Beccafumi "Youth" to Getty
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| Domenico Beccafumi, Head of a Youth, about 1530. J. Paul Getty Museum |
The Getty Museum has completed acquisition of a Domenico Beccafumi oil sketch on paper, the last of a stellar group of European drawings whose purchase (evidently from U.K. collector Luca Padulli) was announced in 2017. This and two other drawings were delayed because of British export law.
Beccafumi was the last great Sienese painter. Though he worked on monumental scale in fresco and mosaic, the artist is now especially admired for oil-on-paper character studies, of which Head of a Youth is a notable example. Beccafumi helped popularize this hybrid medium, bridging drawing and painting. Head of a Youth augments a group of later oil headshots by Federico Barocci, Annibale Carracci, and Rubens, all acquired by the Getty in the past few years.
Comments
As for the Lucas, not sure if it's going to survive a combo of Barry-Munitz-type management and cancel culture.
I wonder if Michael Govan has found a new place to retire to, maybe the Bahamas, Hawaii, Europe? If that falls through, maybe he can manage USC's Pacific Asia Museum? Less there to wreck and ruin.
The Lucas has a very diverse curatorial staff. The Director (Sandra Dumont) is nothing like Barry Munitz.
... I wonder when the Save-LACMA mob will go away. Will they retire to Florida? Less there to wreck and ruin.
The Frick has moved temporarily to the former site of the Whitney Museum. The installation of its old masters collection there is a preview (in principle) of the LACMA installation at the Zumthor building. The reviews have been very good:
Here is the NY Times on the subject:
“After finding Nothingness, I have found Beauty,” Mallarmé wrote. And so it is at Frick Madison: an unexpectedly audacious transmutation of the city’s plushest museum within Marcel Breuer’s home for the Whitney Museum of American Art. Recently occupied by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brutalist building at 945 Madison Ave. reopens March 18 as an old masters gallery, with 104 of the Frick’s paintings, plus marbles and bronzes and vases and clocks.
[...] The backdrop is gray, the lighting sober.
[...] In the Renaissance and in the modern age, in the Bellini and the Breuer, sometimes asceticism is the path to the sublime.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/25/arts/design/frick-madison-moves-breuer-reopen.html
You need to speed up the pace, however, because LA is forecast to have a huge quake in the future, possibly sooner rather than later.
You want to get out while the going is good.
And please don't let the door hit you on the a** on your way out. Thanks.