Los Angeles, California's J. Paul Getty Museum recently announced the addition of four new acquisitions to its collections.
The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California revealed on September 24, 2007 substantial acquisitions to its Paintings, Drawings and Photography Collections.
Baroque master Claude Lorrain (1604-1682) painted the effects of light and atmosphere in his works. Coast View with the Abduction of Europa (1645) recounts how the Roman god Jupiter, in the form of a bull, whisked the beautiful Europa, princess of Tyre, away to the island of Crete. Lorrain's lyrical painting incorporates well-known architectural examples from the port city. The artist achieved the luminous quality of this highly organized "ideal" landscape by layering partially transparent layers of oil paint onto the canvas.
While in Tahiti, French Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) developed his technique of transfer drawing. This involved making images with graphite and blue crayon on a sheet of paper placed on top of an inked one. Both sides of the upper sheet were visible, with the reverse side regarded as the finished product. Eve (The Nightmare) (ca. 1899-1900) is Gauguin's portrait of the first woman fallen from grace in the biblical Book of Genesis. In his monumental composition, Eve is depicted as a nude Polynesian woman concealing her genitalia, indicating her sense of shame.
Felice Beato (1825-d. probably 1908) was a prolific British photographer. In addition to ethnographic portraits, his Asian and Near Eastern images captured war and social unrest from Japan to Palestine. He grew to understand photography's value for propaganda's sake. The Getty Museum is fortunate to have acquired more than 834 of Beato's poignant pictures.
Octopus (2006) by Tim Hawkinson (b. 1960) is a photographic collage that rearranges the artist's fingers, hands and lips into an animal shape whose tentacles represent the beast's alluring, powerful and destructive nature. This unconventional portrait of self also suggests the subject's ability to reconfigure and transform itself.
