Exhibition through August 21, 2011

From 1660 until the early 1800s in Europe, the most impressive paintings collections were known through spectacular albums of prints called Galeriewerke.

This exhibition provides a chronological overview of the Galeriewerk tradition, demonstrating how projects grew more ambitious over time and led to the invention of the modern catalogue.

Read the story of the Düsseldorf Gallery.

Buy the exhibition catalogue.

Digital Collection

The GRI has digitized 35 Russian avant-garde books as part of an effort to provide access to entire Russian modernist books. These extremely rare, handmade artists' books—containing lithographs and poetry—were featured in the 2008–9 exhibition Tango with Cows: Book Art of the Russian Avant-Garde, 1910–1917. The exhibition travels to the Block Museum at Northwestern University in September 2011.

View the digital collection.

Finding Aid

The Samuel Wagstaff papers document the activities of this legendary curator and collector through letters, photographs, ephemera, and other archival documents. This rich archive includes original artworks by artists such as Dan Basen, Robert Morris, and Gordon Newton, as well as Wagstaff's own snapshots of landscapes and people, including Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, and his long-term partner, Robert Mapplethorpe.

Browse the finding aid.

Learn more about this archive from the cataloger.

Interview

In the 1940s Nikolaus Pevsner (1902–1983) fully planned, wrote, and almost completed a seminal work on Townscape, a movement emerging in postwar Britain. This manuscript was reconstructed by scholar Mathew Aitchison and published by the GRI as Visual Planning and the Picturesque.

In this interview, Aitchison discusses his work on the manuscript, the context from which it arose, Pevsner's role as a critic, and the future of visual planning.

Read the interview.

The GRI continues its 25-year tradition of inviting international scholars to engage in interdisciplinary investigation around a specific research theme. This year's group—selected from over 400 applicants—will examine the theme Artistic Practice. Scholars will look at how artists receive, work with, and transmit ideas and images in various cultural traditions.

Read about our incoming scholars.

Learn more about the GRI's Scholars Program.






Banner image: Detail of Vasily Kamensky's Tango s korovami: Zhelezobetonnyia poemy (Tango with Cows: Ferro-Concrete Poems), 1914. The Getty Research Institute, 2872-062