The publication of this inaugural open-access issue of the
Getty Research Journal signals a vitally important
shift in the publication’s fifteen-year history. Founded in
2009 by Getty Research Institute (GRI) director Thomas
Gaehtgens to publish original research emerging from the
collections and activities of the GRI, J. Paul Getty Museum,
Getty Foundation, and Getty Conservation Institute, the
Getty Research Journal was offered in print with a
digital complement. The latter was initially available as a
download from the GRI’s website. Digital editions of entire
issues were later accessible via JSTOR. Since 2015, the
journal has been available in both print and electronic
formats by subscription through the University of Chicago
Press.
Effective with this issue of spring 2024, the
Getty Research Journal is now published on Quire, the
Getty’s own open-source software, and it is available in web,
PDF, and e-book formats free of charge to readers, without a
subscription. With this historic transformation into a diamond
open-access journal, which furthers the Getty’s commitment to
open content, we endeavor to reach an even more wide-ranging
readership invested in the history of art and visual culture
on a global scale. Concurrent with this expanded access, the
Getty Research Journal also advances scholarship on
cultural objects and practices that exceed the current
parameters of the Getty’s institutional collections and
research initiatives. To facilitate the experience of reading
the journal online, the invited lengths of research articles
as well as shorter notices have decreased. Throughout the
issue, enhanced illustrations take advantage of the
interactivity afforded by Quire’s digital interface.
The present issue features five full-length articles and one
shorter notice that collectively address a dynamic range of
subjects spanning four continents and eleven centuries. In
“Northern Africa or Central Iran? An Investigation into the
Production Place of a Fragmentary Kufic Qur'an at the J. Paul
Getty Museum,” Madhi Sahragard upends the previous
geographical attribution of a ninth-century Kufic Qur'an in
the Getty Museum’s collection through close comparison with
related Qur'anic fragments in an Early Abbasid style that
remained previously inaccessible to scholars outside of Iran.
Beatrice Alai and Peter Kidd offer a comprehensive study of
all known cuttings from a large twelfth-century French Bible
produced by a Carthusian monastery in the orbit of the Grande
Chartreuse; “Cuttings from an Illustrated Twelfth-Century
French Manuscript Bible in Los Angeles and Berlin” includes an
expandable appendix with detailed descriptions of the cuttings
in what the authors propose to be their original sequence.
Keelan Overton’s “Jane Dieulafoy in Varamin: The Emamzadeh
Yahya through a Nineteenth-Century Lens” brings the French
traveler Dieulafoy’s photographic documentation of the famed
Ilkhanid tomb complex in the Iranian city of Varamin into
illuminating dialogue with descriptive accounts produced by
her contemporary, the seasoned Iranian statesman, historian,
and epigrapher Mohammad Hasan Khan Eʿtemad al-Saltaneh. The
instructive wartime encounter between Polish painters
stationed in Baghdad and Iraqi artists during the British
military reoccupation of Iraq in 1941–45 is the subject of
Anneka Lenssen’s provocative essay, “Baghdad Kept on Working:
Painting and Propaganda during the British Occupation of Iraq,
1941–45.” Lenssen’s exploration of modern artmaking under
occupation resonates urgently today when nation-states in
multiple regions of the globe continue to persevere under the
violent threat and fatal reality of imperial expansion. In
“Overthrowing Reality: Photo-Poems in 1980s German Democratic
Republic Samizdat,” Anna Horakova and Isotta Poggi survey the
intermedial character of a selection of rare East German
self-published artists’ books known as samizdat, which
integrate poetry and literary texts with graphic arts such as
printmaking, collage, and especially photography. Julieta
Pestarino’s shorter notice, “The Perpetual Unfolding of
Photographic History: A Previously Unknown Panorama of
Salvador, Bahia, by Rodolpho Lindemann” elucidates a panorama
of an important Brazilian city taken by German-born
photographer Lindemann circa 1880, toward the end of the
colonial period.
The leadoff open-access issue of the
Getty Research Journal could only have been realized
through the countless efforts and tireless contributions of
numerous colleagues at the GRI, Getty Publications, and Getty
Digital, undergirded by the ongoing support of the journal’s
editorial board. Sincere thanks are also due to the numerous
scholars in the field—authors, anonymous reviewers, and expert
advisers—who contributed to this first open-access issue in
myriad ways. As executive editor, I am heartened by this
collaboration and look forward to steering the journal into
newer directions still to come.