Research Projects (Getty Research Institute)

Research Projects

The Research Institute's research projects support the development of new art historical scholarship and are often based on the special collections of the Research Library. Covering multiple fields and methodologies, these projects generate conversations between Research Institute staff and visiting scholars with wider networks of expertise, and disseminate outcomes to an international scholarly audience. Research project organizers welcome conversations with scholars working in related areas.

Active Projects
Active Initiatives
Completed Projects

Active Projects

An Art Market for America: Dealers, Collectors, Philanthropy and the Formation of American Museums
Before 1880 the presence of Old Master paintings in the United States was rare. But the following decades saw a surge of importation across the Atlantic of what would form the core collections of American museums. This project analyzes the dynamics that shaped this new art market and American museums' collections. Using the Research Institute's strong dealer archives from this period—particularly those of M. Knoedler & Co., Duveen Brothers, and Goupil & Cie—it builds on the resources of the Project for the Study of Collecting and Provenance to create databases of the Knoedler and Duveen stock books.

Outcomes
Workshop: The Knoedler Workshop (May 7–May 8, 2014)
Database records: Knoedler stock books 1–11 (1872–1970)

Related
Archive: Knoedler Gallery Archive
The Getty Iris post: Knoedler, Mellon, and an Unlikely Sale
The Getty Iris post: Database of Knoedler Gallery Stock Books Now Online

Art of Alchemy
Focusing on the Getty Research Institute's collections of rare books on the theory and practice of alchemy—the art of chemically imitating nature—as well as objects from the Getty Museum that reflect such synthetic artistic techniques, this project brings to light alchemy's influence on the global history of art and visual culture. Art of Alchemy is a collaboration between the Research Institute and the Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin.

Outcomes
Exhibition: The Art of Alchemy
Exhibition: The Art of Alchemy (Kulturforum—Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, May–Aug 2017)
Publication: The Art of Alchemy (due October 2016)

Related
Digitized books: Getty Alchemy Collection
Digitized collection: Manly Palmer Hall Collection of Alchemical Manuscripts, 1500–1825
Exhibition: Migrations of the Mind: Manuscripts from the Lawrence J. Schoenberg Collection

Book Art of the Russian Avant-Garde
Created by the artists and poets Goncharova, Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh, Larionov, Malevich, and Rozanova during the years 1910 through 1917, Futurist book art transformed the hybrid medium of the artist's book in all its dimensions—imagery, poetry, and design. Moreover, word and image in Futurist books depended upon sound. The poetic language of zaum, an invented word meaning "beyonsense," expressed itself in the book through its startling phonic dimension.

Outcomes
Videos: Select poems, read aloud, with accompanying book illustrations (forthcoming)
Publication: Books to Look at, Books to Listen to: The Great Russian Avant-Garde Experiment (due November 2016)

Related
Digitized books: Russian Avant-Garde Books
Lecture: Interactive Books: From the Russian Futurists to El Lissitzky (2014)
Lecture: "Artists' Books of the Avant-Garde: From the Russian Futurists to El Lissitzky," Modern Imprints Symposium, University of Georgia (April 18, 2014) Symposium: The Book as Such in the Russian Avant-Garde
Performance: Explodity: An Evening of Transrational Sound Poetry (includes performance video and program)
Exhibition: Tango with Cows

Brazilian Art History
Reframing the narrative of art history in ways that respond to the specific conditions of Brazil, this project emphasizes the country's dynamic cultural encounters both internally and beyond its borders, as opposed to an older model that sought to identify what was essentially Brazilian about Brazilian art. Project participants are scholars of different periods of Brazilian art, ranging from precontact through the 20th century, and they specialize in media as diverse as feathers, architecture, painting, and new media.

Outcomes
Publication: The Art and Art Histories of Brazil: Reconnecting Traditions (forthcoming)

British Sales, 1780–1800: The Rise of the London Art Market
British Sales Phase II: 1680–1780
The French Revolution instigated an enormous redistribution of art throughout Europe. London emerged as a funnel through which large numbers of objects flowed into galleries, establishing itself as the hub of the international art trade. As part of a joint research endeavor with the National Gallery, London, this project incorporates auction catalogue material from the late 18th century into the Getty Provenance Index®, allowing researchers to track patterns of taste and more fully explore the power of art markets.

