Episodes

Today on Art + Ideas, we’re bringing you an episode from Getty’s new podcast, Recording Artists. In season one, Radical Women, host Helen Molesworth uses archival interviews to explore the lives of six women artists—Alice Neel, Lee Krasner, Betye Saar, Helen Frankenthaler, Yoko Ono, and Eva Hesse. Molesworth also speaks with contemporary artists and art historians to make sense of what it meant—and still means—to be a woman and an artist. This episode focuses on Lee Krasner (1908–1984). Artists...

Ray Kappe’s buildings, frequently featuring extensive spans of glass and warm wood, are known for their embrace of their often unusual sites and the California landscape. But Kappe’s impact on Southern California extends well beyond his own architectural practice. His work as an educator and as founding director of the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) ensure that Kappe’s unique approach to building continues to inspire generations of architects. In this episode, Ray Kappe,...

From painted cave temples in China to pyramids in Egypt to earthen cathedrals in Peru, the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) works globally to conserve artworks, architecture, and cultural heritage sites. An integral part of this effort is conducting scientific research, developing tools and educating and training professionals to manage conservation projects in situ. In this episode, John E. and Louise Bryson Director of the GCI, Tim Whalen, discusses past initiatives as well as what the futur...

This episode commemorates the hundredth anniversary of the opening of the Bauhaus, the influential school founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany. Revered for its experimental art and design curriculum, the Bauhaus sought to erode distinctions among crafts, the fine arts, and architecture through study centered on practical experience and a variety of traditional and experimental media. Two exhibitions from the Getty, one of which is online, explore the Bauhaus curriculum from the p...

Since the Ice Age, humans have been using their imaginations to create objects of great artistry and skill, many of them destined for spiritual or religious functions. Exploring the stories these objects tell and the shared narratives they reflect helps us to understand the nature of belief and the complex relationship between faith and society. In this episode, former British Museum director, Neil MacGregor, discusses these ideas, which are the topic of his recent book Living with the Gods: On ...

Impressionist painter Edgar Degas (1834–1917) is well known for his gauzy paintings of dancers, his motion-filled images of horses, and his striking portraits. But the artist also lived a fascinating life—from a privileged upbringing to family bankruptcy, from defending Paris alongside Manet during the Franco-Prussian War to feuding with the same artist over a portrait. Getty Publications has recently published two biographical essays, both titled “Memories of Degas.” One is by the Irish writer ...

Buried by the 79 AD eruption of Vesuvius and rediscovered in the 1750s, the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum is one of the best-preserved ancient Roman villas. This expansive waterfront home of Rome’s elite contained bright wall frescoes, bronze and marble statues, delicate mosaics, and a library of over one thousand papyrus scrolls that were uniquely preserved by the volcanic debris. The Villa dei Papiri is also the model that J. Paul Getty used for his Malibu museum, now home to the Getty’s ant...

Growing up in the UK, Ian Hodder was surrounded by artifacts of ancient societies. He participated in his first organized archaeological dig in his hometown of Cambridge at the age of 13, and since then he has worked at archaeological sites around the world. Over his long career, he has pushed the field in important new directions, promoting ethnoarchaeology (the study of the relationship between material culture and people) in the 1970s and 80s and more recently exploring how digital tools can ...

Islam is the second largest religion in the world, with 1.8 billion adherents who follow many different sects and traditions. One sect, Wahhabism, has grown tremendously in recent decades, in large part due to Saudi Arabia’s financial backing. Wahhabism’s message is one of intolerance—including towards practitioners of other interpretations of Islam—and this has inspired much of the global terrorism today, including the recent attacks in Sri Lanka, which were claimed by ISIS. In this episode, au...

Mid-twentieth century Los Angeles architect Pierre Koenig (1925–2004), was a skillful constructor of modernist homes. The most famous of these were two case study houses produced wholly of glass, wood, and steel and evocatively photographed by Julius Shulman. Yet despite these early successes, Koenig was largely forgotten by the 1980s. Architectural historian Neil Jackson’s recent book Pierre Koenig: A View from the Archive utilizes the Getty Research Institute’s near-complete archive of Koenig’...

The painter Diego Velázquez (1599–1660), commonly known as Velázquez, was an immensely talented painter who achieved great prominence during Spain’s Golden Age of art and literature. Las Meninas (1656), his most well-known painting, is a complex portrait of the daughter of the king and has inspired countless artists, including Goya and Picasso. In this episode, paintings curator Anne Woollett discusses two biographies of Velazquez written by his contemporaries Francisco Pacheco and Antonio Palom...

