IN FOCUS | Making a Scene at the Getty Center

Untitled (Michael and Christopher Meatyard), Ralph Eugene Meatyard, 1966

Featuring works by Lewis Carroll, Joel-Peter Witkin, Man Ray, Julia Margaret Cameron, Eileen Cowin, Roger Fenton and many others from the permanent collection.

The photographs in this exhibition make no pretense about presenting the world as it exists; instead, they are the productions of directors and actors who rely on stagecraft and occasional darkroom trickery to tell stories. Spanning photography's history and expressing a range of sentiments, the images in this exhibition are inspired by art history, literature, religion, and mainstream media.

Seated Odalisque, Roger Fenton, 1858.

Photo-Transformation, Lucas Samaras, 1976.

A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there -- even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity.

-Robert Dosineau

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Reserve Now for Kehinde Wiley at The Getty

Date: Thursday, April 2, 2009
Time: 7:00 p.m.
Location: Getty Center, Harold M. Williams Auditorium
Admission: Free; reservations required. Call (310) 440-7300 or use the "Make Reservation" button below.



Painter Kehinde Wiley, one of the foremost young artists on the world stage, reveals the artistic traditions that inform his work and discusses his current project creating monumental portraits of young black men in world cities from Mumbai to Rio de Janeiro.

About Kehinde Wiley
Kehinde Wiley hot-wires the studied attitudes and dramatic backdrops of Old Master portraits with a Day-Glo palette and a hip-hop sensibility, creating a radical artistic mash-up that has been praised as hip, provocative, and technically brilliant. By asking his subjects to assume poses found in historical paintings and sculpture, he transforms ordinary urban men into saints, kings, even Christ. Wiley blurs the boundaries between traditional and contemporary, self-consciously celebrating and subverting the propaganda of self-aggrandisement in European art.

See Kehinde Wiley's Paintings
A show of Kehinde Wiley's recent work is on view April 4–May 30, 2009, at the Roberts and Tilton Gallery in Culver City.

German Manuscript Illumination @ The Getty

Detail of Job derided by his Wife, German, Cologne, Circa 1450

German and Central European Manuscript Illumination
February 24–May 24, 2009 @ The Getty Center

The tradition of book painting thrived in Germany and Central Europe for nearly a millennium, enduring even after the invention of printing in the 1400s. This exhibition features manuscripts and paintings made from Cologne to Prague that reveal the richness of Central European book art. It also features a dramatic painting by Albrecht Altdorfer newly conserved at the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Learn more about this exhibition.

See all events related to this exhibition.