Episodes

In Season 2 of Getty's podcast series Recording Artists, titled Intimate Addresses, each episode unpacks one letter from one artist, including Marcel Duchamp, Frida Kahlo, M. C. Richards, Benjamin Patterson, Nam June Paik, and Meret Oppenheim. Anna Deavere Smith reads the letters while our host, poet Tess Taylor, speaks with modern-day creators and historians to explore the artists’ lives. The season launches September 26, 2023. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app or learn more on our website...

Giorgio Vasari’s book Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects from Cimabue to Our Times, first published in 1550, is widely considered to be the ideological foundation of the discipline of art history. In this episode, senior curator of paintings Davide Gasparotto discusses the structure and history of Vasari’s Lives and explores three biographies in particular—those of Giovanni Bellini, Raphael, and Michelangelo. These texts have recently been republished as individual b...

The husband and wife team Charles and Ray Eames produced some of the most iconic designs of the mid-twentieth century. This episode engages with a wide range of topics, from Charles and Ray’s training and inspiration, to their collaborative design process, to the challenges of preserving and conserving modern architecture. Recorded at the Eames’ home and studio in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, this episode brings together in conversation Eames Demetrios, the grandson of Char...

How do we understand the seemingly senseless destruction of monuments during World War I? How does art history dovetail with military history? In this episode, Thomas Gaehtgens’ explores these questions through the lens of Reims Cathedral. He traces the history and symbolism of this iconic gothic building through the war and after, investigating the roles of culture, scholarship, and media in shaping our understanding of WWI and its legacy. Gaehtgens is Director Emeritus of the Getty Research In...

Tom Weiss, a specialist on humanitarian intervention and the United Nations, believes we are at a watershed moment for international cooperation on the protection of cultural heritage. In this episode, Weiss uses the ongoing civil war in Syria as a springboard to address the preservation of monuments and cultural heritage during times of humanitarian crisis and armed conflict. He traces the evolution of thinking and action on this issue, considering the role of the UN, useful legal frameworks, a...

The early Baroque artist Caravaggio painted bold compositions with dramatic lighting that emphasized the physical and emotional humanity of his subjects. In this episode, we listen as two curators, Davide Gasparotto and Keith Christiansen, visit the Getty Museum’s exhibition "Caravaggio: Masterpieces from the Galleria Borghese" to talk about the paintings on view. Gasparotto is senior curator of paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum and Christiansen is the John Pope-Hennessy Chairman of the Depa...

Venetian Renaissance painter Giovanni Bellini is widely considered one of the greatest Italian artists of all time. His landscapes are imbued with allegory and a reverence for nature. In this episode, we listen as two curators, Davide Gasparotto and Keith Christiansen, visit the Getty Museum’s exhibition Giovanni Bellini: Landscapes of Faith in Renaissance Venice to talk about a selection of paintings on view. Gasparotto is senior curator of paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum and Christiansen...

To say that Swiss-born artist, art historian, and curator Harald Szeemann was an obsessive collector might be putting it mildly. Szeemann’s personal archive and research library, which he referred to as the “Museum of Obsessions,” spans over five decades and amounts to thousands of linear feet. In this episode, we hear from the Getty Research Institute’s Glenn Phillips, Doris Chon, and Pietro Rigolo about the work and archive of this influential curator.

Egyptian mummy portraits are among the oldest paintings that have survived from the ancient world. Incorporated with the wrappings of mummies, these strikingly realistic portraits of the deceased reflect a blending of the artistic style of Greco-Roman culture with Egyptian funerary traditions. We visit the galleries of the Getty Villa with associate conservator Marie Svoboda to learn about a project that will bring greater understanding to these remarkable portraits and the era of ancient Egypt.

The Getty Center is a campus that features modernist buildings, beautiful gardens, open spaces, and panoramic views of Los Angeles. Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic at the Los Angeles Times, discusses the relationship between Richard Meier’s unique design and the architectural tradition of LA. This is the final episode of Getty at Twenty, a three-part series that looks at the Getty Center on the twentieth anniversary of its opening.

Stephen Rountree served as the director of the Getty building program, working closely with architect Richard Meier, Getty staff and committees, and neighborhood councils during the construction of the center. In this episode, Rountree talks about the challenges he and his colleagues faced throughout the thirteen-year process. This is the second episode of Getty at Twenty, a three-part series that looks at the Getty Center on the twentieth anniversary of its opening.

Included in Rembrandt’s prolific body of work is a series of twenty-five drawings inspired by paintings created by Mughal artists in India. How did Rembrandt come across Mughal images? Why did he make these drawings? These questions are at the heart of an upcoming exhibition organized by Getty Museum curator Stephanie Schrader. In this episode, Schrader discusses Rembrandt’s series and what inspired him to draw in a style different from his own. "Rembrandt and the Inspiration of India" opens at ...

