Getty Center Puts Mural Art in Focus with Two New Exhibitions

The J. Paul Getty Museum presents two new exhibitions, The Lost Murals of Renaissance Rome and Judy Baca: Hitting the Wall.

On view May 31 through September 4, 2022, the complementary exhibitions highlight the long history of mural art across the globe, from Renaissance Rome to downtown Los Angeles.

“Murals often start on paper, with the artist exploring concepts and ideas in compositional drawings,” says Julian Brooks, senior curator of drawings at the J. Paul Getty Museum. “While very few preparatory drawings for Renaissance facade murals survive, we can see clearly the intensive process Judy Baca used to create her iconic 1984 Olympic mural in downtown Los Angeles.”

In Renaissance Rome, facades of many prominent buildings were painted with spectacular narrative frescoes depicting battles and heroic feats of ancient Romans. Mostly painted in simple tones of gray or brown to simulate stone reliefs of antiquity, the weather-exposed artworks have now almost all disappeared. Luckily, many artists of the period flocked to Rome and sketched these marvels, and prints of them circulated, allowing the frescoes to be appreciated centuries after their disappearance.

The Lost Murals of Renaissance Rome features a variety of works from Getty’s collection, including the celebrated drawings series “Early Life of Taddeo Zuccaro” by his younger brother, late-Renaissance artist Federico Zuccaro. Scholars believe that the 20 drawings in the series, which vividly convey the tough life of a young artist in Renaissance Rome, were designed for frescoes in the Palazzo Zuccari, a 16th-century palace that Federico intended to be a hostel for young artists visiting the city. The series highlights the key role of facade murals in the artistic life of the city, and culminates with Taddeo’s success as a mural artist himself.

Centuries later, muralist and Los Angeles native Judy Baca created her famous mural Hitting the Wall: Women in the Marathon for the 1984 Summer Olympics—the first Olympics that allowed women to participate in the marathon. Similar to Renaissance murals, Baca’s work depicts an act of heroism—a woman triumphantly breaking through an illusionistic wall as she crosses the finish line.

Located on a freeway underpass in downtown Los Angeles, Hitting the Wall was completely whitewashed in 2019 without notice as part of a graffiti-removal campaign. In response, Baca sued, and in 2021 the painting was fully restored.

“Women ran the marathon for the first time in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics,” says Judy Baca. “This image is the pivotal moment in the marathon—the last two miles—in which the athlete is beyond fatigued, almost staggering, running on pure will power, ‘Hitting the Wall.’ The marble stones breaking down is a symbolic collapse of the old order. This is really the story of all women’s achievements. This mural is meant to be an inspiration to all young women.”

Getty’s exhibition Judy Baca: Hitting the Wall presents Baca’s step-by-step process for bringing her mural to life in vivid color, including preliminary sketches, detailed perspective drawings, vibrant colorations, and an actual-size reproduction of a part of the mural.

“The facade murals of Renaissance Rome were some of the greatest treasures of the city, and they have now all-but-disappeared from five hundred years of weathering,” says Brooks. “It’s astonishing that Los Angeles, which can claim to be one of the mural capitals of the world, has an extraordinary array of murals, such as Baca’s Hitting the Wall, that are barely preserved and often overlooked. These exhibitions not only demonstrate the precarious fragility of murals but also the importance of preserving them.”