The Library of the Getty Research Institute wants to open its holdings not only to art historians,
but to all scholars and the public at large. The objective, finding new ways to look at books,
at art, at the world. A library as think tank. That is the Getty Research Institute Library,
coming up on Great Libraries of the World.
J. Paul Getty first opened his personal art collection to the public in 1954,
and commissioned a museum to house it in 1968. That museum opened in Malibu,
California, but in 1976, Getty died, never having seen the museum. Nonetheless, he had
willed $700 million to its Board of Trustees. And by 1982, the trust had swelled to $1.4
billion, making the Getty Museum one of the richest in the world, and one with the greatest
operational freedom. As the museum grew, so did its support organizations. And at the heart of that
is the Getty Research Institute. And at the heart of the Getty Research Institute is its library.
This is a very exciting place to be here, and I think I was attracted to being here because
I had some sense of that excitement, not completely. I had to come here to actually
to realize it. This library only came into existence in 1983, when a very small curatorial
collection from the museum was transferred to the Research Institute. And so it has been very
exciting to work in an institution that had a library that was sort of in its late adolescence
and was coming into adulthood. We're so young, we have never had a card catalog.
My joy in life is to do exhibits, to bring people in, like you actually, and talk to you with
the books or the prints or the multiple in front of us sometimes when things are just very unpleasant.
Maybe we're doing the budget. What I do is go downstairs and work on some project, maybe some
new acquisition, which is just come in the door. And I find I get in the elevator and I'm back.
It's okay again. I have a silly smile on my face that somebody, if they meet me, could wonder,
you know, what is she grinning about? Right now in our gallery, we have an exhibit with the title
Tango with Cows. Now that title comes from a book printed and made by a Russian avant-garde
artist in the early part of the 20th century. And the exhibition is nothing but these kinds of
books that were made by these artists. And the books are all part of our special collections.
There are these wonderful real copies of the Russian avant-garde books that we made as surrogates.
Yes. And one of the people who works in conservation, Genevieve, actually made those beautiful facsimiles.
People love those books. One of our curators is very interested in Russian avant-garde material.
She didn't acquire the collection that we have, but she noticed that we had a very substantial
group of books that had been made by these artists. And she invited some scholars and
some librarians to come here and to look at this collection and to tell us more about it.
The library at the GRI serves the staff of the Gilly Art Museum
to find background information on works of art and artists,
to find provenance and historical context. The staff of the GRI, however, has its own mission
to locate what is unique in the library and to find new connections among its holdings,
and to share those connections with other scholars and with the public.
Thank you very much, Marsha, for arranging this and for allowing us to come in and take a look
at what you have. It is my pleasure, absolutely. So let's start with these images that are just
absolutely fascinating in their detail and attention to all kinds of emotional qualities.
What are they? Well, they were prints that was featured in last year's show in the GRI Gallery
here called China on Paper. And they were also the first of this collection that we have built
of works that Chinese and Europeans made together. And these are some of the first copper plating
gravings that were done in China. So it's a European technique that the Jesuit artists taught
Chinese who were working at the palace in Beijing for the emperor. They were court artists.
And what they were doing was recording the designs of what's called the Old Summer Palace.
And Chan Lang thought of himself as the emperor of the whole world. The Middle Kingdom is the
center of the world. And so he saw European prints of the palaces and the garden complexes like Versailles
and some of the other German garden and palace complexes. So he asked the Jesuit architects
to build palaces which you can you can see they look European. They don't look Chinese.
The Getty Trust is the umbrella organization under which there are four programs. The museum,
the one that most everyone knows about, the Getty Research Institute, Getty Foundation,
and finally the Getty Conservation Institute. We have very different mandates. We serve the
scholarly community. The foundation serves other art museums and organizations throughout the world
with scientific research to understand how better to conserve certain kinds of things like Adobe
Brick and Mosaic, for example. Anyone from the public can use the first floor of the library.
Our exhibitions are all open to the public. We curate them with the public in mind. We have
public programs as well that are associated with our scholar programs and sometimes with
certain parts of the collection, the research library collections. Everybody's talks about
the Getty Museum but there are these three other institutions. We are not in this sense at the
museum a public institution. Although we are public and you can come, you can come tomorrow to work
in the Getty Research Institute if you want to. You can use our library but we have not this general
reputation of being an outside going institution. But in fact we are. I always tell my colleague
from the museum he has 1.3 million visitors but we have as many because we have these databases
which are used by as many people all over the world. To make the holdings of the library more
available to both the public and the scholarly community, the Getty Research Institute librarians
have developed their own very accurate system of online vocabularies in Thessarei as a way to make
their information readily available and easy to use. The GRI's award-winning search system guarantees
that the Getty is not just an important regional library but a library with a global influence.