Outcomes
Database records: British Sales, 1780–1800 (104,000 records); 1680–1779 forthcoming
Conference: London and the Emergence of a European Art Market (c.1780–1820)
Publication: forthcoming

Related
The Getty Iris post: Life Before eBay: British Art Auctions at the End of the 18th Century
Web page: British Sales Phase II: 1680–1780 (National Gallery, London)

Digital Mellini
Built around an unpublished 17th-century manuscript preserved in the Research Institute's special collections, this project explores Web 2.0 methods of social information gathering and sharing to create a new kind of living, collaborative publication that offers expanded opportunities for research and communication. The project's broader goals include making this uniquely valuable scholarly resource widely available to researchers and exploring new methods and tools for digital publication.

Outcomes
Digital publication: Pietro Mellini's Inventory in Verse, 1681 (2015)
Getty Research Journal essay: Digital Mellini: Project Update and Observations on Translating Historical Texts (2012)

Related
Workshop: Digital Art History: Challenges, Tools & Practical Solutions
The Getty Iris post: Creating an Online Collaboration Tool for Scholars

Digital Montagny
The focus of this project is French artist Elie-Honoré Montagny's Recueil d'Antiquités (1804), an unpublished album in the Research Institute's Special Collections that contains drawings, tracings, and annotations by Montagny during his 1804–05 travels in southern Italy and Sicily. As the second manuscript to be researched and edited online using the Getty Scholars' Workspace™ digital environment, the focus here is on images as opposed to Digital Mellini's concentration on text.

Outcomes
Digital publication: Elie-Honoré Montagny's Recueil d'Antiquités: A Digital Critical Edition

Related
Digitized book: Recueil d'antiquités dessinées . . .

Digital Seminar
This project gathers a team of professors from different universities to collaborate on a seminar dedicated to the Swiss curator Harald Szeemann, whose extraordinary archive is now in the Special Collections of the Research Institute. The project allows professors to maintain autonomy and foster in-person relationships with the students in their own classes, bringing scholars and students into a wider, global conversation about the important work of Szeemann.

Outcomes
Workshop: Digital Seminar Workshop I (due 2016)
Workshop: Digital Seminar Workshop II (due 2017)
Seminar: Harald Szeemann and His Archive at the GRI (due 2017)
Online conference: due 2017
Oral history project: forthcoming

Related
Archive: Harald Szeemann Papers

Early Modern Print Culture and the Islamic World
The fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 coincided with the invention of printing in Europe, thus triggering an explosion in the production of visual culture. This increase in visual production fed images and information about Islam to a hungry European audience, whose taste for Islamica evolved in sophistication from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Accordingly, this research project examines the emergence in early modern Europe of a proliferation of prints and publications illustrating aspects of the Islamic world, particularly Ottoman culture.

Outcomes
Exhibition: Facing East: The Early Modern Western View of Islam (forthcoming)
Publication: Facing East: The Early Modern Western View of Islam (forthcoming)

Ed Ruscha, Streets of Los Angeles
Since the 1960s, artist Ed Ruscha has been photographing the streets of Los Angeles, an endeavor that now spans five decades, hundreds of miles, and over half a million images. The Ed Ruscha, Streets of Los Angeles research project will make this groundbreaking and heretofore unknown collection of materials widely available through digitization and eventual exhibition of the negatives, providing a crucial, publicly accessible resource to scholars in history, art, and architecture. It also contributes to current dialogues and research in the digital humanities, new media, and immersive exhibition techniques.

Outcomes
Workshop: Ed Ruscha's Streets of Los Angeles (October 2015)

Related
Archives: Ed Ruscha's Streets of Los Angeles Archives
Publication: Ed Ruscha and Some Los Angeles Apartments
Exhibition: In Focus: Ed Ruscha
Press Release: The Getty Acquires Ed Ruscha Photographs and Archive
Webpage: Every Building on the Sunset Strip
Webpage: From the Archive (Ed Ruscha)

German Sales, 1930–1945: Art Works, Art Markets, and Cultural Policy
German Sales Phase II: 1901–1929
Although individual art dealers and collectors have been the subjects of monographic publications and exhibitions, the wider German art trade during the first half of the 20th century has not yet been fully explored. This research is not only important from an art-historical perspective, it can also provide new insight into the cultural policy and political objectives of the National Socialist regime during the 1930s and 1940s. The Getty Research Institute, in partnership with the Kunstbibliothek—Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, the Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg, and the Forschungsstelle "Entartete Kunst" at the Universität Hamburg, is developing cohesive, cross-institutional data—around 250,000 records to date—about art transactions in Germany between 1920 and 1945 for the Getty Provenance Index®. This project is supported jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft as well as by a grant from the VolkswagenStiftung.

