The J. Paul Getty Museum and Its Collections: A Museum for the New Century - Hardcover

Walsh, John; Gribbon, Deborah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0892364750 ISBN 13: 9780892364756

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1997

Synopsis

Provides a history of the buildings that have housed the Getty Museum collections, overviews the collections themselves, and offers a biography of J. Paul Getty

About this title

Review:

"I don't think there's any glory in being remembered as old moneybags," said oil baron J. Paul Getty in the early l950s, when he was vacillating between amassing all kinds of art and narrowing his focus to ancient sculpture. Getty's fabulous billions have spawned three museums, most recently the "architectural commission of the century," as Richard Meier's hilltop Getty Center, 13 years in creation, is called. In the early '70s, Getty oversaw the previous museum, the fabulous, 48,000-square-foot, pseudo-Roman villa overlooking the Pacific just north of Los Angeles that was greeted with critical jeers and popular accolades when it opened in 1974. As this beautiful book makes clear, Getty's spending has not been in vain. Written by John Walsh, longtime director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, and Deborah Gribbon, associate director, it serves three purposes: it is a biographical sketch of the eccentric, high-living billionaire; it is a selective catalog of the Getty's peerless collections of sculpture, illuminated manuscripts, paintings, drawings, and decorative arts: and it is a history of the three "eras" of the Getty's three locations. The quality of the museum's holdings, from Greek statuary to early-20th-century photographs, is breathtaking, and the 200 color plates here do them justice. Carpaccio's Hunting on the Lagoon, van Gogh's Irises, and Michelangelo's sketch for The Holy Family with the Infant Saint John the Baptist, along with drawings by Titian, Raphael, da Vinci, Rubens, Poussin, Watteau, Cézanne, and Rembrandt are pictured, as is the classical statuary for which the Getty is justly world-renowned. --Peggy Moorman

About the Author:

ThesCRA was developed by the eminent group of scholars who published the eight double-volumes of LIMC (Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae). Among the many contributors to the ThesCRA volumes are Jean Ch. Balty, Sir John Boardman, Walter Burkert, Giovannangelo Camporeale, Tonio Holscher,
Anneliese Kossatz, Vassilis Lambrinoudakis, Francois Lissarrague, John H. Oakley, Ricardo Olmos, H. A. Shapiro, Erika Simon, and Marion True.
Gribbon is Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

John Walsh has been Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum since 1983. Previously, he was curator of paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In addition to articles in such publications as The Connoisseur and Burlington Magazine, he is the author of several exhibition catalogues including A
Mirror of Nature with Cynthia P. Schneider.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0892364750
• ISBN 13: 9780892364756
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304