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The J. Paul Getty Trust awarded the Third Annual J. Paul Getty Medal to Pritzker Prize-winning architect Frank Gehry at a gathering of arts and community leaders at the Getty Center in Brentwood on Monday evening, September 28. Los Angeles Philharmonic conductor Gustavo Dudamel introduced Gehry, who was honored for transforming the built landscape with buildings such as Los Angeles’ Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris.

“There have been very few individuals who have changed the course of architecture, and Frank Gehry is one of them."

"In Focus: Play," on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from December 23, 2014 through May 10, 2015, presents photographs that explore how notions of leisure and play have been represented over the course of the medium’s history. The nearly thirty works from the Museum’s permanent collection highlight a wide range of amusing activities, from quiet games like chess to more boisterous forms of recreation like skateboarding and visits to amusement parks and circuses. All of the photographs included in the exhibition illustrate the many ways people have chosen to spend their free time. The images also demonstrate inventive and improvised approaches, like unusual vantage points and jarring juxtapositions that photographers have employed to help capture the spontaneity of playfulness.

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.

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.

There's a first time for everything, even for wealthy art institutions.

The Getty Museum has added its first sculpture by Auguste Rodin to its permanent collection, officials announced on Tuesday. Rodin's "Christ and Mary Magdalene" is scheduled to go on display starting Tuesday at the Getty Center in Brentwood.

Rodin's sculpture, which dates from 1908, is a marble work that stands 3½ feet tall and appears to depict Jesus Christ on the cross with Mary Magdalene pressed closely alongside.

Jackson Pollock’s “Mural,” a stunning oil-on-canvas measuring more than 8 feet tall and nearly 20 feet long, is currently on display at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The painting recently underwent an extensive restoration at the Getty Center, which took over a year to complete.

“Mural,” which was painted in 1943 for the well-known art collector, Peggy Guggenheim, represents a turning point in Pollock’s career in which he gravitated towards the abstract expressionism that defined his seminal “drip” paintings. The work belongs to the University of Iowa Museum of Art, which received it as a gift from Guggenheim in 1951.

Restorers removed a varnish that was added to the painting during a 1973 restoration. While the previous conservation effort helped preserve the work, the varnish significantly darkened the painting’s colors. “Mural” now appears much brighter and its colors are closer to their original intensity.

During the restoration process, conservators made a number of new discoveries regarding the Pollock painting. It had long been believed that the artist created “Mural” in a single creative burst that lasted between 24 and 36 hours. Restorers noticed that Pollock’s initial paint marks, which cover the entire canvas, were made in four highly diluted colors, which could have been created in a day. However, the other additions to the canvas would have taken much longer than that to dry. Restorers also confirmed that Pollock used house paint as well as high-quality oil paints to make “Mural.”

“Mural” will remain on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum through June 1. After it leaves Los Angeles, the painting will go on view at the Sioux City Art Center in Iowa for several months.