Outcomes
Database records: German Sales, 1930–1945 (250,000 records); 1901–1929 forthcoming
Workshop: Market and Might: The Business of Art in the "Third Reich" (September 23–27, 2013)
Lecture: A Search Renewed: New Efforts to Trace Artworks Displaced during the World War II Era—Lynn H. Nicholas (September 25, 2013)
Publication: forthcoming

Related
Research guide: Collecting and Provenance Research
Bibliography: Provenance Research Resources
Bibliography: Holocaust-Era Research Resources
The Getty Iris post: Publishing German Sales, A Look under the Hood of the Getty Provenance Index
The Getty Iris post: New Online Resource to Reveal Stories about Nazi-Looted Art, Wartime Art Market
Web page: German Sales 1901–1945 (arthistoricum.net)

Getty Scholars' Workspace™
Part of an ongoing Research Institute digital art history initiative, Getty Scholars' Workspace provides an online environment for conducting collaborative art-historical research projects and creating born-digital publications that allow researchers to collaboratively engage with digital facsimiles of primary source materials. The goal of this project is to release a flexible, robust open-source electronic toolset, with accompanying technical and methodological documentation, to be shared with the international art history community.

Outcomes
Software: Getty Scholars' Workspace

Harald Szeemann
The goal of this project is a comprehensive research and programming plan for the Harald Szeemann Papers during the four-year cataloging process. The Research Institute will direct research in the archive towards important questions in the field of art history, making the best strategic use of the archive as portions become available. As one of its earliest activities, the Institute collaborated with Fondazione Prada in 2013 to produce a full-scale reconstruction of Szeemann's seminal 1969 exhibition, When Attitudes Become Form.

Outcomes
Workshop: Harald Szeemann Workshop (June 11–12, 2014)
Discussion: Reconsidering Harald Szeemann
Conference: due April 14-15, 2016
Digitization of primary sources: forthcoming
Exhibition: When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013
Exhibition: The Kingdom of Obsessions (due 2018)
Publication: forthcoming

Related
Archive: Harald Szeemann Papers, circa 1836–2010 (bulk 1957–2005)
The Getty Iris post: Preserving the Legacy of Harald Szeemann
The Getty Iris post: Treasures from the Vault: Harald Szeemann's "Project Files"
The Getty Iris post: Harald Szeemann, From Vision to Nail

Jackson Pollock, Mural
Commissioned in 1943 by Peggy Guggenheim, Mural is a monumental transitional painting by American artist Jackson Pollock (1912–1956). Now in the collection of the University of Iowa Museum of Art, in 2012 Mural came to the Getty Center, where a team of scientists and conservators in the J. Paul Getty Museum and Getty Conservation Institute began analyzing, conserving, and researching this important painting. Stories about its creation and installation have dominated interpretations for decades. With new knowledge about the pigments and materials used in the painting, art historians and curators from the Getty Research Institute and the Museum consider how these findings modify an understanding of Pollock's process and larger body of work.

Outcomes
Workshop: Experts' Meeting for Mural
Symposium: Jackson Pollock's Mural: Transition, Context, Afterlife
Exhibition: Jackson Pollock's Mural
Publication: forthcoming

Related
Publication: Jackson Pollock's Mural: The Transitional Moment

Lawrence Alloway
Lawrence Alloway (1926–1990) was a key figure in the development of modern art in Europe and America, maintaining a prolific output as an art critic and curator. Credited with introducing American abstract expressionism to England and coining the term "pop art," Alloway had eclectic interests including architecture, earthworks, feminism, film, neorealism, science fiction, and public sculpture. This project addresses the multiple facets of Alloway's life and career and his impact on art history and criticism.

