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The Getty Research Journal is an open-access publication presenting peer-reviewed articles on the visual arts of all cultures, regions, and time periods. The journal will be published through Getty’s Quire software beginning with this issue and made available free of charge in Web, PDF, and e-book formats. Topics relate to Getty collections, initiatives, and broad research interests. The journal welcomes a diversity of perspectives and methodological approaches, and seeks to include work that expands narratives on global cultures.

This issue features essays on a fragmentary Kufic Qurʼan of Early Abbasid style produced in Central Iran; cuttings from a twelfth-century Bible written in southeastern France for a Carthusian monastery in the orbit of the Grande Chartreuse; French archaeologist Jane Dieulafoy’s nineteenth-century documentation of Ilkhanid monuments, particularly the Emamzadeh Yahya, one of Iran’s most plundered tombs; the wartime encounter between Polish painters stationed in Baghdad and Iraqi artists during the British military reoccupation of Iraq in 1941–45; and the integration of photography and poetry in East German samizdat artists’ books of the 1980s. Shorter texts include a notice on a large folding panorama of the city of Salvador in the state of Bahia, taken around 1880 by Brazilian photographer Rodolpho Lindemann.

The free online edition of this open-access publication is at www.getty.edu/publications/grj/19/ and includes zoomable illustrations. Free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book are also available.

The Getty Research Journal presents peer-reviewed articles on the visual arts of all cultures, regions, and time periods. Topics often relate to Getty collections, initiatives, and broad research interests. The journal welcomes a diversity of perspectives and methodological approaches, and seeks to include work that expands narratives on global culture.

This issue features essays on the remembering and remaking of Second Empire table centerpieces by French fine metalworking firm Christofle et Cie during the Third Republic; satirical photomontages by Soviet artist trio Brigade KGK in 1934 for an illustrated edition of Joseph Stalin’s speech; a forgotten but important example of New Deal–era painting by little-known US American artist Bennett Buck mistakenly attributed to Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco; poet David Antin’s turn to talking in the 1970s as oral art criticism; the marketing of a limited-edition portfolio published in 1976 by dealer Harry Lunn featuring prints by Gerd Sander of photographer Lisette Model’s work from the 1930s and ’40s; and the material culture and interpretive program at Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site in Philadelphia shaping the public conversation about justice in the criminal legal system. Shorter texts include a notice on a sketchbook shared between French artist Rosa Bonheur and her father and teacher, Raymond Bonheur, during the 1840s and ’50s. This issue also includes a conversation between scholar Laura G. Gutiérrez and visual artist Felipe Baeza about art making, migration, legibility, and belonging in the context of his project, Unruly Forms.

The free online edition of this open-access publication is available at www.getty.edu/publications/getty-research-journal/20/. Also available are free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book.

The Getty Research Journal presents peer-reviewed articles on the visual arts of all cultures, regions, and time periods. Topics often relate to Getty collections, initiatives, and broad research interests. The journal welcomes a diversity of perspectives and methodological approaches, and seeks to include work that expands narratives on global culture.

This issue features essays on a technical examination of a peacock fresco fragment formerly thought to be an ancient Roman artifact; a necrology of French Jesuit artist Jean-Denis Attiret, court painter to the Qianlong emperor in China; the afterlives of bronze zodiac animal head sculptures from the looted Qing-era Yuanmingyuan; the commissioning of a sepulchral monument in Santiago, Chile, for the late archbishop at the end of the nineteenth century; the effect of non finito in the early twentieth-century work of Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler; a series of performances in laundromats across Los Angeles in 1977 by the feminist art collective Mother Art; and photographer Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe's book from 1986 narrating the history of Black women photographers.

Shorter texts include notices on the placement and subsequent censorship of the two riflemen in David Alfaro Siqueiros’s Los Angeles mural América tropical of 1932, and material traces of performance in the archive of Simone Forti that offer glimpses of the interdisciplinary artist's activities between 1970 and 1972.

The issue also includes a conversation between the curators of the exhibition Lumen: The Art and Science of Light, held at the Getty Museum in 2024.

The free online edition of this open-access publication is available at getty.edu/publications/getty-research-journal/21/ and includes zoomable illustrations. Also available are free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book.

A thoughtful look at representations of people experiencing poverty in early modern Europe.
 
The northern Italian artist Giacomo Ceruti (1698–1767) was born in Milan and active in Brescia and Bergamo. For his distinctive, large-scale paintings of low-income tradespeople and individuals experiencing homelessness, whom he portrayed with dignity and sympathy, Ceruti came to be known as Il Pitocchetto (the little beggar).
 
Accompanying the first US exhibition to focus solely on Ceruti, this publication explores relationships between art, patronage, and economic inequality in early modern Europe, considering why these paintings were commissioned and by whom, where such works were exhibited, and what they signified to contemporary audiences. Essays and a generous plate section contextualize and closely examine Ceruti’s pictures of laborers and the unhoused, whom he presented as protagonists with distinct stories rather than as generic types. Topics include depictions of marginalized subjects in the history of early modern European art, the career of the artist and his significance in the history of European painting, and period discourses around poverty and social support. A detailed exhibition checklist, complete with provenance, exhibition history, and bibliography, provides information critical for the further understanding of Ceruti’s oeuvre.
 
This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from July 18 to October 29, 2023.

This richly illustrated volume paints a complex portrait of Caillebotte, masculinity, and identity in late nineteenth-century France.

More than any other French Impressionist, painter Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894) observed and depicted the many men in his life, including his brothers and friends, employees, and the workers and bourgeois in his Parisian neighborhood. Male subjects feature prominently in some of his best-known works, such as The Floor Scrapers, Man at His Bath, Young Man at His Window, Boating Party, and Paris Street, Rainy Day. The originality of his paintings of men is fully explored for the first time in this catalogue, published to accompany a major international exhibition co-organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Musée d’Orsay, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Alongside paintings, drawings, and photographs, as well as an appendix featuring maps and new biographical research that sheds light on Caillebotte’s social network, this volume includes historically grounded thematic essays by curators and leading scholars. By exploring the complex and varied facets of Caillebotte’s identity—as son, brother, soldier, bachelor, amateur, sportsman, and so on—these essays pose questions of identity, leaving space for ambiguous and fluid expressions of gender and masculinity—for both Caillebotte and the larger late nineteenth-century French world.

This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the Musée d’Orsay from October 8, 2024, to January 19, 2025, J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from March 25 to May 25, 2025, and The Art Institute of Chicago from June 29 to October 5, 2025.