Getty Publications

Luxury items from centuries past are most often seen within museum settings, devoid of their original contexts and connotations. This groundbreaking book seeks to re-imagine objects from 18th-century Paris within their original context, showing how they were used in the daily routines of the elite members of society. Against the background of the reign of Louis XV (1723-1774) the chapters move chronologically from morning to night, covering topics as diverse as timekeeping, fashion and self-identity, domestic architecture, literature and art, and entertainment and socialising. By connecting the purposes, function, and beauty of these items, this volume makes a fascinating and important contribution to the study of a great period in French culture.

Ever since its original publication in Germany in 1938, Max Schweidler's Die Instandetzung von Kupferstichen, Zeichnungen, Buchern usw has been recognized as a seminal modern text on the conservation and restoration of works on paper. To address what he saw as a woeful dearth of relevant literature and in order to assist those who have 'set themselves the goal of preserving cultural treasures, ' the noted German restorer composed a thorough technical manual covering a wide range of specific techniques, including detailed instructions on how to execute structural repairs and alterations that, if skilfully done, can be virtually undetectable. By the mid-twentieth century, curators and conservators of graphic arts, discovering a nearly invisible repair in an old master print or drawing, might comment that the object had been 'Schweidlerized.' This volume, based on the authoritative revised German edition of 1949, makes Schweidler's work available in English for the first time, in a meticulously edited and annotated critical edition. The editor's introduction places the work in its historical context and probes the philosophical issues the book raises, while some two hundred annotations elucidate the text itself. An amply illustrated appendix presents technical reports on eleven old master prints that underwent repair or other treatment using techniques similar to those Schweidler describes; it complements Schweidler's own text in aiding curators, conservators, and collectors to detect such repairs. There is also a glossary.

In 1933, Walker Evans traveled to Cuba to take photographs for The Crime of Cuba, a book by American journalist Carleton Beals. Beals's explicit goal was to expose the corruption of dictator Gerardo Machado and the torturous relationship between the United States and its island neighbor. Evans's photographs are fascinating both for their subject matter and the evidence they provide of his artistic development. This volume brings together more than sixty of these images-all from the J. Paul Getty Museum's extensive holdings of the photographer's work. Codrescu's spirited text helps to provide a sense of the aesthetic and political forces that were shaping Evans's art in the early 1930s. He argues that the photographs are the work of a young artist whose temperament was distinctly at odds with Beals's impassioned rhetoric and shows that Evans was just beginning to combine his early, formalist aesthetic with the social concerns that would figure so prominently in his later work. Together, the images and the insightful essay provide a compelling study of a major artist at an important juncture in his career.

A seminal figure in the history of photography, Edward Weston (1886 — 1958) began his long and colourful career in Southern California. Among the more than fifty prints gleaned from the Getty Museum's important collection of approximately 240 works that span the photographer's career, this book features pictures made in Claremont, Glendale, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and other locations in California and the U.S. Weston wed machine-age aesthetics with vernacular subjects, pursuing Modernism as a way of seeing. He produced works of art using subject matter as wide-ranging as sea shells, green peppers, sand dunes and nudes, and he set a standard for elegant composition and print technique for generations of photographers to come. Commentaries on each of the featured works, as well as an introduction and chronology, are provided by Brett Abbott, curatorial assistant in the Getty Museum's Department of Photographs. A colloquium discussion on the artist's work includes Abbott's contributions as well as those of six other participants: photographer William Clift; Amy Conger, author of Edward Weston: Photographs from the Collection of the Center for Creative Photography; David Featherstone, a freelance writer and editor; Weston Naef, curator of photographs at the Getty Museum; David Travis, curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago; and Jennifer Watts, curator of photographs at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California.

Manuel Alvarez Bravo, who celebrates his 100th birthday in 2002, is Mexico's most famous photographer. In eight decades as a photographer, he interacted with Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Sergei Eisentein, Tino Modotti and Octavio Paz, and created works of art that display an array of styles and themes. This volume contains 50 images with extended commentaries on each by Robert Tejada, an independent curator and critic. There is also a transcript of a symposium on Manuel Alvarez Bravo.

This delightful book is a colorful reminder of the many things that visual art can be, become, and do. Whether it's weaving or making pottery or working on your computer or turning junk into something unexpected and wonderful, An ABC of What Art Can Be is an invitation to look around and think creatively-outside the boring box. After all, A is for artist, creator of art, Making all sorts of things with the hands and the heart. The playful rhymes and dazzling collages are reminders that each of us is unique and can produce a work of art that's equally unique. In this lively book readers will find an ABC that's unlike any other. It includes four pages of «fun stuff»--easy-to-do activities inspired by the text and illustrations. Ages four and up.

Photography is most commonly associated with fact, yet it has been a medium for fiction from the very beginning. From as early as 1839, artists began exploring photography's enormous potential for storytelling and often went to great lengths to create pictures for the camera. In this book, a short introductory essay summarizes the history of staged photography, highlighting key debates on the medium's blunt factuality and its capacity for deception, and goes on to showcase works by both widely known and less prominent artists, including Man Ray, Andy Warhol, Alfred Stieglitz, Lewis Carroll, Julia Margaret Cameron, Jo Ann Callis, and Paul Outerbridge.