Outcomes
Lecture: forthcoming
Digitized correspondence: Lawrence Alloway and Sylvia Sleigh Correspondence
Publication: Lawrence Alloway: Critic and Curator

Related
Collection: Lawrence Alloway Papers, 1935–2003
Collection: Sylvia Sleigh Papers, 1803–2011, (bulk 1940–2000)
Conference: Lawrence Alloway Reconsidered
Publication: Tate Papers Issue 16
The Getty Iris post: Sylvia Sleigh and Lawrence Alloway, Mutual Muses

Luxury Arts in the Ancient Americas
Luxury Arts in the Ancient Americas is one of 46 exhibitions dedicated to pre-Columbian, Latin American, and Latino art that will open in September 2017 as part of the Getty Foundation's Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative. This research and exhibition project investigates the development of luxury arts in the pre-Columbian Americas, specifically the associations of materials and meanings, from about 1,000 BC to the arrival of Europeans in the early sixteenth century. It reveals how skilled artisans in the ancient Americas created and expressed meaning and value, as well as deployed social and political knowledge, through their choice of materials and technologies, in some of the greatest works of art known from the ancient Americas.

Outcomes
Exhibition: forthcoming
Exhibition Catalog: forthcoming
Symposium: forthcoming
Workshops: February 6–8, 2014, at Getty Center; November 13–15, 2014, in Mexico City, Mexico; February 4–7, 2015, in Lima, Peru

The Material of Form: Abstraction and Industrialism in Mid-Century Argentina and Brazil
Combining art-historical and scientific analysis of selected works from the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, this project develops a comprehensive understanding of the formal strategies and material decisions made by artists experimenting with geometric abstraction in Argentina and Brazil at midcentury. In the 1940s and 1950s, industrializing countries across Latin America sponsored ambitious national development programs, fueling innovation among new domestic industries. Many artists experimented with the novel synthetic materials fabricated in this new economic context, creating objects that were cutting-edge for their compositional and physical properties alike. This project is a holistic study of the object, from compositional elements to the materials that concretize those forms, and also places emphasis on the social, political, and cultural underpinnings that supported these innovations.

Outcomes
Workshop: forthcoming
Conference: forthcoming
Exhibition: forthcoming
Publications: forthcoming

Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA (Los Angeles, Latin America)
This project conducts in-depth explorations of the artistic connections between Los Angeles and Latin America, the relationships between Latin America and the rest of the world, and the history of exchange among Latin American countries and throughout the Latin American diaspora. As part of a larger initiative by the J. Paul Getty Trust, the Research Institute is collaborating with other Getty programs and will take part in a region-wide series of exhibitions and events in 2017.

Outcomes
Workshop program: Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA (PDF, 1p., 129KB)
Conversation: Latin Americanisms: Colonialism and Coloniality (event video)
Conversation: Latin Americanisms: Archive and Memory (event video)

Related
Press release: Getty Announces Topic For New Initiative (PDF, 2pp., 75KB)

Photo Study Collections Research Project
The goal of this project is a conversation, both local and global, about the use of photo archives. Research topics include how photography transforms mediums, how scale is represented, and how artists and art historians may have produced and collected photographs of artworks to support their own perceptions of significance. Other areas of inquiry focus on whether digital photography will fill the same role as its analog predecessor and whether digital collections will be able to replicate the research value of photo archives.

Outcomes
Workshop: Photography's Mediation of Sculpture (January 16–17, 2014)
Colloquium: Photography and Sculpture: The Art Object in Reproduction—Day 1 at the Clark Art Institute
Colloquium: Photography and Sculpture: The Art Object in Reproduction—Day 2 at the Getty Center
Symposium: Objectivity and Neutrality in Analog and Digital Photography (February 25–26, 2016)
Getty Research Journal essay: Foto Arte Minore: The Max Hutzel Collection of Photographs of Art and Architecture in Italy

Related
Resource: Getty Research Institute Photo Archive
Resource: Guide to the Photo Archive and Database

Photography and the Visual Arts in Cold War Hungary
This collaborative project between the Research Institute and the Wende Museum of the Cold War, located in Culver City, focuses on complementary collections from both institutions that together portray a synopsis of Hungary's visual history during the Cold War, represented across artistic disciplines as well as in public and private spheres. The project redefines the paradoxical relationship between official and unofficial cultures in the Eastern Bloc and the changing meaning of the avant-garde.

