We’ve just made it easier to find research resources in the collection of the Research Library at the Getty Research Institute, one of the world’s largest art libraries.

Last week, we launched a restyled and updated interface for the online catalog of the library’s holdings, which include over one million books, periodicals, and auction catalogs, along with extensive special collections and about two million photographs of art and architecture. The Research Library is open to qualified researchers, and an increasing volume of our materials is being digitized and made available online.

By updating the aesthetics and usability of the site, we hope that any seeker—from experienced scholar of art history to casual visitor—will be able to more easily find relevant resources from the GRI’s vast collections.

The interface now matches the look and feel of the Getty website. It offers easier navigation, easier-to-use basic and advanced searching, and easier-to-scan search results, including options to print, export, and email all or selected records for sharing or personal use. To better support researchers, bibliographic citations can now be exported in RIS format for use with software such as EndNote® or Zotero.

Search results pages, like the one shown below, now include object-type icons to help you readily identify books, periodicals, electronic resources, archives/manuscripts, sound recordings, videos, maps, and other materials.

A simple click on any title link in the search results takes you to a detailed view with complete information on that item.

Two features of note:

• Book covers from Google Books display where available, and “About This Book” links let you preview them in Google Books.
• Persistent links (web addresses that remain unchanged over time) can be used for citing, sharing, and bookmarking items of interest.

To search the library catalog, visit library.getty.edu.

The GRI Library Catalog, which currently uses ExLibris Voyager® software, will continue to be improved as we plan and implement a transition to ExLibris Primo®. Primo will offer a single interface for discovery/access to an integrated set of GRI resources, including books, journals, finding aids, print and electronic articles, digital objects, and other types of resources, with search features such as “did you mean” and more intuitive navigation. Primo will bring the design of the GRI’s web offerings more in line with popular site-search tools like those on Amazon.com.

Feedback and suggestions on the new Research Library Catalog interface can be submitted by clicking on “Contact the GRI” at the bottom of any page.

We’ve also made improvements to the look and functionality of our venerable Photo Study Collection (PSC) database. The Photo Study Collection, housed on-site, contains about two million printed photographs that provide both supplementary and original pictorial research for the study of fine arts from antiquity to the modern period. Over 312,000 of the study photographs are represented by descriptive records in the database; about 4,300 records are also accompanied by images.

Later this year, when the Research Institute makes about 60,000 images from Max Hutzel’s Foto Arte Minore available as a digital collection, PSC users will be able to search the Hutzel collection through PSC and view the images.

The interface makes it easier to identify and select subject areas and selected intact archives through new “Limit by Collection” checkboxes.  You can search a single collection, multiple collections, or all of the collections at once simply by checking the appropriate boxes. A brand-new features lets you view results in PDF format and print, save, or email those results.

 
Tags: art history, GRI, library catalog, Photo Study Collection, photographs, Research Library, scholarship, technology, Voyager

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Artist Larry Bell creates sculptures that play with optical effects, light, and perception. He opened his studio and shared creative insights into his creative process last January 22 as part of “In Studio,” a program we in the Museum’s Education Department organized featuring six artists whose work was included in the exhibition Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents. The following questions grew out of that visit.

How are you different as an artist now than you were in the ‘60s and ‘70s?

I’m a lot older, is the main difference!

Your 2002 work Time Machine [pictured below] is enthralling. Two participants sit facing each other, separated by a large piece of coated glass. When both people adjust to the right location, their faces are transposed. How does the experience that this sculpture fosters relate to your larger body of work?

It’s an interesting tool to improvise an installation with. It controls the viewer’s attention.

Course participants explore Larry Bell's sculpture Time Machine in the artist's studio, January 22, 2012

During our studio visit, you said that when you’re making art, how you’re feeling takes precedence over the visual composition. What do you hope the viewer feels in the presence of your work?
I try to make things I have not seen before, and I would hope viewers respond accordingly, but I have no control of that.

What’s a question you never get asked, but wish you would?

“Why do you do this?” The answer is that I’m addicted to doing it. I do not know how to do anything else.

Larry Bell discusses his work with course participants

 
Tags: contemporary art, Larry Bell, Pacific Standard Time, PST, PSTinLA

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Do artworks have an inner life? You might think so when you visit a new exhibition opening today at the Getty Center. The Life of Art: Context, Collecting, and Display presents the life stories of four objects made to serve beauty and function, offering you the chance to examine them closely to understand how they were made, how they’ve been used, and what’s happened to them over time.

Today this silver fountain is a museum object, but 300 years ago it did dirty work washing used tableware. Mounted on a plexiglass panel to reveal its back, a gilt-bronze wall light reveals clues about its past: breaks and repairs, its time in the rooms of a certain French queen, and what it must have been like to  put its 14 pieces together (take stem A, now insert panel B…no wait…).

Interactive features on iPads in the galleries, as well as online and in a forthcoming free iPad app, offer a touchable tour with more secrets about each object, encouraging you to explore in greater depth.

The four pieces are presented under dramatic lighting and at unexpected angles (see the photos above, taken from a motorized lift by one of our intrepid preparators)—very different from the more traditional display in the galleries. They’re also placed at a much lower height than usual, so you can pull up a chair and—is chat the right word? I think it is.

 
Tags: exhibition design, French art, furniture, gallery design, interactive features, iPad, porcelain

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The Research Library at the Getty Research Institute has recently finished digitizing historic catalogs of the library of Łańcut Castle in Podkarpackie, Poland, and making them available to the U.S. Consul General in Krakow and the director of the Łańcut Castle Museum.