The long life of German photographer August Sander (1876-1964) spanned one of the most turbulent eras in his country's history. The Great War of 1914-1918, the Weimar Republic, the reign of National Socialism, and the horrors of World War II all left an indelible imprint on both the man and his work. Sander, a conventional studio portraitist who transformed himself into an avant-gardist, exemplified the complex and sometimes contradictory nature of his time. He was at once innovative and deeply wedded to the past, blending a progressive vision with a traditional view of society and his craft. The approximately fifty plates featured in Focus: August Sander are some of the most striking from the Getty Museum's more than twelve hundred pictures by the artist. They include images of rural dwellers such as those found in Young Farmers and Farm Girls, and other portraits including Wife of the Cologne Painter Peter Abelen, Parliamentarianand the poignant Blind Children, Düren. A chronological overview of Sander's life provides a factual framework for this discussion.

The material history of wax is a history of disappearance—wax melts, liquefies, evaporates, and undergoes innumerable mutations. Wax is tactile, ambiguous, and mesmerizing, confounding viewers and scholars alike. It can approximate flesh with astonishing realism and has been used to create uncanny human simulacra since ancient times—from phallic amulets offered to heal distressing conditions and life-size votive images crammed inside candlelit churches by the faithful, to exquisitely detailed anatomical specimens used for training doctors and Medardo Rosso’s “melting” portraits. The critical history of wax, however, is fraught with gaps and controversies. After Giorgio Vasari, the subject of wax sculpture was abandoned by art historians; in the twentieth century it once again sparked intellectual interest, only soon to vanish. The authors of the eight essays in Ephemeral Bodies—including the first English translation of Julius von Schlosser’s seminal “History of Portraiture in Wax” (1910–11)—break new ground as they explore wax reproductions of the body or body parts and assess their conceptual ambiguity, material impermanence, and implications for the history of Western art.

This installment in the acclaimed In Focus series examines the life and career of Dorothea Lange (1895-1965), who is most recognized for her social documentary work during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Getty Museum holds nearly one hundred of the artist's pictures, about fifty of which are discussed by Judith Keller, associate curator of photographs. These include the iconic images of homeless farm families as well as lesser-known Southwestern views, personal photographs Lange made at home in the 1950s, and late compositions from an extensive trip to Asia and the Middle East. In Focus: Dorothea Lange is published to coincide with an exhibition of her photographs at the Getty Museum from October 15, 2002 through February 9, 2003. The book includes an edited transcript of a colloquium on Lange, with participants Keller; Keith Davis, Fine Arts Programs Director, Hallmark Cards, Inc.; David Featherstone, independent curator, freelance writer, and editor; Therese Heyman, curator emeritus, Oakland Museum of Photography; Weston Naef, curator of photographs, Getty Museum; Sally Stein, associate professor of art history, University of California, Irvine; and Michael Williamson, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer and author, currently working for the Washington Post. Their animated conversation adds greatly to the understanding of the artist's creations. A complete chronology of major events in Lange's life rounds out the book.

Doris Ulmann, one of the foremost photographers in the United States in the 1930s, disappeared from public awareness until the 1970s. She is best known for her quintessentially American pictures of the rural South. A prolific creator, she died before many of her last images could be printed. The latest addition to the acclaimed In Focus series present fifty-five pictures by Ulmann from the Museum's collection. Judith Keller, associate curator of photographs, wrote the extensive accompanying captions and participated, along with William Clift, David Featherstone, Charles Hagen, Weston Naef, Ron Pen, and Susan Millar Williams, in a colloquium on Ulmann and her work. The volume includes an edited transcript of their discussion and a chronological overview of Ulman's life.

This latest volume in the acclaimed In Focus series examines the life and work of Alfred Stieglitz, concentrating on the Getty Museum's considerable holdings of the work of this American master. In his studies of his wife, Georgia O'Keefe, in his portraits of the urban scene, and in his pictures of natural form, Stieglitz defined the modern movement on photography. In his periodical Camera Work he championed photography as an art form; in his famous gallery «An American Place» he promoted the work of other American modernists. Fifty reproductions with commentaries by Weston Naef, the Getty's curator of photographs, represent both the range of the Getty's collection and the importance of Stieglitz's contribution. The book also includes an edited colloquium on Stieglitz's life and work. Participants included Emmit Gowin, Sarah Greenough, Charles Hagen, John Szarkowski, and Weston Naef.

Traditionally, a critical component of the education of any architect was to draw the ruins of ancient Rome, reconstructing either from ancient sources or, more often, pure fantasy, what the original structures must have looked like. From this training emerged generations of architects imbued with the aesthetic ideals that would form the Neoclassical and Beaux-Arts building styles. In this magnificently printed volume are reproduced some of the most extraordinarily handsome drawings of the ruins of ancient Rome made by French Prix de Rome architects from 1786 through 1924 Accompanied by text that explains how the Prix de Rome was awarded and the significance of the prize in the history of architecture, as well as how the study of ancient models formed the basis for nineteenth — and early twentieth-century architectural styles, these drawings provide an invaluable understanding of how the modern imagination recorded and transformed ancient fragments into a modern architectural idiom.