The bestiary, a medieval book of animals both real and imagined, was one of the most popular books in medieval Europe. Detailed illustrations and descriptions of real yet unfamiliar animals like whales and elephants shared the page with those of imaginary creatures like unicorns and dragons. But the fantastical and allegorical stories in the bestiary didn’t live in the books alone—the images and stories of these animals often escaped from the pages to inhabit an array of objects and works of art...

How has the field of art history changed in the last 30 years? This episode centers on this question through a discussion with Mary Miller, the recently appointed director of the Getty Research Institute. She describes her academic career studying the art of the ancient Maya at a time when this field didn’t fit comfortably into most art history departments, delves into the evolving role of the Getty Research Institute’s library, archives and scholarly programs, and closes the discussion with her...

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 ...

How is dripping water into a vessel a musical performance? Or the release of a butterfly into a space? Or washing one’s face? These three events are all proposed in scores created by Fluxus artists, an international, anti-art community of composers, poets, visual artists, and performers dedicated to testing and blurring the line between art and life. These three performances are also just some of the many Fluxus scores being enacted as part of the LA Philharmonic’s season-long Fluxus Festival, o...

Founded during the tumultuous year of 1968, the Studio Museum in Harlem recently celebrated its 50th year of showcasing the work of artists of African descent. In this episode, Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum, discusses the history and evolution of this important institution, from its various homes (including its new building project with architect David Adjaye and his firm Adjaye Associates) to the powerful curators who have shaped it into the future-focused insti...

Florence in the late 1520s was a place of turmoil, as powerful families vied for political and economic control of the city. Throughout the unrest, painter Jacopo da Pontormo continued to paint captivating works of art, including the Portrait ofCarlo Neroni, the Getty’s Portrait of a Halberdier, and his great masterpiece, the Visitation. In this episode, Getty paintings curator Davide Gasparotto walks through the exhibition Pontormo: Miraculous Encounters exploring the history and significance o...

Nineteenth-century photographer Carleton Watkins is perhaps best known for his photographs of Yosemite, which inspired the preservation of this land and, later, the creation of the National Parks system in the United States. But his unusual life and tumultuous career is rarely examined. In this episode, art historian Tyler Green discusses Watkins and the impact of his photographs. Green is author of Carleton Watkins: Making the West American and host of the podcast Modern Art Notes.

Although 19th century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron did not pick up her first camera until the age of 49, the artistically composed and printed images she made during her short career were both groundbreaking for their time and an inspiration to artists long after her death. In this episode, Getty photography curator Karen Hellman discusses three biographies of Cameron: one by her grandniece Virginia Woolf, one by art critic Roger Fry, and one by Cameron herself. These biographies were rec...

When Arthur Drexler retired in 1986 from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, he was the longest-serving curator and department head in the history of the Museum, a distinction he holds to this day. Hired in 1951 by Philip Johnson, the first director of the Museum’s groundbreaking Department of Architecture and Design, Drexler promoted a wide range of architects and saw great changes to architectural theory and practice during his thirty-five-year tenure. In this episode, historian Thomas Hines d...

Contemporary artist Tacita Dean works in many mediums to create a varied and compelling body of work, from collections of four-leaf clovers to chalk drawings to filmed portraits of artists. In 2018, a wide array of these works was on view during three simultaneous exhibitions in London: one at the National Portrait Gallery, one at the National Gallery, and one at the Royal Academy of Arts. Taking those exhibitions as a starting point, in this episode Dean discusses her working methods, her appro...

Jackson Pollock’s Mural (1943) is a monumental eight-by-twenty foot work that marks a turning point in the artist’s career and in the course of American art. In 2012, Mural traveled to the Getty for conservation, cleaning, and study, which revealed groundbreaking information about the work and its creator. In the first half of a two-part conversation, Laura Rivers and Yvonne Szafran, conservators at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Alan Phenix and Tom Learner, scientists at the Getty Conservation Insti...

Between 1910 and 1915, Russian painters and poets invented an experimental language called zaum, which emphasizes sound and is characterized by indeterminacy in meaning. These artists used zaum to create handmade artists’ books that are meant to be read, seen, and heard. Nancy Perloff, author of Explodity: Sound, Image, and Word in Russian Futurist Book Art, takes us to the archives at the Getty Research Institute to examine two fascinating zaum futurist books and to discuss a number of the visu...

In this episode, curator Scott Allan discusses a biography of Édouard Manet written by author and art critic Émile Zola. Édouard Manet was controversial during his lifetime, and the account discussed here, written by a critic and novelist he knew well, provides insight into his life and his art. This biography was published last year in a short book that is part of the Getty Publications Lives of the Artists series. During the month of January, we are rereleasing some of our most popular episode...