The Getty Does Blue Paper and Red Blood in Two New Shows

Acquisitions in 2023 include a grand royal portrait and a teacup fit for a French dauphin.

L ast week, I was in Los Angeles for National Review Institute donor visits and museum visits as well. It’s a quiet season for art, it seems, but I love the Getty and always go whether or not there’s a blockbuster on view. I saw two exhibitions there, mostly from the permanent collection. Drawing on Blue: European Drawings on Blue Paper, 1400s–1700s is a perfect but not fascinating exhibition and Blood: Medieval/Modern is too small, impressionistic, and hodgepodge to get traction. Where’s yellow? It’s a primary color, too. There’s the California sun under which the Getty sparkles, I decided, and the sun takes it in stride.

Even in this bit-of-a-fizzle season exhibition-wise, the Getty looks splendid. I love it. The campus will be 30 years old in 2027, and it looks both new and venerable. The Getty, the Disney Center, and the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, called the music center, are the anchors in Los Angeles’s evolution from a white-bread town to a high culture-giant.

I haven’t visited the Getty since 2022. Today, I’ll look at two of the exhibitions on view and its recent — and very solid — art acquisitions. Pacific Standard Time, the Getty-sponsored biennial art extravaganza, starts this fall. This year, about 60 Southern California arts organizations will mount programs around the theme of “Art and Science Collide.” I’m wary but optimistic. A couple of exhibitions will focus on environmental justice, a thumb-sucker for rich, manic liberals, and a couple of programs will dramatize climate hysteria. Most of the other projects sound good.

Drawing on Blue looks at Italian, Dutch, French, and Spanish artists from late-15th century into the Rococo era in the 1700s. I enjoy exhibitions about materials. Art isn’t made by magic, and though paint, pastel, ink, chalk, and other media are essential in flat art, the support, in this case blue paper, can subtly and richly augment the look. In northern Italy, blue paper made from discarded rags, some blue already, was produced as early as 1388 as a wrapper for commodities such as sugar. Woad, a yellow flower from the cabbage family, was European and produced blue dye. Indigo, which was imported, was also used. Before long, artists in the Veneto and especially in Venice used blue paper for preparatory and experimental drawings.

Why? First of all, it was cheaper than white paper. Soon, artists realized that blue paper provided a ready-made middle tone. White highlights looked more vivid and darks — in pencil, crayon, ink, or chalk — made more convincing volume. Complementary or contrasting chalk colors worked well, too. Blue paper came into its own in Venice, a big-sky place surrounded by water.

Carpaccio, Lorenzo Lotto, Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto loved using blue paper to build form and to develop light and shade. They’re at the foundation of drawing on blue paper. Most of Dürer’s Venetian drawings are on blue paper.

A small Carpaccio drawing, Bishop Holding a Candle, from 1493, a small Titian nude, and three Veronese drawings are good primers in how artists used what became known as Venetian blue paper. But the exhibition needed some blue firepower that could come only from borrowing works such as Sebastiano del Piombo’s self-portrait from the National Gallery of Scotland, or a Dürer Venetian drawing from the Albertina in Vienna, or a splashy Tintoretto drawing like Venus and Vulcan in Berlin.

Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, where I worked a million years ago, has great Canaletto drawings, too. So does the Courtauld Gallery in London, which, I think, is the Getty’s partner in Drawing on Blue, or at least it partnered with the Getty in the exhibition’s very good scientific work about blue paper and is doing a blue-paper exhibition later this year.

The curators make lots of good points, but the Venice section seems tepid when it should be glorious. I’m not suggesting a rehash of the Morgan Library’s great Drawing in Tintoretto’s Venice, from 2018, but everything that subsequent artists did with blue paper started in Venice, as these artists well knew.

The two red-chalk, mid 1580s drawings by the Italian Mannerist Pomarancio, both from the Getty’s collection, show how much the contrast of red on blue paper adds in monumentality. Both are simple, but Claude Lorrain’s late 1630s drawing of figures by a harbor starts with blue paper, handy for a serene sky and water. Claude uses brown ink and brown wash and red and yellow chalk in tandem with the paper for forms and volumes. The blue paper peeks through the brown wash. White highlights work with the blue to add a bit of dazzle. Overall, the blue paper unifies and enriches a complex scene.

Blue is a staple in Rococo-era pastels, and the exhibition displays two of the Getty’s best. Charles-Antoine Coypel’s self-portrait from 1734 is made from many sheets of blue paper pieced together, mounted on canvas, with the seams disguised. This allowed Coypel to create an impressively big work — remember that paper then was produced in small sheets, not rolls — while giving his blue paper a starring role. He left some of the sheets bare of pigment so the paper, in effect, played itself. Like lots of old blue paper, alas, Coypel’s sheets have faded to brown.

The fantastic pastelist Rosalba Carriera was born in Venice in the mid 1670s, so he came from the blue-paper tradition. The Getty’s Muse, from 1720, is very lovely and on blue paper almost entirely covered with pastel, but Carriera uses some of the blue color in the paper — small passages — to create shadows defining the woman’s face and neck.

