J. Paul Getty Museum
The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los
Angeles, California is one of the most extraordinary art museums in
the world, with magnificent western art from the Middle Ages to the
current period, with it welcoming over 1.3 million visitors each
year, making it one of the most visited art museums, or any type of
museum, in the nation. There is another location at the Getty Villa
in Pacific Palisades, California which houses the artworks from the
ancient realms of Etruria, Greece and Rome. Getty would open his
second museum in 1974 in a replicated version of the Villa of the
Papyri at Herculaneium. It would become the wealthiest museum in the
world in 1982, when it would be so fortunate to receive $1.2 billion
and eventually renamed the Getty Villa. The more detailed
information about the collections can be obtained on the Gettyguide
at the museum, which has a wonderful set of interactive multimedia
tools, and you can also get much from getty.edu. The museum is in
the process of clearing up a controversy about numerous works' title
that it has in its collections. It seems that the previous curator,
Marion True, was indicted in Italy in 2005, as well as famous art
dealer, Robert Hecht, Jr., for trafficking in stolen antiquities;
with more charges filed by the Greek authorities. In 2006, True
wrote to the Getty Trust that she was being forced to carry the
entire burden for her practices which were fully known, approved and
condoned by the Getty board of directors, and the mess continues. In
2006, the museum's director, Michael Brand, would announce that the
museum had returned twenty-six pieces to Italy, except the
Victorious Youth, that is continued to be claimed by the Italian
government. In 2007, the museum would be forced to return 40 relics
that included a 5th century BC statue of the goddess Aphrodite that
had been stolen from the Morgantina, the ancient Greek settlement in
Sicily. The museum had previously returned three pieces that had
been determined that they were stolen in 1999, in another case not
related to this one, and it included a torso of the god Mithra from
the 2nd century AD, the head of a youth by the Greek sculptor
Polykleitos and a Greek red-figure kylix from the 5th century BC
signed by the painter Onesimos and the potter Euphronios as the
potter. In September of 2007, a contract was signed that would
return forty ancient artworks to Italy that had been stolen and
these include the 5th century BC Aphrodite limestone and marble
statue, and then in 2010, marble and bronze sculptures, fresco
paintings stolen from Pompeii and Greek vases. The museum contains a
magnificent collection of antiquities, sculpture and decorative art,
drawings, photographs, manuscripts and paintings that span the globe
and the centuries. The museum and villa host about twenty-five
exhibitions every year and include both permanent collection works
and rotating displays. The antiquities collection has a strong
holding in Greek and Roman art of the 6th century BC to the 4th
century AD and has continued to grow and include huge marble
sculptures, bronzes, Hellenistic silverware and jewelry, one of the
best collections of Greek vases in the nation, Greek and Roman gems
and a large variety of ancient glass. The drawings collection
contains about 700 European drawings that date from the 14th century
to the end of the 19th century that range from preparatory sketches
to the highly finished independent artworks, with excellent holdings
of Italian renaissance and the French school. The last five years
have been devoted to acquiring the works of van Gogh, Degas,
Gauguin, Courbet and Seurat. The manuscripts collection really began
moving in 1983, when the museum would acquire the best private
collection of illuminated manuscripts in the world that had been
assembled by Irene and Peter Ludwig of Aachen, Germany. The
collection contains manuscripts from the 9th to the 16th centuries
with amazing examples from Byzantine, international, renaissance,
gothic, Romanesque and Ottoman. The unbelievable painting collection
was begun by Getty himself in the 1930s, although it wouldn't become
a world class collection until after his death and the funds he
bequeathed would be of great benefit. The collection includes 450
European paintings that date from about 1300 up to 1900, with
outstanding strengths in baroque paintings from Italy and Flanders,
Dutch paintings from the 17th century, Northern Italy renaissance
and French paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries, with a
fabulous collection of 18th century pastels. There is certainly more
about the spectacular museum and it amazing collections, but the
best thing to do is to visit and peruse these excellent works
yourself at a leisurely pace, allowing yourself a big amount of
time.
The Geffen
The
Geffen contemporary at MOCA, which had been called the Temporary
Contemporary opened its doors in 1983, in a former police car
warehouse in Little Tokoyo that had been rejuvenated by the well
known California architect, Frank O. Gehry, and it contains 40,000
square feet of exhibition space, as well as a branch store of MOCA.
MOCA or the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, California
houses one of the nation's best collections of European and American
art that has been made since 1940. Today, it houses about 5000 works
in every media and ranges from masterpieces of abstract
expressionism and pop art to the more modern works that have been
created by the younger and up and coming artists. Some of the major
acquisitions and donations that have been obtained now form the
nucleus of the permanent collections and include the Panza
collection, which was a 1984 purchase from Giuseppe and Giovanna
Panza de Biumo of Milan and includes 80 works of abstract
expressionism by such noted artists as Franz Kline, George Segal,
Antoni Tapies, Roy Lichenstein, Jean Gautrier, Robert Rauschenbery,
James Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg and Mark Rothko; a 1986 bequest
from the Barry Lowen collection that contains 67 works of
minimalist, post minimalist, drawings, photography, sculpture and
neo-expressionist paintings by such noted artists as Cy Twombly, Dan
Flavin, Agnes Martin, Ellsworth Kelly, Joel Shapiro, Julian
Schnabel, Frank Stella and Elizabeth Murray; another gift but in
1989 from the Rita and Taft Schreiber collection of 18 magnificent
abstract expressionist drawings, paintings and sculptures by 13
artists, that included; Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrian, Arshile
Gorky and Alberto Giacometti. There are numerous more collections
that would acquired over the years either by donation or
acquisition, making this museum such a marvelous venue to visit and
spend some time perusing the spectacular works by many great and
famous artists.