"The reason why African Americans began these places of leisure and relaxation in the outdoors was because they were excluded from going to the white establishments." Around the turn of the 20th century, African Americans seeking to escape racism in the South began moving to Southern California in larger numbers. Like others who migrated to the Golden State at the time, they also came in search of new opportunities and seaside recreation. But discrimination prevailed, even out West, and Black Am...
Feb 16, 2022•35 min•Ep. 153
“If anything, a sense of self, a sense of destiny, the fact that she belonged among the greats, was a defining mark of Artemisia’s personality.” Artemisia Gentileschi was an acclaimed Baroque painter whose life was as compelling as her art. Born in Rome in 1593 to Prudenzia di Montone and the Tuscan painter Orazio Gentileschi, Artemesia lost her mother when she was 12, leaving her to help raise her three brothers. Her father took the unusual step of training her as a painter, though there were f...
Feb 02, 2022•49 min•Ep. 152
“Lamb’s objective was essentially to do Kon-Tiki in the Chiapan Rainforest. And he needed a lost city as a selling point.” In 1950, American adventurers Dana and Ginger Lamb traveled to the jungles of northern Guatemala looking for Maya ruins and a story they could turn into a movie. There they encountered a rich cache of decorated structures made in the first millennium CE, including a particularly elaborate limestone lintel (a horizontal support above a doorway) carved by an artisan named Mayu...
Jan 19, 2022•50 min•Ep. 151
"I think it just shows very well how Rubens worked, how he got the inspiration from antiquity, but he transforms it into something completely new and very alive." The Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens is most famous for his dynamic, colorful renderings of religious scenes and mythological stories. Yet Rubens’s work was also deeply inspired by the art of the past. He was a keen student of classical antiquity, engaging with ancient sculptures, coins, gems, and cameos both at home and in hi...
Dec 22, 2021•39 min•Season 6Ep. 150
“Bagan is actually a splendid site. You can imagine in only in this, like, fifty square kilometers, they have more than 3,000 monuments. And then all the monuments have different styles and different architecture.” The ancient past of Bagan, Myanmar, is still visible today in the more than 3,000 temples, monasteries, and works of art and architecture that remain at the site. Beginning around 1000 CE, Bagan served as the capital city of the Pagan Kingdom. Many of the surviving monuments date from...
Dec 08, 2021•43 min•Season 6Ep. 149
"Buck wanted to stand in every room from his house, turn his head, and see every view. Even the bathroom. And so that was kind of what inspired the design of the house." Among the most famous photographs of modern architecture is Julius Shulman’s picture of Case Study House #22, also known as the Stahl House after the family that commissioned it. Two girls in white dresses sit inside a glass cube that seems to float atop a cliff over the illuminated grid of Los Angeles at night. Built by a famil...
Nov 24, 2021•39 min•Ep. 148
“Holbein was able to combine his ability to create a very believable likeness with these strong design sensibilities, and also an ingenuity, a cleverness, a creativity to create individual portraits of specificity and complexity.” Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/98–1543) depicted some of the most important thinkers and politicians of his day in beautiful, highly individualized portraits. In Basel, he socialized with and painted humanists such as Desiderius Erasmus and Bonifacius Amerbach. In Lond...
Nov 10, 2021•46 min•Season 6Ep. 147
“She was not afraid. She wasn’t daunted. I think that’s one of the key differentiators about her and her career.” Sculptor Luisa Roldán (1652–1706) followed a rare path for women in 17th-century Spain. Like other female artists, she trained and worked in the studio of a male family member, in this case her father. After marrying at 19, she established herself as an independent artist. This set her apart from most other women of her day, who stopped making art when they started families of their ...
Oct 27, 2021•44 min•Season 6Ep. 146
“We hear the security guards talking to one another on the walkie-talkie, saying that there’s a man on the line saying that he has a stolen painting. And I wish somebody could’ve seen us, because we just stopped our conversation and Jill’s eyes got big, and she said, ‘Oh, my gosh, are we gonna remember this moment for the rest of our lives.’” On the day after Thanksgiving in 1985, two thieves casually entered the University of Arizona Museum of Art (UAMA). They strolled out minutes later with Wi...
Oct 13, 2021•42 min•Season 6Ep. 145
“The metropolis is not just the city; it’s the mother city. It has a fundamental role in defining the history of these countries that we discussed in the book.” The period between 1830 and 1930 was one of global change, particularly in Latin America. Emerging from Spanish and Portuguese colonial rule at the start of the century, cities from Buenos Aires to Havana faced explosive population growth and rapid modernization, which reshaped the urban landscape and sociopolitical structures. These cha...
