Grant Period: October 2010–May 2011

With support from ARTstor, the Getty Research Institute digitized 1,500 photographs of 20th-century artists by Alexander Liberman and will soon digitize 6,500 photographs of modern Southern Californian architecture by Julius Shulman. Free licensing of higher-resolution versions of these images will also soon be available through ARTstor.

For over 60 years, Shulman steadily created one of the most comprehensive visual chronologies of modern architecture and the development of the Los Angeles region. The collection in ARTstor has been selected from Series I and Series II of the Julius Shulman photography archive and features photographs of buildings designed by architects such as Gregory Ain, J. R. Davidson, Charles and Ray Eames, Craig Ellwood, Pierre Koenig, John Lautner, Richard J. Neutra, Eero Saarinen, R. M. Schindler, and Raphael Soriano.

A painter, sculptor, photographer, and graphic designer, Alexander Liberman served as art director for Vogue magazine and editorial director of Condé Nast Publications from 1962 to 1994. His archive includes photographs he took of more than 240 European and American artists, including Georges Braque, Paul Cézanne, Salvador Dalí, Willem de Kooning, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Wassily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse, Barnett Newman, Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, and Mark Rothko. Produced between 1925 and 1998, Liberman's portraits captured artists at work or in their studios, many documenting works in progress or finished works of art. This project will digitize highlights from Series I.A., Artists and Personalities, of the Alexander Liberman photography archive.