Displaying items by tag: j. paul getty museum

A long-running legal battle between the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the US arm of the Armenian Apostolic Church over the ownership of a group of 13th-century manuscript pages has ended with a compromise. The Getty has agreed to acknowledge that the church is the rightful owner of the eight brilliantly illustrated pages. The church, in turn, has pledged to donate the pages to the museum. The manuscript pages have been in the Getty’s collection since 1994, when the museum bought them from an Armenian American family.

Lee Boyd, an attorney for the church, told the Los Angeles Times on Monday that the settlement represents the first restitution of art from the Armenian genocide.

Since the late 1960s, art historians have known that another painting lay underneath Rembrandt’s famous An Old Man in Military Costume (painted about 1630-1631), a compelling character study (tronie) of age and one of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s most beloved Dutch paintings. Until now, however, seeing that hidden image in detail has been frustratingly elusive.

A recent collaborative study conducted by experts from Los Angeles, Antwerp, and Delft, using two complementary, element-specific imaging techniques, has provided the most detailed representation of the underlying painting—an image of a young man wrapped in a cloak—to date.

The reporters staked her out. The investigators said she conspired with crooked dealers. And her museum colleagues seemed content to watch her disappear, as if one of the world’s most powerful, respected and sought-after art historians deserved to be the only American curator brought to trial.

Ten years ago, Marion True, then curator of antiquities for the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles — the wealthiest museum in the world — was formally accused by the Italian government of taking part in a stolen-art ring. Within months, she would lose her job, her career and leave the country.

When the J. Paul Getty Museum announced in June the purchase of a 17th century bust by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, it was heralded as a major acquisition -- the first sculpture attributed solely to the Italian Baroque genius in the museum's collection.

But now a criminal complaint has been filed in Slovakia in connection with the sale of the sculpture, in which the country's cultural minister claims improprieties in the piece's rather convoluted journey.

It's almost as if the dozens of exquisitely detailed, often perfectly intact bronze sculptures on display at the J. Paul Getty Museum disappeared into an ancient witness-protection program — and decided to stay there for thousands of years.

"Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World," which opened at the museum Tuesday, brings together more than 50 bronzes from the Hellenistic period that extended from about 323 to 31 B.C.

The J. Paul Getty Museum has just acquired an important early sculpture by the Baroque master Bernini: a marble bust of Pope Paul V that many art historians did not believe still existed.

Originally commissioned by Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the nephew of Pope Paul V, in 1621, the sculpture was the 23-year-old artist’s first documented portrait of a pope — a subject that would define his career.

The Harvard Art Museums have named Edouard Kopp the Abrams associate curator of drawings in the museums’ division of European and American Art, officials announced this week. Overseeing the collection of pre-twentieth century drawings, Kopp will develop exhibitions and public lectures while organizing the rotation of works on paper within many of the museums’ galleries. 

Previously, Kopp served as associate curator of drawings for the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, where he was responsible for French and Germanic drawings.

The major retrospective of Robert Mapplethorpe's work that the J. Paul Getty Museum and Los Angeles County Museum of Art promised four years ago when they jointly acquired some 2,000 images by the New York City photographer is set to open in 2016 in an exhibition at both museums.

The Getty's part will run March 15 to July 31, 2016; the LACMA dates are March 20 to July 31, 2016, the two museums announced Thursday. The co-curators are Paul Martineau of the Getty and LACMA's Britt Salvesen.

Thomas Kren, the associate director for collections at the J. Paul Getty Museum, will retire after more than 35 years, the museum announced Thursday.

When Kren leaves the Getty in October, Richard Rand, senior curator of paintings and sculpture at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., will replace him. Rand began his career at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1989.

Kren arrived at the Getty in 1980 as the associate curator of paintings. In 1984 he became the first senior curator of manuscripts, a position he held until 2010, when he took on his current role.

Cervantes’s "Don Quixote" is considered by many to be among the greatest works of fiction ever written. From the publication in 1605 of the first of two volumes (the second followed ten years later, exactly 400 years ago), the novel enjoyed immense popularity. Reprints and translations spread across Europe, with the adventures of the knight Don Quixote and his companion, Sancho Panza, captivating the continental imagination and influencing both the performing and visual arts.

"Coypel’s Don Quixote Tapestries: Illustrating a Spanish Novel in Eighteenth-Century France" is devoted to a series of tapestries by Charles Coypel (1694−1752), painter to Louis XV, which illustrates twenty-eight of the novel’s most celebrated episodes and woven at the Gobelins Manufactory in Paris. The exhibition includes three Gobelins tapestry panels from the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and two Flemish tapestries inspired by Coypel from The Frick Collection, which have not been on view in more than ten years.