The J. Paul Getty Trust 2010 Report

 
The year under review represented a period of great activity and forward momentum for the Foundation in each of our strategic initiatives, whether in our home city of Los Angeles or abroad. The Foundation worked closely with the other Getty programs and with partner institutions to achieve our shared goals.

Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980

Womanhouse exhibition catalogue, 1972. Designed by Sheila Levrant de Bretteville. Courtesy of the California Institute of Arts Institutional Archives.First Kumu, 1959, Henry Takemoto.
Stoneware, glazed. Scripps College, Claremont, CA. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Fred Marer. © Henry Takemoto Pacific Standard Time is an unprecedented collaboration of cultural organizations across Southern California, all working together to present the history of art in Los Angeles in the post-World War II decades. An outgrowth of the Foundation’s 10-year commitment to supporting projects that recover and preserve the record of this vital period in modern art, Pacific Standard Time has grown to encompass more than 60 organizations stretching from Santa Barbara to San Diego along the California coast and as far inland as Palm Springs. In January 2010, the Foundation announced 26 new grants for exhibitions and publications, with subsequent grants supporting a 10-day performance arts festival. The wide variety of thematically linked exhibitions and programs celebrating the art of the period will open in October 2011 and run until April 2012, with the performance art festival taking place in January 2012.

The number of Pacific Standard Time partner organizations and activities continues to grow each month; for further information, visit getty.edu
and pacificstandardtime.org.

Conservation: Panel Paintings Initiative and Mosaikon

Adam, 1507, Albrecht Dürer. Oil on panel. © Museo del Prado (España). (Panel Paintings Initiative) Paintings created on wood supports–known as panel paintings–rank among the most significant works of Western art. Their unique structure and the complex aging behaviors of wood and paint have long challenged conservators. Today few experts have the diverse skills and experience necessary to conserve these paintings. Building on the Getty’s long-standing interest in panel paintings conservation, the Foundation, in collaboration with the Conservation Institute and the Museum, is supporting the training of the next generation of specialists through the Panel Paintings Initiative. During the last year, a needs assessment survey supported by a Getty grant to the State Art Museum, Denmark, was completed. As the result of a previous grant to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the conservation of Adam and Eve (1507) by Albrecht Dürer, the paintings were recently reinstalled in the Prado Museum in Madrid. The Ghent Altarpiece, completed 1432,
Hubert and Jan van Eyck. Oil on panel.
Cathédrale de Saint Bavon. © Lukas - Art in Flanders.
(Panel Paintings Initiative) A new grant is supporting the conservation analysis of the Ghent Altarpiece (1432), which is among the most beautiful and significant works of art in the world. The project offers an opportunity to train a group of seven postgraduate and midcareer conservators while the condition of the 18 separate panels of the altarpiece is assessed, and treatment and protocols are developed, by a group of experts from Europe and North America. Simultaneously, a Getty-funded, three-year training project undertaken by the esteemed Opificio delle Pietre Dure e Laboratori di Restauro (OPD) in Florence centers on the large painting of The Last Supper by Giorgio Vasari (1546) that was severely damaged in the Florence flood of 1966. The project involves not only the conservation of the five large panels that compose the painting, but also the training of seven advanced, midcareer, and postgraduate conservators. Furthering the goals of this joint initiative, GCI staff completed final editing of the panel paintings project bibliography, which can now be accessed online.

Mosaikon, another conservation initiative, is a joint effort of the Getty Conservation Institute and the Foundation in partnership with ICCROM (the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property) and ICCM (the International Committee for the Conservation of Mosaics) that seeks to create a regional strategy for the conservation of mosaics in the Mediterranean. As part of the initiative, this year the Foundation awarded a large grant to the Centro di Conservazione Archeologica in Rome to undertake a two-year training project for mosaics technicians in the Middle East. Serving as a model for the region, the project will enable technicians to strengthen their abilities to analyze ancient techniques and materials, plan and implement conservation protocols, and devise long-term maintenance strategies. An additional grant was awarded to ICCROM in Rome to conduct a training workshop for decision makers in museums from throughout the Middle East and North Africa whose collections include significant mosaics. With these two major projects in place, the Mosaikon partners will be well positioned to evaluate the results and disseminate these models in the region. Along with the GCI’s regional courses for technicians and managers of archaeological sites, the training component of Mosaikon is now well underway.