Adolph Menzel was a 19th-century pioneer of German realism. His paintings, drawings, and prints capture reality with remarkable truth and atmosphere. In this episode, art historian Werner Busch discusses why there has been so little published about this important artist in English. He also examines the biographical and historical events that shaped Menzel’s work and the course it took. Busch is former professor of art history at Freie Universität Berlin and author of "Adolph Menzel: The Quest fo...

In this episode, an interview with German painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer doesn’t go as planned. But all is not lost. Despite—or perhaps as a consequence of—the disruptions, a candid and thoughtful conversation ensues. Kiefer’s work confronts controversial issues from recent history, including the power of war and the cycle of destruction and renewal. He is co-recipient of the 2017 J. Paul Getty Medal, an award that honors extraordinary contributions to the practice, understanding, and suppor...

Gold nose adornments, feather paintings, and beaded shell collars. These are some of the objects featured in the Getty’s current exhibition, "Golden Kingdoms: Luxury and Legacy in the Ancient Americas," which traces the development of luxury arts in the Americas from antiquity to the arrival of the Europeans in the sixteenth century. We visit the galleries with co-curators Joanne Pillsbury, Timothy Potts, and Kim Richter who discuss how the study of objects made of gold, jade, shell, feathers, a...

In September 2017 the Getty launched Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, a regional exploration of Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles. In a three-part series, we hear about the development of one of the Getty exhibitions that is part of this initiative, "Making Art Concrete: Works from Argentina and Brazil in the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros." The exhibition is now open! In this final conversation, we meet the curatorial and conservation teams in the galleries to visit...

The year 2017 marks the 60th anniversary of the Dodgers’ move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, and the 55th anniversary of the opening of Dodger Stadium. Jerald Podair, author of "City of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles," tells the story of the controversial construction of this famed stadium and its impact on the surrounding landscape. Podair is professor of history and the Robert S. French Professor of American Studies at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin.

Walter Hopps was a legendary curator of contemporary art who revolutionized the museum realm with radical exhibitions and an enduring support for contemporary art and artists. Published earlier this year, "The Dream Colony: A Life in Art," is an autobiographical account of Hopps’s life, compiled by Anne Doran, an arts writer, and edited by Deborah Treisman, fiction editor of "The New Yorker." The book includes an introduction by Ed Ruscha, who knew Hopps for many years. The authors visited the G...

In the galleries of the Getty Museum are two works of art with an interesting connection. The first, a magnificent cabinet with intricate stone inlay, gilded statuettes, and an array of compartments and hidden drawers. The second, a commanding portrait bust made of marble. At almost six feet tall, the Borghese-Windsor Cabinet, as it’s called, was originally commissioned for Pope Paul V, who is the subject of the marble portrait bust by the renowned sculptor, Gian Lorenzo Bernini. We visit the ga...

The close relationships between artists and authors in 19th-century France is evidenced in the illustrious novels of Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Marcel Proust, J. K. Huysmans, and Guy de Maupassant. These novelists wrote about painting, created painters as characters, and physically described characters in the vein of their painter-friends. Anka Muhlstein, author of "The Pen and The Brush: How Passion for Art Shaped Nineteenth-Century French Novels," discusses how the intimate exchange between...

Although Jackson Pollock’s iconic "Mural" (1943) may appear to have been swiftly executed, close examination of the paint and archival photographs reveals otherwise. In the second 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 Institute, and Andrew Perchuk, deputy director at the Getty Research Institute, focus on how conservation and scientific analysis enhance our art ...

Jackson Pollock’s "Mural" (1943) is a monumental eight-by-twenty foot work that marks a turning point in the artist’s career and 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 Inst...

At age eighteen, Chris Killip saw an image by Henri Cartier-Bresson and decided to become a photographer. Killip, who grew up on the Isle of Man, documents social landscapes and is known for a series of powerful images of struggling industrial communities in North East England. We hear from Killip about his past working as an assistant to advertising photographer Adrian Flowers, his experience rediscovering images from work made decades ago, and his love for black-and-white photographs. Killip i...

While working in Chandigarh, Le Corbusier also developed projects in Ahmedabad, the former capital of Gujarat, 740 miles southeast of Chandigarh. In the second of a two-part series on modern architecture in India, we hear from B. V. Doshi, Le Corbusier’s “man on the job” for his projects in Ahmedabad. Doshi shares his experiences as a young architect working with Le Corbusier in Paris and recounts various projects he managed in Ahmedabad and Chandigarh.