several of the large oil paintings in the gallery were unfinished. Turner painted the base and general background on those but had not added detail. Bob was very interested in his painting Hero of a Hundred Fights, showing an industrial forge and reworked to add a bronze statue of the Duke of Wellington being removed from its mold. The Turner exhibition will be at the Getty through May 24, 2015. There was an extensive review of the exhibition in the Los Angeles Times about two weeks before we went.

Margaret grew tired near the end of the exhibition and wanted to leave early, so Meredith took her out while Bob finished looking at paintings in the last gallery, then we swapped off, and Meredith went back into the exhibition. Bob and Margaret strolled around on the plaza level and enjoyed the view out over the pass looking south.

Admission to the Getty is free, but parking costs $15. Despite numerous signs telling people to pay at a machine before going back to the car, we managed to get stuck in the exit lane behind someone who failed to do so. After that minor delay we headed back to the Valley and met up with Kathleen, Meredith’s sister, for coffee.

Wheelchair access at the Getty is very good. There are several levels but the buildings mainly connect just at the plaza level, so one has to go up and down in elevators as you move from one building to another, and the elevators can be a bit slow.

Getty Center — Tapestries

By | |
Comments Off on Getty Center — Tapestries

Getty Center
Sepulveda Pass
November 15, 2014

We took Margaret to see the special exhibition at the Getty, of tapestries and related paintings by Peter Paul Rubens. The tapestries are part of a larger set celebrating the Triumph of the Eucharist, commissioned in the 1620s by the Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia, the ruler of the Spanish Netherlands. The tapestries were woven in Belgium and installed in the Convent of the Poor Clares in Madrid, an institution closely associated with the Habsburg monarchy. We first learned about the exhibition through a preview piece Joyful Weaving of Art in the Los Angeles Times. After it opened there was a longer review in the Times, Wonders Unfurl, as part of an article which also looked at a tapestry exhibit in New York.

Getty-Rubens

The tapestries are of monumental size. Next to them were paintings on oak panels that Rubens had made as models from which the weavers could work. It was interesting to note that the paintings are mirror images of the tapestries. The weavers were working from the back side of the tapestries and this reversal of the pattern image made their work easier. Although the colors have faded slightly with time, the tapestries still show remarkable shadings of detail.

The overall spirit of the series is triumphalist, very much in keeping with the Counter Reformation period in which they were made. They are devotional works and celebrate one of the central mysteries of Catholic Christianity, the sacrament of the Eucharist. Some panels are allegorical, such as the victory of Truth over Heresy. Other panels illustrate scriptural stories which Catholics see as prefiguring the Eucharist, such as the sacrifice offered by Melchizedek for Abraham, and the gathering of manna in the desert.

After touring the special exhibition we went over to another building to see a Rubens painting in the permanent collection, of the Caledonian boar hunt. We strolled through that gallery and looked at other period paintings, mainly by Flemish artists. Margaret enjoyed a Rembrandt self portrait in which the artist is laughing.

Admission to the museum is free, but parking costs $15. The parking system has been changed so that one pays on leaving, rather than entering.

We ate at the museum café. A nice feature is that there are half a dozen different stations, so one can select from a variety of choices. We each enjoyed Mexican food; Margaret had a fruit salad from the grab and go section.

We enjoyed the tapestries and related panels a great deal. Margaret was not particularly interested in them. Her preferences run more to historical and anthropological museums, and less toward art. After the museum visit she was very interested to hear about our trip to Ontario last week, where we met three of her cousins. They had asked to be remembered to her, and she enjoyed hearing about our dinner with them. After we left the Getty we met up with Kathleen for coffee and showed both Margaret and Kathleen our slides from Brampton and Toronto. We gave Margaret a framed photo of Meredith with the cousins which she was very pleased to have.

Getty Center – Photography

By | |
Comments Off on Getty Center – Photography

Getty Center
Los Angeles, Sepulveda Pass
May 17, 2014

On this recent visit, we went to the Getty Center primarily to see a special exhibition of photographs of Queen Victoria and her family (“A Royal Passion: Queen Victoria and Photograph”), which we learned of through a Los Angeles Times article.

We have been to the Getty a number of times before. When we first started our museum odyssey we steered clear of it, intimidated by the large scale and thinking it was not worth the trip if we were not going to spend a full day. At the time we did not realize that admission is free. The only cost to get in is $15 per car to park. If you come by public transport, then there is no cost. (On this particular visit the pay parking machines were not working, so everyone was able to leave without paying for parking.) We now visit the Getty whenever there is a special exhibition we are interested in, and we usually take some time after that to visit one or two of the permanent galleries.

We will not try to give a full description of the museum here. Suffice it to say it is a really splendid institution. In addition to its outstanding collections, the architecture, gardens, and setting are all beautiful. The one drawback is that access to the museum is from the 405 in the Sepulveda Pass, which is an area of Los Angeles Meredith likes to refer to as her personal purgatory because of the ever-present traffic congestion.

The photos of Victoria, Albert, and their children spanned the entire period of her reign. Photography was first invented just two years after Victoria became queen, so she was the first of the English Royals to be photographed. In the early years the photos were informal, private photos taken for the family’s own enjoyment. Later photos in the exhibit include the formidable official portraits more familiar to us. We were struck by the explanation next to one of the last photos that the negative was retouched to make the queen look slimmer and less wrinkled; the beginning of photo retouching! We also liked a 38 second silent video, quite good quality, of the queen in her carriage in the procession for her Diamond Jubilee in 1897.

getty-victoria3

Near the Victoria photos was a gallery with a special Ansel Adams exhibit of photos. The Yosemite photos were perhaps the most striking, but what Margaret and Meredith enjoyed most were three video excerpts of interviews with the artist. We went on from the special photography exhibitions to see a special showing of Jackson Pollock’s painting, Mural, then finished with the 19 century European paintings on the upper level of the same building. Those are part of the permanent collection, and we always enjoy looking at them. But let’s face it, who doesn’t enjoy Monet?

We ate lunch, as we usually do, at the museum café. We have not yet tried the museum restaurant; the prices are a bit more expensive than we like to pay. The café – located on the lower level of the same building as the restaurant — is a cafeteria with half a dozen different stations. It offers Mexican food, pizza, sandwiches, burgers, and a few other options. The food is good; the prices are a little high but comparable to other museum cafés. The hostess was quite helpful and made a point of telling us we should ask her if we would like help carrying the trays. Once we had our food, she came over promptly and carried one of our trays, while Bob carried the other and Meredith pushed Margaret in her wheelchair.