Page from Catalogue de la bibliothèque à Lancut de Son Excellence Monsieur le comte Alfrede (sic) Potocki (1832). The Getty Research Institute, 910146B

The digitization is part of the Research Institute’s ongoing work to make items from our library’s holdings freely accessible online. The two Łańcut catalogs—which include one compiled in Latin in 1757 listing some 800 titles, and a second written in French in 1832 in 1832 inventorying approximately 1,800 prints and 7,500 books—are available to all for free download on the Internet Archive, where they join over 8,700 other books we’ve digitized since 2008.

Richinda Brim of the Getty Research Institute works with scanning equipment used to digitize the inventories. Shown here under glass is the 1832 catalog.

Opening page from Catalogus bibliothecae Lancutensis, Stanislai principis Lubomirski (1757). The Getty Research Institute, 910146A

Łańcut Castle, now a museum, dates back to the 17th century, and the buildings, interiors, and library remain largely intact. In 1944 the surviving heir to the castle took the catalogs with him when he fled in advance of the Russian Army. Later they were purchased by the Getty Research Institute, and we now hold them in our Research Library. The museum has no early catalogs of its collections and is thrilled to locate them and receive digitized copies.

This week Lee A. Feinstein, U.S. ambassador to Poland, will visit Łańcut Castle Museum and present beautifully printed facsimiles of the catalogs created using the hi-res digital scans to Wit Karol Wojtowicz, director of the Museum. We’re delighted to assist in this project, which U.S. Consul General Allen Greenberg described as a great example of the friendship between the people of the United States and Poland.

Łańcut Castle today. Photo: Lestat (Jan Mehlich) / Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5

 
Tags: digital publishing, Getty Research Institute collection, Lancut Castle, Poland, Research Library

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Vija Celmins's 1966 painting Freeway is dramatically spotlit in Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents at the Getty Center. (Collection of Harold Cook, Ph.D. © Vija Celmins)

As you move through Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A.: Painting and Sculpture, closing this Sunday, the colors of the walls or the unusual angles of the wall panels might not be the first thing you notice. But Museum designers have plotted your journey through the galleries as meticulously as the curators have selected the artworks that populate the space.

To follow up on the walkthrough of the artworks in Crosscurrents we posted when the show opened, here’s a second, farewell tour—through design eyes.

When crafting an exhibition, designers begin with a long list of considerations: How should the space flow? What’s the best light, and the best viewing distance, for each piece? What colors and type express the personality of the show? After many discussions and plans comes a detailed foam-core mockup hung with tiny artworks—all to scale—so the team can scrutinize the smallest detail.

Foam-core mockup of the assemblage gallery featuring scale replicas of every artwork on display

I wanted to know how Getty Museum designers Emily Morishita and Irma Ramirez approached Crosscurrents and its varied visual feast, which features hard-edge paintings side by side with large-scale ceramics, radical assemblages just around the corner from resin orbs and Pop canvases.

The answer? Understatement. “We knew we wanted to make a modern, white-walled space because we wanted a minimal look,” Emily told me. “We wanted this to be a blank canvas.”

The look may be minimal, but the design is full of thoughtful details. Setting the stage is a title wall featuring vintage photos of L.A.’s iconic freeways. John Mason’s wall-sized ceramic beckons you into the first gallery, a bright white expanse that’s the perfect foil for intensely colorful paintings and ceramics. Tall text panels jut out of corners at an angle; each panel has a few thematic words, marked in bold—a parallel to the punctuated moments of L.A. art on view in the show.

Title wall of Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents as installed (above), and as crafted in foam-core and cardboard during the design process (above)

The next gallery is the opposite: it’s intimate, dimmer. Small sculptures and assemblages hang close together as in a salon. The walls are a warm tan. The labels for each work are gathered together in spaces off to the side so they don’t intrude into the experience.

From there, you turn into a dark passageway that transports you back to postwar L.A. of the ’60s and ’70s. Louis Hock’s cinemural Southern California loops images of urban life and the ocean lapping against the sand, while a Julius Shulman photomural lets you hover above the glittering lights of Hollywood. You’re invited to reflect, take a breather before absorbing more.

The space provides a thematic transition into the next chunk of the exhibition, which explores how California’s industrial, surf, and car cultures influenced the art made here. This gallery has dramatically spotlit pieces featuring clouds and freeways, as well as a sculpture that, well, leans. Emily and Irma allowed plenty of room around this resin plank and made sure there’s a long sight line so you can spot it—and avoid knocking against it—as you walk through the small gallery.

Presiding over this space is the larger-than-life figure of Walter Hopps, holding court on his own circular island. Look up at the mirrored oculus, and you can see yourself and the art-world impresario side by side.

This smaller space gives way to a dramatic gallery with large, colorful paintings blanketing the white walls, including the exhibition’s signature piece, Ruscha’s Standard Station. Overhead, louvers are left open—for conservation reasons, during the first and last weeks of the exhibition only—to allow the great big L.A. paintings to appear under their hometown light. A seating station with iPads features oral-history videos about the art you see around you, bringing you into connection with the works through the artists’ eyes.

Irma Ramirez (right) and design manager Merritt Price refine the design for the iPad seating station

The final gallery presents stunning, luminous works. Both lighting and colors are dramatic here; for example, Mary Corse’s Untitled (White Light Grid Series-V) seems to glow from within thanks to a trio of spotlights hung on a brace from the ceiling.

For both the designers and the curators, putting huge, astonishing works at the end of the trip was intentional, just like every inch of every room. “It’s like a finale,” Emily said.

 
Tags: color, Crosscurrents, exhibition design, gallery design, interior design, Pacific Standard Time, PST, PSTinLA

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