Look Ahead: Exhibition Calendar
Exhibitions at the Getty
A Look Ahead
Updated Sep 2017
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Current Exhibitions:
The J. Paul Getty Presents Flight of Fancy: The Galle Chandelier
This display provides an in-depth look at a French chandelier made by the bronze caster and gilder Gérard-Jean Galle in about 1818-19. Resembling a hot-air balloon, the chandelier is a work of extreme novelty that includes the signs of the zodiac and a glass bowl intended to hold water for small goldfish. Following contemporary taste, Galle adapted motifs found in ancient art to new forms of furniture creating an intriguing object that was thoroughly modern for its time. Curated by Jeffrey Weaver.
Getty Villa Presents First Major Exhibition on the Villa Dei Papiri
The Getty Villa is modeled on the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum. Buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, the ancient villa was rediscovered and explored by subterranean tunnels in the 1750s and '60s again in the 1990s and early 2000s. It has yielded spectacular colored marble and mosaic floors, frescoed walls, a large collection of bronze and marble statuary, and a library of more than a thousand papyrus scrolls. This exhibition presents rare original artifacts and traces attempts to unroll and decipher the carbonized papyri.
Upcoming Exhibition:
Peasants in Pastel: Millet and the Pastel Revival
Long associated with aristocratic portraiture, pastel had fallen out of fashion by the mid-nineteenth-century, when Jean-François Millet (1814 – 1875) turned the powdery medium to a quite different purpose: scenes of contemporary peasant life. This installation presents a selection of pastels by Millet and his followers, addressing the relationship between rural labor and urban collecting and encouraging visitors to consider how an artist’s chosen medium affects our understanding of his or her subject matter. Curated by Emily Beeny.
Balthazar: A Black African King in Medieval and Renaissance Art
Early medieval legends reported that one of the three kings who paid homage to the newborn Christ Child in Bethlehem was from Africa. But it would be nearly one thousand years before artists began representing Balthazar, the youngest of the magi, as a black African. This exhibition explores the juxtaposition of a seemingly positive image with the difficult histories of Afro-European contact – in particular the brutal African slave trade – which informed European artists’ interest in representing race. Curated by Kristen Collins and Bryan Keene.