Moving museum catalogues online

Collection (formerly Untitled), 1954,
Robert Rauschenberg. Oil, paper, fabric, wood, and metal on canvas. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Gift of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson. © Estate of Robert Rauschenberg / Licensed by VAGA, New York (Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative) The publication of scholarly collection catalogues has long been a critical part of a museum’s mission, providing authoritative information about works of art for scholars, students, and the general public. The five-year Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI) is developing models for scholarly collection catalogues in an online environment, as museums confront both the vast opportunities and accompanying challenges for scholarship that is “born digital.” Working with the J. Paul Getty Museum and a group of eight other museums–the Art Institute of Chicago, Arthur M. Sackler and Freer Gallery of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Seattle Art Museum, Tate, and Walker Art Center–the initiative has focused this past fiscal year on resolving complex technical and legal issues. Technical challenges include the need to find innovative ways to aggregate information from multiple sources and deliver it to the Web, and finding solutions that will overcome the differences among existing museum collections management software systems now in use. Legal issues include the differences between laws governing rights for reproducing images online and those for print, and the circumstances under which images used in an online scholarly catalogue might constitute fair use for educational purposes.

To address these issues, the Foundation convened technical working groups and a meeting of museum general counsels. In an initial effort to share results with the field, the OSCI was featured at the Association of Art Museum Curators in Chicago and at the Museum Publishing Seminar in Washington, D.C. Looking forward, the initiative will move into the implementation phase in the next fiscal year.

Connecting Art Histories

Immaculate Conception with Monstrance, Matheo Pisarro (atrib.), Church of Yavi, Jujuy, Argentina. Photo: Fundacion TAREA, Argentina. (Connecting Art Histories) Since the 1980s, a series of Getty Foundation programs has provided opportunities for international exchange and scholarship. The Connecting Art Histories initiative builds on this earlier tradition, targeting a few specific programs that have great potential to impact future developments in art history. Toward this end, two new grants offer opportunities to increase connections among Latin America scholars. A grant to the Universidad Nacional de San Martín in Buenos Aires builds on the Getty’s long-standing interest in promoting “technical” art history–an approach that combines the expertise of art historians, conservators, and conservation scientists to gain new understanding of the making and meaning of artworks. The grant will support four intensive research seminars on three continents–including one at the Getty Research Institute–focused on artistic practices under the Spanish in the New World. The seminars were developed in consultation with staff at the Museum, Conservation Institute, and Research Institute. Seminar organizers will also develop a database of pigments, dyes, resins, and other materials present in colonial works of art, which promises to become a key resource for the field. A second grant to the Museum of Latin American Art (MoLAA) in Long Beach brings together leading museum directors, curators, and university scholars from 16 countries to discuss new models for interpreting and presenting Latin American art. The first gathering was held jointly at MoLAA and the Getty Center in spring 2011, organized collaboratively by the two institutions.
A second seminar will follow in fall 2011 at the Museo de Arte de Lima in Peru. Additionally, the seminars will be posted online as webcasts, greatly expanding the discussion internationally.

It has been clear to the Foundation and our advisors for many years that much groundbreaking art historical research worldwide often finds only a limited audience due to language barriers. Art in Translation, an innovative, entirely electronic journal presenting new scholarship from around the world in English translation, was designed to address this problem. Art in Translation has now published its first four issues. Funded by a Getty grant to Edinburgh University, the journal recently won the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers’ award for “Best New Journal.”

Leadership Development

In January 2010, the Getty Leadership Institute (GLI) moved to Claremont Graduate University, where it is now an independent institute associated with both the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management and the School of Arts and Humanities. The Getty provided a substantial three-year grant to ensure the ongoing success of the Institute, including full support for the flagship program MLI: The Museum Leadership Institute and one other, shorter program. The GLI has now settled into its new home, where it is thriving and already developing new program plans and partnerships.

Other leadership and professional development grants include the multicultural summer internships offered each summer in Los Angeles; the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program; professional development programs at museums in Africa; and support for art historians and conservators to attend large-scale international conferences.