People think that because everything is available on the internet that all information is actually
accessible and of course it's not because if you search on a term or an artist's name or a subject
that can be depicted in art or something similar, you don't necessarily find it because the word
doesn't reside in the database record or in the web page that has that relevant image. The magic
does not exist where you can just say go get me everything that looks like this. There is so called
content-based image retrieval which is based on pattern recognition but especially for art and
architecture it doesn't work very well because if the user says go get me images of peace,
how do you get that? What does peace look like? There's no pattern. So there's a lot of
intellectual work that goes on that's input into the databases. It's not like a telephone book.
It could be considered like a telephone book with biographies of all the people in the telephone
book. We're starting to link our vocabulary records to images because a picture is worth
a thousand words. So you could get to the AAT record for the expression trompe l'oeil and
it says something about an illusionistic rendering but you might not quite understand what that is
based on reading the definition in the record. Now you'll be able to click on a link and go to a
pick an image of a trompe l'oeil painting for or fresco for example and so that will greatly
enhance I think the the power of our vocabulary is lookup tools. We have experts who select the
material of what is scholarly and what is not. It's a debated question. Produce a content that is
used in a way that Wikipedia can't be used. So a lot of what we do is building these tools
that enable creators of cultural information like us and other people who build digital libraries
to index our catalog materials so that end users can find them. We just started a new project
called Kona. There will be a record for the Mona Lisa which will also have variants like
La Joconde, La Joconda and so forth the actual name of the sitter again so that the user can
search on any one of those titles and they will retrieve the records for what we call the Mona Lisa
but what the Louvre calls La Joconde. First object here is a notebook of a man named Padre
Filippo Baldi. He was not really an architect in the real sense the way we know it. He was more
interested in architectural decoration. As you can see there's none of the pages show real structural
designs but they all show objects used in religious buildings. Candelabras, columns, door frames.
It says something about how designers worked at that time. This man was a Franciscan monk but he
wanted to take his drawings along to show to potential clients. The abbot of this monastery
or the nuns of that convent and so he took an old manuscript from the library of his monastery
probably cut out the pages and then pasted his own drawings in it and so that he could take this
along and I could say look I can do this kind of a door frame but I can also do this kind of an altar
or I can decorate a little puto on your ceiling or something like that. The album goes from the
late 17th century to 1730 more or less. There are drawings in here that you can see were sent
to somebody who probably did the execution the manufacturer and like this here you can see it
was all folded up before you stuck it in there but there are even some drawings where you can see
it had the leftovers of a stamp are still on there. Amazing. This drawing how well you see
it was all folded up and maybe had it in his pocket or he sent it off to somebody here you
can see. Ah yes yes yes. And this was really handled also a lot you can see this was reduced by
somebody on the work site it's very dirty the dirty fingers are on there and it's not something we
did. What's interesting also about this notebook is that when you look up his name you can find him
in the encyclopedias of the world of art and architecture but it's like only one building
that they mentioned thanks to this notebook we now know that he designed at least that he was
involved in like 20 or more buildings in the catalogue record you would include words that people
can search for ornamental design pediments. So that means that if I didn't know what a pediment
was but I said that it was a doorframe or something I could look under a doorframe but I could also
look under pediment. Yeah exactly yeah that will just provide much greater access to them. Oh yes
yeah and I actually think that there are there's at least a mass of thesis hidden in this manuscript
here. I haven't found a student yet but hopefully that will happen. The Getty Research Institute
is constantly looking to improve its collections but also to find new ways to use those collections
that's why it invites the scholars from all kinds of disciplines from philosophy to anthropology,
religious studies to history to evaluate the collections. They often discover surprising
connections and unexpected influence in their own fields of knowledge. We have so many holdings and
we want to get out when we come out with them. I have invites colleagues all over the world to
look into our collection to work on them and make known what we have. I loved it. It was one of the
best years I've ever had in my own professional life. It was just it was amazing and partially
precisely because it was a dialogue with people outside of my field or you know experts in all
sorts of different areas. This thing that really knocked me out about the library was the depth
of its collection particularly in Europe. I mean that's its main strength but they're beginning
to do great work in Latin America and Asia as well. I found the great thing of the Getty was that on
the whole there were lots of people there. I thought hey that that's interesting especially
I myself come from the world of ancient religion mainly that that's my main expertise.
You certainly were confronted with this world of art history which was totally new to me
but which proved to be very inspiring. We sort of see it as our job to bring scholars to the
collections that we have and we see this laboratory as functioning the way a chemistry lab might work
for a chemist or a biology laboratory for a biologist. This is where the humanist the art
historian can work with other scholars to collaborate to actually see the material
and it's fascinating to attend one of these workshops and every year based on a theme we bring
a group of scholars here and these scholars are usually working on research projects that connect
with our theme. They meet with one another once a week to hear about each other's research and to
share that with with the professional staff at the Getty, Getty wide and then they they have the
time on their own to to work on their their projects throughout the year. This year we are
working on networks and boundaries. What happens if cultures come together different traditions
come together. There is one working on 17th century architecture in Persia and somebody is working how
to build up a museum of African art in Cameroon. Do they have to talk about something? Yes they
have. So these are the subjects we elaborate we work on. We want to know more about the national
traditions of art history in different other cultures. We want to know what art history means
in India and we got over 300 applications from all over the world. We are what scholars are
all the time in the learning process. The theme in the coming years will be display of art.