Outcomes
Workshop: Photography and the Visual Arts in Cold War Hungary (July 20–21, 2015)
Exhibition: Standing Apart: Photography and the Visual Arts in Cold War Hungary (due spring 2017 at the Wende Museum of the Cold War)
Publication: forthcoming

Related
Collection: Michael and Carol Simon Collection of Hungarian Photography, 1850s–2009
Lecture: (Re)Presenting Cold War Hungary: Encounters between Photography and the Visual Arts
Getty Research Journal essay: The Photographic Memory and Impact of the Hungarian 1956 Uprising during the Cold War Era

Printmaking in the Age of Louis XIV, 1660–1715
In collaboration with the Bibliothèque nationale de France, this project reassesses the history of prints and techniques, print production, commerce, and taste and collecting in France from 1660 to 1715, providing the first broad overview of a watershed period once considered the golden age of French printmaking. From the grand portraits to satiric views of everyday life, the project explores the rich variety and varying functions of prints that came to define French power and style in ancient regimes.

Outcomes
Workshop: Printmaking in the Age of Louis XIV (January 14–18, 2013)
Lecture: Fit for a King: Louis XIV and the Art of Fashion
Symposium: forthcoming
Public program: An Afternoon Adventure with Cornelia Funke
Exhibition: A Kingdom of Images: French Prints in the Age of Louis XIV, 1660–1715
Publication: A Kingdom of Images: French Prints in the Age of Louis XIV, 1660–1715

Related
Exhibition: Printing the Grand Manner: Charles Le Brun and Monumental Prints in the Age of Louis XIV
Publication: Printing the Grand Manner: Charles Le Brun and Monumental Prints in the Age of Louis XIV

Producing Empire: Visual Culture and the Politics of Representation (The ACHAC Collection)
This project uses the Research Institute's Association pour la Connaissance de l'histoire de l'Afrique Contemporaine (ACHAC) Collection to reveal how the French displayed, defined, and represented their empire. Through materials that extend across several mediums including photographs, postcards, maps, travel posters, advertisements, and children's games, this collection offers unique insights into the impressive range of visual materials utilized by the French authorities in representing the diversity of their international colonies.

Outcomes
Graduate seminar: Producing the French Empire: The ACHAC Collection and the Politics of Representation (Spring 2014)
Workshop: Producing Empire: Visual Culture and the Politics of Representation (The ACHAC Collection) (May 9, 2014)
Publication: forthcoming

Related
Collection: ACHAC Collection, 1880–ca. 1975

Remodeling the Getty Provenance Index
The Getty Provenance Index® is a set of databases offering free online access to source material for research on the history of collecting and art markets. A pioneering project in the digital humanities, the Provenance Index was founded more than 30 years ago. The goal of the remodeling project is to undertake a complete conceptual and technical overhaul, thus realizing the Index's full potential as one of the leading tools for art-historical research on the social life of objects.

Outcomes
Workshop: Remodeling the Getty Provenance Index (June 8–9, 2015)
Database: Getty Provenance Index (new data architecture and user interface forthcoming)

Sarnath: Exhibiting the Birth and History of Indian Buddhism
Situated in northeastern India, Sarnath is one of the birthplaces of Buddhism and an important pilgrimage site along the Ganges River. While the local museum in Sarnath is rich in artworks crucial to the study of Buddhist art and history, its display changed little since the museum opened in 1910. The Getty programs will collaborate with Indian colleagues at the Sarnath Museum and at the Archaeological Survey of India in Delhi, experts at the British Museum in London, and scholars of Buddhist art to update the museum's display, create a database of all artworks pertaining to Sarnath, and establish a set of best practices for archaeological site museums in India.

Outcomes
Workshops: forthcoming
Symposia: forthcoming
Reinstallation: forthcoming

Transpacific Encounters
The "discovery" of the Americas was a momentous occasion that ushered in the early modern period and the era of globalization. Aside from the ensuing Spanish conquest and colonialization of the Americas, other types of encounters fundamentally altered how artworks and trade goods circulated the globe. This project explores the artistic ramification of these encounters, focusing on the cross-cultural global networks that occurred between the Americas and Asia.

