LOS ANGELES, CA – To celebrate the long-awaited April 18 opening of the newly reinstalled galleries for its antiques collection at the Getty Villa, an elegant grand reception was held the day before on the Villa grounds for more than 700 guests . It was one of the signature events of Los Angeles’ spring cultural season.
“The reinstallation of the Villa presents the antiquities collections in a historical sequence that allows visitors to follow the evolution of Greek and Roman art over some 6,000 years,” said Timothy Potts, director of the Getty Museum. The new facility features a 3,000 square foot increase in gallery space through the repurposing of underutilized areas. The reinstallation also brought an improved lighting system, display cases for many items as well as digital tools to facilitate close inspection of coins, gemstones and other small items. “I am particularly pleased that the planning process for this reinstallation has identified stored items that may be on display after many years, or in some cases for the very first time,” Potts added.
One such object is a group of recently preserved first-century frescoes from the Villa of Numerius Popidius Florus at Boscoreale, near Pompeii, which is now in a dedicated gallery. One of the highlights of the resettlement is a newly renovated gallery on the first floor, dedicated to the era of Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic world (336-30 BC). The centerpiece is La Jeunesse Victorieuse (“Getty Bronze”) which can be better appreciated now in the company of other objects of the same style and period, including a marble head of Alexander the Great and luxurious silver vessels and gold jewelry. The statue of Hercules, displayed in a grandiose style, was one of J. Paul Getty’s most prized possessions and was a great motivation for Getty to build a museum in the style of an ancient Roman villa. The sculpture was discovered in 1790 near the villa of the Roman Emperor Hadrian. The statue of Leda and the Swan which is displayed next to the statue of Hercules shows the God Jupiter who disguised himself as a swan in order to seduce Leda the mortal queen of Sparta. Their legendary affair gave birth to Helene, whose kidnapping by Paris led to the Trojan War. It is the Roman version of an earlier Greek statue of Leda and was discovered in 1775 on the Palatine Hill in Rome. The new exhibition “Plato in LA: Contemporary Artists’ Visions” is highly imaginative and a conceptual “marriage” of the Greek philosopher’s fundamental principles and ideas with the city of Los Angeles as a laboratory for existential and institutional experimentation. Some of today’s most famous artists, such as Paul Chan, Rachel Harrison, Jeff Koons, Paul McCarthy, Adrian Piper and Michelangelo Pistoletto, have created original works of art just for this exhibition which is a collection of sculptures, paintings, drawings and large-scale installations. .
Highlight of the Plato exhibition
The Museum of Modern Art in New York has loaned the most important of Mike Kelley’s Plato Cave drawings to the Plato exhibition. One of the highlights of the Plato exhibit is an original artwork created by Koons, whose lifetime achievement is estimated to be worth nearly $1 billion. His aluminum “Play-Doh” sculpture is meant to resemble a pile of children’s toys of the same name. It’s created from giant pieces of painted aluminum that aren’t held together with adhesive, but each piece fits together perfectly. Because the cracks had to be made by hand and eye, a tedious and detailed process, it took Koons 20 years.
The Palmyra exhibit features some of the city’s most unique artwork and pays homage to the ancient city of Palmyra, which was located in an oasis in the Syrian desert and flourished between the first and third centuries. Palmyra was at the crossroads of trade routes between the Roman and Persian empires and the citizens of Palmyra embellished their tombs with distinctive funerary portraits. Although the eastern lands conquered by Alexander the Great were gradually reduced to Syria, the influence of Greek art remained strong in countries such as Mesopotamia, Persia, Pakistan and Palmyra. The Roman Empire succeeded the reign of Alexander and the influence of Roman art is evident in the monuments of Palmyra. The city of Palmyra was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980, but buildings and artifacts that had survived hundreds of years were tragically deliberately destroyed during the recent Syrian civil war. war. However, we are fortunate that well-preserved photographs of the site taken in 1864 by Louis Vignes, a French naval officer trained by the famous photographer Charles Nègre, have survived and constitute the first photographic record of Roman ruins. The collection was recently acquired by the Getty Research Institute and is on display for the first time in the exhibition. Another proud acquisition of the J. Paul Getty Museum that will be on display at the Villa exhibition is the bronze Etruscan sconce of the sun god Usil. The bronze sconce which probably decorated an Etruscan chariot or funerary cart is “of exceptional quality, representing the apogee of an artistic milieu in which Greek and Italic aesthetics merged to create a typically Etruscan style”, a Potts said. The appliqué depicts the solar deity Usil, the equivalent of the Greek god Helios or the Roman god Sol, and is part of a selection of bronze statuettes and reliefs that are a particular strength of the Getty’s collection of Etruscan art. Prominently featured is Athenian pottery, a collection of Greek works from southern Italy and Sicily that includes the astonishing terracotta group Orpheus and the Sirens. The exhibition will run until September 3.
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Photo source: Wikimedia Commons. Copyright : Bobak Ha’Eri License: CC-BY-SA
Source: thenationalherald.com