How would you install a picture gallery right now if you would start with the gallery and that
happens for example in I mean in the Arab countries you know Abu Dhabi they want you know what are
they doing you know what what how do you install that and for this public. So there are many many
questions concerned but it's fascinating to talk about it. We are not looking for final solutions.
We are as you say it now in a modern way we are starting a discourse you know that's what we do
yeah so we want to go into an interesting discussion about these questions you know
I just discussed with a colleague from Dresden they have to reinstall the Dresden Gemelda gallery
the picture gallery in Dresden which is one of the major galleries in the world and they have
the 16 Madonna of Raphael you know if you put this picture with other pictures on the same wall
it will lose you know so why not have it alone but then if you put it alone there is a problem of
making it perhaps too religious you know so but we also want to demonstrate that this is
a picture which comes which comes out of a chapel. Those are two drawings by a contemporary architect
Zaha Hadid originally from Iraq living in London. These are drawings for an installation design
that she did for an exhibition about Russian avant-garde art and architecture at the Guggenheim
Museum and when you look carefully the circles you can see are the central atrium of the Guggenheim
designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in which he wanted to put those kind of designs inspired by
Todd Lean's monument for the Third International that he had done in the 1920s. In the end the
real installation at the Guggenheim was much simpler because this would have been very expensive
to do. We actually acquired these drawings because art of display is so important within
the research of our institute but also we acquired photographs with it and that you can see what was
finally realized so that you also can think about what an architect needs to do to get his or her
ideas realized and at that time she was still a relatively young woman architect and was not that
easy for women to get their ideas across and she definitely felt that in the beginning that as
somebody from the Middle East and as a woman people did not always listen to her and so from
that point of view it's very interesting but also just the relationship to our extensive Russian
avant-garde collections here in the institute sort of are many connections that we have.
And this? This is Marcel Duchamp. He made many variant editions of this which is called the
Bois. But it's like a little museum in a box. It's a mini museum yeah yeah made by the artist
that put in together his own museum and publishing it. And controlling both the the original art
and the derivative art in a new way. Probably learning something in both directions.
Yeah yeah and so we like this very much because it it shows how art is disseminated, collected.
These are highly collectible and weigh into six figures if not a million dollars.
The other thing that's amazing about this is that it also calls to mind
a solarius and the little universes that had little pop-up books and the surgical books where
you could see what's going on inside the intestines and so on. And this is this is like a pop-up book.
I see things sliding out and moving in and so it's it's an interactive museum as well as a
museum in a box. Marcel Duchamp was very interested in making multiples but he also
made variants of his multiples. So it's almost as if he couldn't make a new addition without
rethinking it and redesigning it for the study of these things. It's been very important to know
about all the different versions. The theme year right now is borders and connections and so we
have a lot of people that are here that are that are working on projects that take them out of
Europe and take them out of North America into other parts of the world. And we've had topics in
the past that have had to do with biography that have had to do with with art markets and the value
of art. We had one year that was called change and that seems pretty vague but it was pretty
specific when we had scholars here that were were looking at conservation and how artwork changes
over time. As a research institute we have the responsibility to to think about these questions
to bring people together to talk about it you know. Whatever we will say about digitized books
we need libraries. We need the book and we need the library. The library's institutions of memory
they are institutions of bringing things together which do not exist elsewhere you know.
It is not true that all the libraries are the same you know. I mean you must know that. You can buy
the book but the libraries are identities. They have character. They have meaning. They have history.
They have memory. And you know it's completely different to work in the British Museum Library
or to work in the Bibliotheque Nationale. I must tell you I have completely different ideas in these
two spaces. You know the books might be completely the same but I have completely different ideas
working in the Bibliotheque Nationale with these green lamps out of the 19th century setting with
the Puvideshavan on the walls. It's a completely different than going to Weimar. Libraries are
institutions of wonder you know. Where you find treasures you make discoveries. You meet people.
You are able to concentrate. You are able to get outside of the ordinary life.
The Getty Research Institute Library is often overshadowed by the Getty Center and its museums.
But it serves not only those institutions but takes a leadership role in pushing the sometimes
insulated field of art history into other scholarly disciplines. Experts from those fields
provide new insights enriching the library's collections. We have seen how the scholars
and residents programs takes on important issues about how art and society intermingle.
We've seen how online access and exhibits provide the public with a new way of discovering
the library's treasures. And we've seen how curators look actively for contemporary materials
to add to the collections. This is not just passive archiving. The GRI library is great
not merely because of its focused collection but because its staff is creative, committed,
and enthusiastic. They encourage us to take a fresh look at the past, gather the most important
materials of the present, and carry the pursuit of knowledge into the future.
I'm Chet Gritch. Join us next time when we visit another library on Great Libraries of the World.
Thank you.
