Upcoming Exhibitions

The human face has been the subject of fascination for photographers since the medium’s inception. This exhibition includes posed portraits, physiognomic studies, anonymous snapshots, and unsuspecting countenances caught by the camera’s eye, offering a close-up look at the range of human stories that facial expressions—and photographs—can tell.

This exhibition surveys the rich and varied history of modern fashion photography, exploring the ways in which photographers whose careers have been closely associated with the industry have shaped evolving notions of style and beauty. Drawn from the Getty Museum's permanent collection and supplemented by loans from private and public sources, Icons of Style features more than one hundred-sixty photographs presented alongside a selection of costumes, illustrations, magazine covers, videos, and advertisements.

During the 1600s citizens of the Dutch Republic enjoyed increasing political and religious freedom, economic prosperity, and maritime supremacy which ushered in a tremendous boom in art production. A newly flourishing art market prompted the making of vast quantities of finished drawings. Dutch artists created works on paper that proudly commemorated local citizens, architecture, landscapes, customs, and pastimes. In addition to these specific depictions of Dutch daily life, artists drew generic scenes with a high degree of specificity. By juxtaposing portraits of people and places with more generic types, this exhibition underscores the masterful likeness of the Dutch visual tradition. Drawings by Rembrandt van Rijn, Albert Cuyp, and Hendrick Avercamp will be featured as well as many new acquisitions by Gereard ter Borch, Willem Buytewech, and Esaias van de Velde.

Artists' books occupy a creative space between traditional books and contemporary works of art, challenging what a book can be. This highly visual and experiential presentation of some of the most lively and surprising works from the Research Institute's extensive collections focuses on artists' books that can be unpacked, unfolded, unfurled, or disassembled. They are made to be displayed on the wall or deployed as sculptures or installations. The exhibition seeks to provoke new inquiry into the nature of art and to highlight the essential role that books play in contemporary culture.

One of the most intriguing series in Rembrandt's oeuvre comprises his drawings made in the style of artists serving the Mughal court in India. Juxtaposing Rembrandt's depictions of Mughal rulers and courtiers with Indian paintings and drawings of similar compositions, this exhibition reveals how contact with Mughal art inspired Rembrandt to draw in an entirely different, refined style prompted by his curiosity for a foreign culture.

Between the first and third centuries AD, the inhabitants of Palmyra, an ancient Syrian caravan city at the crossroads between the Roman and the Parthian empires, embellished their tombs with distinctive funerary portraits. These vivid likenesses of finely dressed men, women and children, often accompanied by inscriptions naming local families, illuminate cultural exchanges taking place in the eastern Mediterranean. This installation presents sculpture from the collections of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen on long-term loan to the Getty alongside historical engravings and photographs from the Getty Research Institute.

Plato is one of the founding figures of Western civilization. His legacy encompasses ethics, politics, theology, and poetics. In this exhibition at the Getty Villa, a museum exploring classical art and culture, some of today's most celebrated artists consider Plato's impact on the contemporary world. In the form of sculptures, paintings, drawings, and large-scale installations, they respond to his contribution to philosophy—from defining the ideal to understanding the human condition—while fostering the ultimate Platonic experience: contemplation.

Medieval manuscripts preserve stories of faith, romance, and knowledge, but their luxurious illuminations can reveal disturbing narratives as well. Often created for the privileged classes, such books nevertheless provide glimpses of the marginalized and powerless and reflect their tenuous place in society. Attitudes toward women, Jews and Muslims, the poor, those perceived as socially divergent, and foreign peoples beyond European borders can be discerned through caricature and polemical imagery as well as marks of erasure and censorship. Curated by Kristen Collins and Bryan C. Keene.

The pages of medieval manuscripts reveal a dynamically interconnected world filled with real and imagined ideas about foreign peoples and places. Buddhists, Muslims, and Christians living across Europe and Asia conceived paradise as a place of perfect harmony, but the path for locating such a site or achieving this state of mind varied between these religions. By exploring the terrestrial and celestial realms, this exhibition highlights the spiritual motivations for creating and owning portable and devotional artworks.

European paper was not manufactured in giant sheets until the nineteenth century. Competing with painters who worked on monumental canvases, eighteenth-century pastellists joined together multiple sheets of paper in order to create large, continuous surfaces. The piecing together of pastels, however, also served other purposes, allowing artists to paper over their mistakes or paste the heads of important sitters onto bodies posed by models. Matching each exhibited pastel with a map of its component sheets, this installation encourages visitors to consider how these objects were made.