Building the Getty Collection: A Decade of Acquisitions (panel discussion)

Date: Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Time: 7:00 p.m.
Location: Getty Center, Harold M. Williams Auditorium
Admission: Free; reservations required.

Three of the J. Paul Getty Museum's senior curators—Lee Hendrix of the Department of Drawings, Thomas Kren of the Department of Manuscripts, and Weston Naef of the Department of Photographs—describe their collecting philosophy and introduce some of the collection's treasures at this panel discussion moderated by Museum director Michael Brand.

The curators present a handful of spectacular objects that have joined the collection over the last 10 years and reveal how they managed to find and successfully purchase these fascinating, beautiful, and significant works:

• Lee Hendrix presents The Early Life of Taddeo series, a late 16th-century cycle of drawings depicting the rags-to-riches story of a young Renaissance artist. The drawing from this series shown at right is currenly on view in Ten Years of Drawings: What, How, and Why.
• Thomas Kren discusses the Stammheim Missal, an eye-popping illuminated manuscript made at a German monastery in the 1170s. Two illuminations from the Stammheim Missal are on view in Rare Finds: Ten Years of Collecting Manuscripts.
• Weston Naef reflects on David Hockney's Pearblossom Highway and a group of mid-19th-century daguerreotypes by photography pioneer Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey.

About the Drawings, Manuscripts, and Photographs Collections
J. Paul Getty collected primarily antiquties, paintings, and French decorative arts. In 1981, the Museum began to buy drawings spanning European art from the Renaissance to the end of the 1800s, with particular focus on Italian, Dutch and Flemish, and French drawings. In 1983, the purchase of the Ludwig collection of 144 illuminated manuscripts—the world's most important group of medieval and Renaissance books and leaves still in private hands—formed the heart of a collection that has grown into one of the Getty's treasures. And in 1984, the Department of Photographs was born with the acquisition of several exceptional private collections. The collection spans the entire history of photography from the 1840s to today.

 Video: Get to know the Museum's curators and collection in the Getty Center orientation video.



How to Get Here
The Getty Center is located at 1200 Getty Center Drive in Los Angeles, California, approximately 12 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. See Hours, Directions, Parking for maps and driving directions.