Featuring 30 sheets from the Museum’s European drawings collection by Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, J.M.W. Turner, and more, the exhibition is on view at the Getty Center October 15, 2024 through January 19, 2025.
For centuries, artists have wrestled with the challenge of representing effects of light. The exhibition will address this challenge while investigating the union of paper and light: looking at both radiant light captured on paper and the luminous translucency paper can provide.
The exhibition’s first section, Highlights and Reserves, features techniques artists employed to create the effect of light. Some artists applied bright lead-white heightening, while others left parts of the paper blank, or “reserved.” The latter technique can be seen in The Battle of the Bones by Odilon Redon, a recent acquisition that features two skeletons battling to the “death.” To create his macabre scene, Redon left parts of the paper blank for the white bones, blackening the rest of the sheet with charcoal for the dark setting. Another example is Still Life with Blue Pot by Paul Cézanne, a watercolor still life in which the artist simply used the pale tone of the paper to illustrate the white cloth and jug in the scene, as well as light glancing off the sheen of the apples. These contrast dramatically with vibrant hues of red, yellow, and blue.
Some artists used erasers or other materials to remove media and regain the lighter tone of paper. For his watercolor drawing Longships Lighthouse, Land’s End, J.M.W. Turner used a rag to reveal the pale tone of the paper and added touches of white pigment to emphasize plumes of spray in the scene. Turner is reputed to have kept one of his thumbnails longer to scratch out highlights.
The next section, Through Paper: Using Translucency, presents how artists used the translucent properties of paper. Paper often played a huge role in the creative process, in the form of tracing paper or serving as a route to specific effects, such as backlighting. Figures Walking in a Parkland, an extraordinary 12-foot-long watercolor by Louis Carrogis de Carmontelle, was originally displayed in front of a window and lit by allowing daylight to shine through. Carmontelle strategically used opaque watercolor in the leaves of the trees, a technique that made his scene look dark and strange without backlighting. The watercolor will be on display, lit from behind as originally intended, and fully unrolled.
In the third section, Life Class: Three Artists Draw a Model, three sketches of a model recently identified as Père Bainville will be on display. Presented side-by-side, the drawings showcase the similarities and differences in the ways artists rendered form. While the examples by Émile-Jules Pichot and an unknown French artist are very similar, the third, by Seurat, features intense removal of charcoal in the model’s ear, collarbone, and wrist bone, resulting in a stronger depiction of light and shade.
“We anticipate visitors will be fascinated by the ways artists have used paper to achieve spectacular effects of light,” says Julian Brooks, senior curator of drawings at the Getty Museum. “The exhibition presents some of the innovative techniques artists have explored for centuries—and still use today—to capture the illusion of light on paper.”
The exhibition will also include works recently acquired by Getty and on display for the first time, including Study of a Boy Reading by Joseph Wright of Derby, At Rest after the Bath by Degas, The Battle of the Bones by Odilon Redon, and Spectators Hiding behind a Barricade by Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri).
Paper and Light was curated by Julian Brooks, senior curator of drawings at the Getty Museum.
This exhibition is part of PST ART, a Getty initiative presenting over 70 exhibitions at institutions across Southern California tied to the theme Art & Science Collide. PST ART is presented by Getty. Lead partners are Bank of America, Alicia Miñana & Rob Lovelace, Getty Patron Program. The principal partner is Simons Foundation. For more information about PST ART: Art & Science Collide, please visit: pst.art