Sep 29, 2021•46 min•Season 6Ep. 144
"Everything was made of the most familiar objects. It could’ve been taken off a desk or a kitchen counter or something, and put into action. They were inert, but their meaning wasn’t. I thought to myself, this isn’t art; it’s better." In the early 1960s, artists from around the world practicing in wide-ranging disciplines—from music to dance, visual art to poetry—began to coalesce in a movement called Fluxus. Fluxus grew out of the absurdity of Dada, Surrealism, and Futurism, drawing inspiration...
Sep 15, 2021•27 min•Season 6Ep. 143
“To really read into the fragment that you have in front of you and to imagine the rest of what was the whole text is really romantic and an enjoyment of tekagami viewing.” The rise of tea drinking ceremonies during the Edo period (1615–1868) brought about another new cultural phenomenon: calligraphy albums. Called tekagami , or “mirror of hands,” these albums showcase calligraphy by 8th-century emperors, famed poets, and other illustrious figures from Japan’s past. The calligraphic samples are ...
Sep 01, 2021•47 min•Season 6Ep. 142
“You could easily say ‘I can’t believe Rubens held such sway deep into the 18th century in Latin America as a touchpoint. Wow. That’s profound.’ But that, to me, is much less important than rethinking fundamental categories of picture making.” One of the biggest influences on art in the Spanish Americas from the 16th through 18th centuries was Peter Paul Rubens. Although the renowned Flemish artist never traveled to the Americas himself, missionaries, merchants, and colonizers flooded the region...
Aug 18, 2021•44 min•Season 6Ep. 141
“When you pick an object up, not only do you begin to understand how it was made, it’s facture, the people who made it, but you can also, I think, begin to start to tell the story about the people whose hands it was in.” Prominent Jewish banker and art collector Moise de Camondo settled in Paris in the 1870s and quickly began amassing the signifiers of wealth around him—a beautiful home, fine furniture, and artistic masterpieces. But after his only son, Nissim, was killed fighting for France in ...
Aug 04, 2021•37 min•Season 6Ep. 140
“Photography, historically, has been used to pin people of color in a particular location to a particular identity or stereotype, and the artists in this exhibition work to unpin that.” Photography is a uniquely accessible and flexible medium today, encompassing everything from cell-phone snapshots to large-format negatives, from formal studio sets to casual selfies. Nonetheless, photographs of people of color have historically played on negative stereotypes and fixed identities. In the exhibiti...
Jul 21, 2021•54 min•Season 6Ep. 139
“He often said is that this was a garden not for the visitors. He was happy if visitors enjoyed it; it was a garden for the people who worked here, who every single day, would see the slight changes and would have a seasonal experience.” The largest work of art at the Getty Center is located outside the galleries—the Central Garden, designed by artist Robert Irwin. The garden stretched Irwin’s understanding of what art could be; it is alive and changing with every passing moment. In the nearly 2...
Jul 07, 2021•34 min•Season 6Ep. 138
"For Blake, visionary art is not mysterious or fuzzy or soft. Visionary art is something which actually very precise and crisp." Painter, poet, draftsman, and printmaker William Blake was born in London in 1757, a time when England’s art scene was growing and transforming dramatically. Blake trained as an engraver, eventually developing his own technique that allowed him to combine word and image in colorful works. Blake used this approach to illustrate poems he composed and began to publish lim...
Jun 23, 2021•40 min•Season 5Ep. 137
"It was really powerful to be on the road following her footsteps. It just gave me an incredibly profound respect for her grit." In the 1930s and ‘40s, photographer Dorothea Lange drove up and down California and across the American West, recording people and their living conditions with her camera and notepad. Eighty years later, poet Tess Taylor saw echoes of Lange’s photographs of temporary housing, migrant labor, and precarious livelihoods in contemporary California. Taylor retraced Lange’s ...
Jun 09, 2021•50 min•Season 5Ep. 136
"From what we know, the earliest form of true writing was that invented in Mesopotamia in the late fourth millennium BC. Closely followed by Egypt, not long after. It’s probably only a matter of a couple of hundred years, if that. But Mesopotamia seems to have it by a nose." Mesopotamia, the fertile land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, was home to some of the world’s first cities. Beginning around 3400 BC, people came together in this region to build elaborately decorated buildings, for...
May 26, 2021•42 min•Season 5Ep. 135
"They were rather shocked that we were interested specifically in restoring art by women. And I remember one specific curator said, 'Well, if you would just open your base to men as well, we would have a lot of worthy things for you to restore.'" Where are the women artists in museums? The non-profit organization Advancing Women Artists was inspired by this simple, powerful question. Though artists like Artemisia Gentileschi and Plautilla Nelli were prolific and successful in their lifetimes, th...
