The Getty Center
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Silk and Swan Feathers: A Luxurious 18th-Century Armchair
Coming soon
The product of several craftsmen including a joiner (woodworker) and an upholsterer, this extraordinary French armchair embodies the era’s refined sense of comfort and style. Made in Paris for an elite patron, its sumptuous appearance is striking, from its deep, brocaded-silk cushion stuffed with swan and goose feathers to the gold foil on its brass tacks. Despite its fragility, the chair has survived nearly unaltered over the centuries.
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Artists as Collectors
Coming soon
Artists were the earliest and greatest collectors of drawings. Celebrated painters including Edgar Degas, Thomas Lawrence, and Giorgio Vasari were passionate collectors, and their appetites for drawings by old and contemporary masters compelled them to acquire exceptional examples of draftsmanship by artists such as Delacroix, Raphael, and Rembrandt. Not just a tool for the making of works of art, drawings were valued as intellectual property, coveted rarities, and powerful status symbols.
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Power, Justice, and Tyranny in the Middle Ages
Coming soon
Medieval power structures included royal courts, the church, city governments, and even universities. Although positions of authority were usually inherited, leaders were expected to embrace justice, a virtue associated with godly rule, and tyranny, a vice that ensured downfall and chaos. Social and legal hierarchies exposed in manuscript illumination underscore the tenuous place of women, the poor, and other "out-groups." Examples of good and bad government reveal the constant struggle between base human instincts and loftier ideals.
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J. Paul Getty Life and Legacy
Coming soon
This permanent display provides insight into the life and legacy of J. Paul Getty, the art collector and businessman who used his fortune to create an institution dedicated to the diffusion of artistic and general knowledge. The installation includes three objects collected personally by Mr. Getty and a digital interactive experience in the form of touch screens that visitors can explore to learn about Getty's art collection, his personal life, business dealings, and establishment of the Trust and the Museum.
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Photo Flux: Unshuttering L.A.
Coming soon
Photographs by 35 Los Angeles-based artists challenge ideals of beauty, representation, cultural capital, and objectivity. These primarily BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) artists have radically transformed photography to express their own aesthetics, identities, and narratives. Their work is foundational for an emerging generation of artists participating in the Getty Unshuttered program, which engages teens to seek photography as a platform to amplify social topics that resonate in their own lives. Guest curated by jill moniz.
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Mario Giacomelli: Figure-Ground
Coming soon
Born into poverty and self-taught as a photographer, Mario Giacomelli (1925–2000) lived his entire life in Senigallia, along Italy's Adriatic coast. Soon after purchasing his first camera in 1953, he began creating humanistic portrayals of people in their natural environments and dramatic abstractions of the landscapes. Rendered in high contrast black and white, his photographs are often gritty and raw, but always intensely personal.
This exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Daniel Greenberg and is made possible through gifts made by him and Susan Steinhauser. -
The Expanded Landscape
Coming soon
Photographs by Darren Almond, Michael Flomen, Hai Bo, Richard Misrach and Toshio Shibata, among others, feature graphically abstract compositions, black-and-white or monochromatic renditions, elevated vantage points that eliminate the horizon, experimental techniques, or personal relationships with individuals who inhabit a landscape. These large-scale works from the Getty Museum’s collection, all made over the past 25 years, resonate with Mario Giacomelli’s approach to landscape as seen in the concurrent exhibition Mario Giacomelli: Figure–Ground.
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In Focus: Protest
Coming soon
We are reminded frequently of the power of photographs to propel action and inspire change. During demonstrations photographers take to the streets to record fast-moving events. At other times they bear witness to daily injustices, helping to make them more widely known. This exhibition of images made during periods of social struggle in the United States highlights the myriad roles protest photographs play in shaping our understanding of American life.
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Paolo Veneziano: Art and Devotion in 14th-Century Venice
Coming soon
Paolo Veneziano led the premier painter’s workshop in late medieval Venice, producing work ranging from large complex altarpieces to small paintings intended for personal devotion. This focused exhibition reunites panels that originally formed a larger ensemble but are today scattered across different collections. This reconstruction, together with his other paintings, are set against the backdrop of the city’s uniquely cosmopolitan visual culture.
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Transcending Time: The Medieval Book of Hours
Coming soon
Manuscripts known as “books of hours” were among the most widely produced and used during the Middle Ages. These decorated prayer books not only structured time for their readers (over a day, a year, and a lifetime) but their creation reveals an increasing demand for private and personalized Christian devotion. Featuring masterpieces of medieval illumination from the permanent collection, this exhibition offers glimpses into the daily lives of their readers, the material features of luxury manuscripts, and the thriving late medieval book market.
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Holbein: Capturing Character in the Renaissance
Coming soon
The versatile German artist Hans Holbein the Younger created captivating portraits for a wide range of patrons, including scholars, statesmen, and courtiers, in 16th-century Basel and Tudor England. Holbein’s compelling drawings and paintings, enriched by inscriptions and evocative objects, offer eloquent visual statements of personal identity. Explore the splendid Renaissance culture of erudition, self-definition, luxury, and wit in the first major presentation of Holbein’s art in the United States.
Co-organized by the Getty Museum and the Morgan Library & Museum.
Supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. -
La Surprise: Watteau in Los Angeles
Coming soon
Graceful scenes of courtship, music and dance, strolling lovers and theatrical characters: this is the imaginary world conjured by the greatest French painter and draftsman of the 18th century, Antoine Watteau. Los Angeles is home to an extraordinary group of Watteau’s works. This focused exhibition, marking the 300th anniversary of the artist’s death, brings together a dozen of them from public and private collections and celebrates the Getty’s recent acquisition of an exquisite example: the painting La Surprise.
The Getty Villa
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Assyria: Palace Art of Ancient Iraq
Coming soon
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.
The masterworks in this exhibition are on special loan from the British Museum, London. -
Mesopotamia: Civilization Begins
Coming soon
Mesopotamia—the land "between the rivers” in modern-day Iraq—was home to the ancient Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians. Among their many achievements are the creation of the earliest known script (cuneiform), the formation of the first cities, the development of advanced astronomical and mathematical knowledge, and spectacular artistic and literary accomplishments. The exhibition covers three millennia from the first cities in about 3200 BC to Alexander the Great’s conquest of Babylon in 331 BC.
Organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Musée du Louvre, Paris. -
Rubens: Picturing Antiquity
Coming soon
Passion for the art and literature of classical antiquity inspired the dynamic Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640). Presented amidst the antiquities collection at the Getty Villa, this exhibition juxtaposes the artist’s exhilarating drawings, oil sketches, and monumental paintings with rarely shown ancient objects, including exquisite gems owned by Rubens himself. Heroic nudes, fierce hunts, splendid military processions, and Bacchic revels attest to the artist’s extraordinary ability to translate an array of sources into new subjects.
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Persia: Ancient Iran and the Classical World
Coming soon
For over a millennium, from around 650 BC to AD 650, ancient Greece and Rome had a tumultuous relationship with their neighbors to the east: the Medes, Persians, Parthians, and Sasanians of ancient Iran. This exhibition explores the artistic and cultural connections between these rival powers through royal sculpture, spectacular luxury objects, religious images, and historical documents, assembled from major museums in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East.