Getty Research Journal
Number 1
Edited by Thomas W. Gaehtgens and Katja Zelljadt

The Getty Research Journal is a refereed journal that showcases work by
scholars and staff associated with the Getty Research Institute and the
other programs of the J. Paul Getty Trust. Essays focus on an object or
aspect of the Getty's extensive archival, rare book, and artistic
holdings or bear upon the annual research themes of the Research
Institute or the Getty Villa. The journal also presents a selection of
short, lively pieces about new acquisitions, scholarly activities, and
ongoing research projects at the Getty.

Getty Research Institute
240 pages, 7 x 10 inches
34 color and 62 b/w illustrations
ISBN 978-0-89236-970-6
paper, $50.00
2009

http://www.getty.edu/bookstore/titles/GRJ.html

Foreword
Thomas Gaehtgens

Heterotopia in the Renaissance: Modern Hybrids as Antiques in Bramante,
Cima da Conegliano, and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
Lorenzo Pericolo

A close scrutiny of three different representations of architecture-the
Prevedari print (1481) by Donato Bramante, the Madonna and Child with
Saints Michael and Andrew (ca. 1496-98) by Giovanni Battista Cima da
Conegliano, and the illustration of Artemisia’s tomb in Francesco
Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499)-allows the author to
formulate and develop the concept of “heterotopia” during the
Renaissance. Because Bramante’s, Cima’s, and the Hypnerotomachia’s
depictions of hybrid buildings (composed of ancient and modern elements)
are neither reconstructions of nor elaborations on ancient artifacts,
the author argues that they incarnate a new paradigm of architectural
depictions, one in which antiquity and modernity intersect without
fusing together, bringing about a deliberate effect of estrangement and
misrecognition.

Elements of a Ribera
Charles G. Salas

In 2001, the J. Paul Getty Museum acquired a painting by Jusepe de
Ribera entitled A Philosopher, one of a number of
“beggar-philosopher” pictures done by the Spanish painter in
Naples in the 1630s. Many of these pictures portray a
three-quarter-length male figure wearing tattered clothes and engaged in
some way with a book. Each figure is presumed to represent a particular
ancient philosopher, but which philosopher is not necessarily evident
and was not meant to be evident. However, the Getty painting, which
features an open book with geometrical drawings, provides more clues
than most to the identity of its philosopher, for these drawings are
taken from Euclid’s Elements, implying that the Getty’s philosopher
is Euclid himself. Elaborating on the search for the identity of the
Getty painting, this essay reveals a complex and engaging symbolism that
deepens our understanding of the seventeenth century and the rise of
modern science.

The Indole of Education: The Apologues of Carlo Lodoli
Marc J. Neveu

Carlo Lodoli exists as a footnote in most major books on the history of
modern architecture-typically noted either as an early prophet to
structurally determined functionalism or as a continuation of the
Italian humanist tradition. Few of his writings have survived and his
built work amounts to a couple of windowsills; he did, however, teach
architecture. Central to Lodoli’s pedagogy was a search for indole-the
inherent essence of things, from the nature of truth to the nature of
materials. Lodolian scholarship tends to examine the latter over the
former and, indeed, little has been written on his teaching methods.
This essay seeks to flesh out the nature of Lodoli’s pedagogy through
the apologues he used in his lessons.

Japan as Museum? Encapsulating Change and Loss in
Late-Nineteenth-Century Japan
Chelsea Foxwell

The Meiji period of Japanese history (1868-1912) was one of sweeping
societal change, endorsed under the banner of “progress.” This
modernization was conceived in such a way as to appeal to a Western
audience and to elevate Japan’s status on the world stage. Japanese
art-presented at world’s fairs, in exhibitions, and widely discussed
by critics-played a key role in shaping perceptions of Japan both in the
West and in Japan itself. This article examines viewpoints on Japonisme
and on the notion of Japan as a repository of “traditional” culture.
In a larger sense, the essay considers the ways that voyeurism and an
acute awareness of potential audiences played a role in shaping the
understanding of Japanese art.

October 1912: Understanding Kandinsky’s Art “Indirectly” at Der Sturm
Riccardo Marchi

The scholars who have studied the epoch-making change constituted by
the appearance, in the 1910s, of a kind of painting called “pure,”
“abstract,” and “nonobjective” are legion. But they have not
adequately analyzed and explained the change in the habits of viewing
and judging art that this kind of painting required in order to be
understood and appreciated. This is what the author does in this
article, by focusing on an important episode in the practice, theory,
and reception of abstract painting: Wassily Kandinsky’s 1912 one-man
show at Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm gallery in Berlin.
Through this analysis, the author offers a new way of looking at
Kandinsky’s “pure” painting, one that is very different from both
the form-oriented views of 1960s American high modernist critics, who
saw “pure” painting as a kind of art pour l’art, engaged in a
quest for the specificity of its medium, and from the views of the
scholars who, in opposition to formalist notions of abstraction, keep
insisting on detecting a hidden religious iconography in Kandinsky’s
nonobjective paintings.

“Fabbrica + Treno”: The Visual Poetry of Altered Spaces
Annette Leddy

“Fabbrica + Treno,” a collection of twenty parole-in-libertà held
at the Getty Research Institute, was composed in 1916 by a twenty-year
old Pavian named Angelo Rognoni, never published in its entirety, and
exhibited only twice in 1922. Hand-drawn with unusual delicacy, this
collection is otherwise typical of parole of the World War I period in
its thematics and way of breaking up the page, consistently observing
the futurist convention of “simultaneity.”
Applying a new artistic paradigm, Rognoni identified dramatic changes
in the objective and subjective landscape, which he generally
celebrated. This essay offers a close analysis of these “altered
spaces” of Rognoni’s time and considers how they function for
viewers in the present. In seeking to celebrate the changes brought by
science and technology, Rognoni’s parole preserved the rhythms,
pleasures, and charms of the past, of the vanished moment before such
advances had so deeply impacted modern life.