Outcomes
Conference: Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World (includes conference video and program)
Symposium: Transpacific Engagements: Visual Culture of Global Exchange (1781–1869) (includes symposium program and abstracts)
Publication: Transpacific Engagements: Exchange, Translation, and Visual Culture in the Age of Empires (1565–1898) (forthcoming)

Video Art in Latin America
This project addresses the need for more English-language resources about the history of video art from Latin America and provides access to key works of video art from the region through the special collections of the Research Institute. The goal is to link archival resources to emerging threads of interdisciplinary scholarship and re-examine canonical narratives of video art within the context of pan-American practices. The project also aims to expand the historical and conceptual frameworks for studying global video art alongside a broader global media practice.

Outcomes
Public program: Recent Video from Latin America screening
Public programs: additional video screenings forthcoming
Digital resource: forthcoming
Workshop: forthcoming

Active Initiatives

Art on Screen
Though cinema's relationship to other arts has been the subject of scholarly discourse since the medium's inception, the unique hybridity of its production and display has often excluded it from mainstream art-historical discourse. Focusing on the complex relationship between moving-image media, fine art, and architecture, Art on Screen bridges the divide between cinema and the fine arts. Through a combination of interdisciplinary research, lectures, screenings, and symposia, this initiative revives cinema's position within the museum and art history.

Outcomes
Seminar: Landscape Films in the Age of Affluence—Jennifer Peterson and Alexander Nemerov (June 2015)
Seminar: Buon Fresco: A Screening and Conversation between Tacita Dean, Davide Gasparatto and Yvonne Szafran (December 2014)
Seminar: The Medium Messed: Aesthetics of Video Viewing—Ulrike Hanstein and Liz Kotz (April 2014)
Seminar: Rhythm and Pacing in Ivan the Terrible, Part I—Leah Jacobs and Michael Patterson (February 2014)
Seminar: Allan Sekula and the Cinema of Honest Materiality—Ed Dimendberg and Colin Gardener (November 2013)
Seminar: Spencer Williams: A Comic History of Race Movies—Jacqueline Stewart and Kara Keeling (October 2013)
Seminar: Wrong Living: Cinema and the Bungalow—John David Rhodes and Charles Wolfe (April 2013)
Seminar: Dancing with the Devil: The Rolling Stones in Cinema—David E. James and Rani Singh (February 2013)
Public program: Galaxie film screening
Public program: A Conversation with Agnès Varda (includes symposium video)
Public program: Smog film screening
Public program: FILM and Film with Tacita Dean
Public Program: William Krisel: Architect film screening and conversation
Workshop: Art Film and the Current Condition (June 15–16, 2012)
Workshop: Moving Image Workshop with Tom Gunning (April 2–3, 2010)
Workshop: Robert Beavers Film Workshop (October 2009)
Lecture series: ongoing

Related
Collection: Harry Smith Papers
Publication: Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular
The Getty Iris post: Harry Smith's Archives and Collections Now at the Getty Research Institute
The Getty Iris post: Treasures from the Vault: Harry Smith and Patterns in the Wind

The Future of Art Bibliography
The Future of Art Bibliography (FAB) initiative developed out of various conversations among colleagues in the United States and Europe. Concerns in the art-historical community about limited funding resources for art libraries and projects internationally and the cessation of the Getty's support for the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA) provided the catalyst for a Kress Foundation grant to the Getty Research Institute. Learn more.

Completed Projects

Digital Diego
The Digital Diego project aims to make Diego Rivera's sketchbook of California miners accessible to the public for a period of one year. Rivera created the sketchbook in preparation for the Allegory of California (1930–31) fresco located in the San Francisco Stock Exchange Tower.

Outcomes
Digitized sketchbook: California Miners
Getty Research Journal essay: Diego Rivera's "California Miners" Sketchbook (1931): New Research on the Artist in California during the Great Depression

Digital Kirchner
This project centers on a series of illustrations of the Apocalypse by German artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938). Created on the back of cigarette boxes in 1917, the small-scale drawings were tipped into an album that is preserved in the Research Institute's special collections. Team members wrote a scholarly essay about the drawings, while the album itself was digitized and used to develop a Beta version of the online collaborative platform Getty Scholars' Workspace, the initial public release of which is scheduled for late 2015.