May 12, 2021•43 min•Season 5Ep. 134
“Schlosser could be described as the least-known famous art historian.” In the 16th and 17th centuries, Central European nobles gathered and displayed art and natural wonders side by side in spaces known as art and curiosity cabinets, or kunst- und Wunderkammer . Viewers were awed by the spectacle of traditional fine artworks alongside objects like ostrich eggs in elaborate stands, complex mechanical clocks, suits of armor, and calligraphic manuscripts. In 1908 Austrian curator and scholar Juliu...
Apr 28, 2021•38 min•Season 5Ep. 133
"There is, and appropriately so, a tension between Sarnath as an archaeological monument, a historical monument, but also a highly sacred one." After reaching enlightenment, the Buddha began attracting followers—and founding a religion—by preaching. He delivered his first sermon at Sarnath, near the banks of the Ganges in Northeast India, in the 6th century BCE. By the 3rd century BCE, it had become a site of considerable importance; the emperor Ashoka visited and erected a gleaming pillar, offi...
Apr 14, 2021•47 min•Season 5Ep. 132
“The idea is that you put the scroll in the machine and it does a pirouette. And as it turns around, the x-rays see what’s inside the scroll from every possible angle, 360 degrees, all the way around. And we can invert that and recover a complete representation of what’s inside, in three dimensions.” In 1750 well diggers discovered a villa near the ancient town of Herculaneum that had been buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Among the treasures pulled from the villa were more than...
Mar 31, 2021•35 min•Season 5Ep. 131
We’ve asked members of the Getty community to share short, personal reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. These recordings feature stories related to our daily lives. This week, Maite Alvarez, who works on exhibitions at the museum, recalls how she discovered a Baroque sculpture's true maker—Luisa Roldán. To learn more about this sculpture, visit: www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/1101/ . Transcript JAMES CUNO: Hi, I’m Jim Cuno, president of the J. Paul Getty Trust. We...
Mar 23, 2021•4 min
"One of the things I’ve heard most frequently in attending and working with and participating with ACHAC at different events, is to hear young people, and even adults, say, 'I had no idea. I did not know that back at this particular historical juncture, my ancestors were put on display in the city, in these parts, for entertainment.'" During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, France taught its citizens about its overseas territories in the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, and Asia through ...
Mar 17, 2021•41 min•Season 5Ep. 130
We’ve asked members of the Getty community to share short, personal reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. These recordings feature stories related to our daily lives. This week, Museum editor Lyra Kilston muses on Richard Neutra's innovative and newly relevant school designs, as seen through photographs by Julius Shulman. To learn more about these images, visit: https://primo.getty.edu/permalink/f/mlc5om/GETTY_ROSETTAIE131574 . Transcript JAMES CUNO: Hi, I’m Jim Cuno, pre...
Mar 09, 2021•4 min
"It became Hoefnagel’s task to think of illuminations that were every bit as extraordinary as this amazing writing." The exquisite Renaissance manuscript Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta , or Monument of Miraculous Calligraphy , is the result of a unique partnership between two different artists working thirty years apart. From 1561 to 1562 the master calligrapher Georg Bocskay created a book in which he demonstrated hundreds of elaborate scripts in many different languages and alphabets. More than ...
Mar 03, 2021•36 min•Season 5Ep. 129
We’ve asked members of the Getty community to share short, personal reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. These recordings feature stories related to our daily lives. This week, curatorial research assistant Alex Jones is reminded of his grandmother by a photograph of a Black woman at a 1965 civil rights protest. To view this work visit: https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/reflections-alex-jones-on-charles-brittin/ . To learn more about this photography, visit: http://blogs.gett...
Feb 23, 2021•5 min
With an artistic career that began with political cartoons in his college newspaper, Romare Bearden moved between mediums and styles throughout his life, although his artistic breakthroughs did not come without hard work. Over the course of a long career that spanned a tumultuous period in the fight for representation and civil rights for African Americans in the United States, Bearden became a deeply influential artist. Art historian Mary Schmidt Campbell delves into Bearden’s fascinating life ...
Feb 17, 2021•56 min
We’ve asked members of the Getty community to share short, personal reflections on works of art they’re thinking about right now. These recordings feature stories related to our daily lives. This week, educator Laura Gavilán Lewis considers what it means to be separated from her loved ones as she looks at a portrait of Zénaïde and Charlotte Bonaparte. To learn more about this work, visit: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/802/ . Over the next few weeks, look for new recordings every o...
Feb 09, 2021•4 min