An Ornamented Inventory of Microcosmic Shifts: Notes on Hans
Hildebrandt’s Book Project “Der Schmuck” (1936-1937)
Spyros Papapetros

An incomplete manuscript by a forgotten art historian on a subject long
neglected. So might a description of Hans Hildebrandt’s “Der
Schmuck” run were it not for the archive that remains, filled with
Hildebrandt’s handwritten notes, sketches of jewelry, clippings from
the pages of illustrated newspapers and magazines, hundreds of
photographic reproductions, and numerous manuscript drafts. Conceived
and developed by a pacifist, modernist scholar with a Jewish wife in
Nazi Germany, this project for a universal history of jewelry and
adornment came to nothing. This article sifts through remnants and
contexts, uncovering new questions and perspectives on the subjects of
adornment, the historiography of the inquiry into it, and the ruptures
of politics and history into matters of art and culture. Caught between
an absolute macrocosmic view that envisioned a world rigidly realigned
by a single Ur-ornament and an opposing microcosmic vision that
reflected the brilliant variety of adornment from cultures around the
world, Hildebrandt’s project remains a fascinating oddity, an
incongruous artifact that forces us to reassess why it remained
incomplete while nevertheless constituting a fitting tribute to the
historiography of decoration.

Morphology in the Studio: Hélio Oiticicia at the Museu Nacional
Irene Small

How does what constitutes a work or a form of art evolve? What could
such an analogy to biological development mean for art historians? This
article addresses such questions, treating the work of Brazilian artist
Hélio Oiticica as a case study in the morphology of art. As functional,
performative, “living” works, his parangolés-a series of layered
capes that participants wore and danced in-represent a critical juncture
within Oiticica’s formal investigations into the question of
“color-structure in space.” Their invention in 1964 is often
cited as an example of the “anti-art” movement that challenged the
role of the traditional museum. Yet the fact that Oiticica developed
both the parangolés and his general system of aesthetic organization
while helping his father classify insects at Brazil’s Museu Nacional
remains unexplored. This essay interprets this setting as formative
rather than coincidental, arguing that ideas of Goethean morphology and
Linnean taxonomy were fundamental to Oiticica’s methods of
categorizing, naming, and developing his own work. By framing the
development of the parangolés as an instance of morphological and
taxonomic evolution, the essay revises our understanding both of
Oiticica as an anti-artist and of the nature of artistic development
itself.

Looking at the Sky in Buenos Aires
Olivier Debroise

Olivier Debroise died suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack, at
the age of fifty-five, in his home in Mexico City on 6 May 2008. He had
left Los Angeles only weeks before, having just finished a residency as
a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute (GRI) in Winter
2007-2008. This text is an edited excerpt of the paper Debroise
presented at the GRI on 18 February 2008. Focusing on a close reading of
a Happening by Argentinean artist Oscar Masotta from 1966, the essay
shows how he constructed a critique of the myth of the Happening from
within one. It also sheds a broader light on the artistic climate of
midcentury Buenos Aires and forms part of an unfinished book project
titled Machines, Spacecrafts, Footsteps, Bombs, and Artistic Change in
the 1960s, which was to chronicle a series of artistic practices in
several Latin American countries at a time when postwar technological
developments in mathematics (particularly cybernetics in its relation to
language), information theory, and satellite communication were
increasingly being used by artists to challenge their current situation
and the role of art in a media-dominated society.

Voluptuous Unease: David Maisel’s Library of Dust
Karen Lang

This essay examines David Maisel’s Library of Dust, one hundred
C-print photographs of copper canisters containing the unclaimed ashes
of mentally ill patients of the Oregon State Hospital. Since the
canisters were subject to repeated flooding over a period of some
fifteen years, the chemical composition of the ashes of each cremated
body has catalyzed its own reaction on the canister’s surface. Death,
the great leveler, here initiates a process of blooming individuality.
Since beauty and duress cannot be told apart in these photographs, they
occasion an aesthetic experience of voluptuous unease. Indeed,
Maisel’s photographs are shot through with a host of uncomfortable
proximities: of the dead and the living; of the canisters’
machine-made uniformity and their individual patterns of corrosion and
efflorescence; of the order and accumulation of the library and the
disorder and ever-molting divisibility of dust. The essay explores the
implications of these proximities, showing that Library of Dust resists
our efforts to fix meaning through language. Moving beyond formalist and
postmodernist approaches to photographic meaning, the essay argues that
what distinguishes photographs, as works of art, lies in the resistance
of the photograph to language.

Acquisitions & Discoveries

Facing East: The Western View of Islam in Nicolas de Nicolay’s
Travels in Turkey
David Brafman

Ut pictura poesis: Pietro Mellini's “Relatione delle pitture migliori
di Casa Melini” (1681)
Nuria Rodríguez Ortega with Murtha Baca

In Search of Marble in Paris for Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Bust of Louis
XIV: A Letter from Charles Perrault to Jean-Baptiste Colbert
Anne-Lise Desmas

Sur le motif: Painting in Nature around 1800
Frauke Josenhans

The Papers of Yona Friedman
Wim de Wit

Alfred Schmela, Impassioned Gallerist
JoAnne C. Paradise

The Allan Kaprow Papers: Video before Then
Jonathan Furmanski

“African American Avant-Gardes, 1965-1990”
Rebecca Peabody