Press Releases
J. Paul Getty Museum Presents Gordon Parks: The Flávio Story
On assignment to document poverty in Brazil for Life magazine, American photographer Gordon Parks encountered one of the most important subjects of his career: Flávio da Silva. Parks featured the resourceful, ailing boy from an impoverished Rio favela (Portuguese for shantytown) and his family in the heart-rending 1961 photo essay “Freedom’s Fearful Foe.” It resulted in donations from Life readers but sparked controversy in Brazil. This exhibition explores the celebrated photo essay, tracing the extraordinary chain of events it triggered and Parks’ representation of Flávio over several decades. Curated by Amanda Maddox.
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.
Deborah Marrow Led Getty Foundation for 30 Years
Getty Museum Acquires Photographs by Laura Aguilar
Magnificent Assyrian Palace Reliefs on View at the Getty Villa
Assyrian kings in the ninth to seventh centuries B.C. decorated their palaces with masterful relief sculptures that represent a high point of Mesopotamian art, both for their artistic quality and sophistication and for their vivid depictions of warfare, rituals, mythology, hunting, and other aspects of Assyrian court life. The importance of these ancient treasures has only increased with the recent destruction, by ISIS, of many of the reliefs that remained in Iraq. Curated by Timothy Potts, assisted by Sara Cole.
J. Paul Getty Medal Goes to Lorna Simpson, Ed Ruscha, and Mary Beard
The J. Paul Getty Museum Presents Blurring the Line: Manuscripts in the Age of Print
The history of the book in the late Middle Ages is a story of competing media as the handwritten and the illuminated encountered the print revolution in Europe. New printing technologies gave rise to a rich period of experimental cross-fertilization during which artists created hybrid works, books printed to look like manuscripts, and painted compositions modeled after prints. This exhibition includes masterpieces of both media, challenging the division between them considering the culture of the book as technology met artistry. Curated by Larisa Grollemond.