Outcomes
Getty Research Journal essay: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Drawings of the Apocalypse

Related
Digitized sketchbooks: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Sketchbooks, 1917–1932

The Display of Art in Roman Palaces, 1550–1750
This project identifies and analyzes patterns of display in noble Roman residences over two centuries (1550–1750), a period that encompassed the beginnings of collecting as it is understood today and the end of the baroque. The very concept of art and the writing of the history of art developed in close dialogue with display in such settings. As part of the project, hundreds of Roman inventories were added to the Getty Provenance Index®.

Outcomes
Publication: Display of Art in the Roman Palace, 1550–1750

Related
Conference: Display of Art in Roman Palaces, 1550–1750
The Getty Iris post: Display of Art in Roman Palaces

Los Angeles Architecture, 1940–1990
Part of the Getty's Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A., this project explored all aspects of the history of Los Angeles's architectural and urban development, from the city's mass-suburbanization and resulting sprawl to the construction of its freeway system, as well as architects' experiments with new building types, materials, and techniques. This broader approach enables a better understanding of a city that has been both maligned and admired, a city that some scholars have called the first postmodern city; others, the city of the future.

Outcomes
Symposium: Urban Ambition: Assessing the Evolution of L.A. (includes symposium video and program)
Conversation: Why L.A.? An Evening with Hitoshi Abe, Neil Denari, Craig Hodgetts, and Peter Noever (includes event video)
Public programming: Related Events
Exhibition: Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940–1990
Publication: Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940–1990

Related
Resource: Julius Shulman Resources
Resource: Architecture and Design Collection Highlights
Collection: Julius Shulman digital photography archive
Collection: Ray Kappe Papers, 1954–2007
Collection: Pierre Koenig Papers and Drawings, 1925–2007
Collection: John Lautner Papers, 1929–2002
Collection: Union Station Collection

Orientalist Photography
The Middle East and North Africa—the "Orient" to 19th-century European travelers—were crucial in photography's development as a new technology and an art form. Meanwhile, photography was pivotal in maintaining Europe's distinctively Orientalist vision of the region. Orientalist photographs permit research into photography's role in shaping European and non-European views of the Middle East and North Africa; further, attention to the local artists, patrons, audiences, and collectors of these photographs complicates notions of the "Orient" both geographically and culturally.

Outcomes
Graduate seminar: Contact Visions: Orientalism, Photography, and the Middle East (Winter 2009)
Symposium: Zoom Out: The Making and Unmaking of the "Orient" through Photography
Publication: Photography's Orientalism: New Essays on Colonialism's Representation

Related
Collection: Pierre de Gigord Collection of Photographs
Collection: Jacobson Orientalist Photography Collection
Exhibition: Walls of Algiers: Narratives of the City
Publication: Walls of Algiers: Narratives of the City through Text and Image

Surrealism in Latin America
The history of surrealism in Latin America is a vibrant research field that has developed over the last few decades. Scholars, however, face significant challenges: primary documents are often located in archives that are difficult to access, and secondary sources exist in several languages, complicating conversations among scholars. Work remains on the relationship between surrealism and pre-Columbian art; the role of key figures such as Peruvian poet César Moro and Austrian painter and editor Wolfgang Paalen; and surrealism's continuing legacy in the work of postwar artists in Latin America. This project addressed these challenges, producing new research in a wide variety of formats.

Outcomes
Digitized collection: Dyn, No. 1–No. 6 (on-site access only)
Resource: Surrealism in Latin America research guide
Bibliography: Surrealism in Latin America
Workshop program: Surrealism in Latin America
Symposium: Vivísimo Muerto: Debates on Surrealism in Latin America (includes symposium video and program)
Lecture: A "New Friendship between Art and Anthropology": Surrealism in Mexico (includes lecture video)
Exhibition: Farewell to Surrealism: The Dyn Circle in Mexico
Publication: Farewell to Surrealism: The Dyn Circle in Mexico
Publication: Surrealism in Latin America: Vivísimo Muerto
The Getty Iris post: The "Scandalous Life" of César Moro
The Getty Iris post: The Forgotten Surrealist