Carriera tended to roughen the paper, lifting blue fibers to the surface. This in itself gave the image depth. It worked like the weave of a canvas, which painters sometimes emphasized to give a motif a bit more prominence or weight. Paper in Carriera’s day, as in the time of Venetian artists like Tintoretto, was made from old textile pulp, so the paper had fibers. Blue paper, initially cheap, was more fibered than more refined papers. Artists made lemonade from lemons, to bring yellow into the conversation, and accentuated the rough surfaces. Drawing on Blue displays magnified images of old, fibered blue paper. It looks like a topographical map.

The Wolf and the Fox, by Jean-Baptiste Oudry, from 1733, is intensely blue in part because Oudry’s illusionistic frame is painted in Prussian-blue watercolor entirely covering blue paper while the narrative scene itself is created with black ink, gray wash, and white gouache highlights with lots of the blue paper left bare.

Prussian blue was a new synthetic pigment. The blue paper that Oudry used was itself made with new dyes. Oudry used paper, color, and narrative to offer an Enlightenment-infused parable. He depicts a fox and a wolf. The fox, tired of eating chicken, asked the wolf how to catch a lamb for his meal. The wolf advises him to disguise himself as a wolf, and off the fox-in-costume goes. He corners a lamb, who, unlike all the other sheep, isn’t stupid. He can tell that this wolf is only a fox. Rather than surrender, he persuades the disguised fox to chase a nearby rooster.

Oudry’s parable concerns disguises. To change one’s basic nature is impossible. Oudry’s picture frame is an illusion created by a new pigment created by technology. The intensity of even his blue paper makes the white highlights pop, creating more drama — and more illusion. “Color’s tricky” is the moral of the story. I know, this isn’t Double Indemnity deception-wise, but it’s the 1730s. I learned from the catalogue that Oudry was part of a group later called the Rococo empiricists. It was a group of artists, theorists, and scientists who researched the physics of light and the new field of optics.

I liked Drawing on Blue and learned a lot. Blue, suggesting serenity, loyalty, sincerity, and constancy, is my pet color, enlivened by a tie with lots of red, so I thought I’d fancy Blood: Medieval/Modern, the other Getty exhibition I visited.

It’s not that the theme is a bad one. Aspects of Christianity — the Roman Catholic Church, for example — emphasize blood as a symbol and in rituals. it’s a coincidence since I’m hardly bloodthirsty and might be too squeamish for my own good, but I wrote about Catherine Opie’s use of Old Master martyrdom scenes in her new series of photographs of the Vatican. Is bloodshed in vogue?

Blood isn’t a big show — only three galleries — but it takes a stab, to pun, at the Crucifixion, menstruation, the beleaguered patriarchy, which loves its bloodlines, AIDS, the self-abuse practice called cutting, and a modified version of Nike Air Max 97s, which use red ink mixed with a drop of human blood. Streetwear company MSCHF collaborated with a rapper to make 666 pairs — Nike sued the company over the pentagram-bedecked footwear, which are called “Satan Shoes.” I’ll stick with my all-weather Merrills.

The Getty has a first-rate collection of medieval illuminated manuscripts, and pages from some are displayed. I’m a sucker for illuminated manuscripts, painstakingly painted by monks, for their precious look and vibrant color. The world needs more of their piety, though I tend to believe it needs it in others, like people in Washington. Still, the manuscript pages are small and hard to study and, let’s face it, with so many Bibles and psalters and so many painted pages, a curator can cherry-pick to make any point she wants. In these old texts and images, women’s blood and men’s blood are treated differently, but how the Nike sneakers and AIDS fit into the story still baffles me.

The objects are so disparate in medium, scale, and time that it’s impossible for simple country souls like me to fasten on the particular theme of this blood pudding. Having just come from the serene Drawing on Blue, I felt even more discombobulated. I’m not against the Getty doing bleeding-edge art shows, to pun again, though that defies the Getty’s brand. The problem is that Blood is a few DNA markers short of a full storyline. That said, I commend the curatorial imagination invested in the project. The exhibition’s certainly not boring.

I don’t think the Getty’s put a foot wrong over the past, say, 25 years in acquisitions. Yes, the Getty Kouros, purchased in 1985, might be a fake, but it might be real. Yes, the Getty once was in the business of buying hot antiquities, but they were, at least, as sublime as they were black-market. Sometimes it pays a pretentious price, and a scandalous one since the Getty is, after all, a nonprofit. This said, I can’t argue with the unerring eye of its curators.

The museum has Christ as the Man of Sorrows, painted by Antwerp’s Quentin Metsys in the 1520s. Last year, the museum bought Gerard David’s Holy Family, also from the 1520s and also by a Netherlandish artist with Antwerp roots. It’s a tira mi sù and a warm and fuzzy family scene. Each figure is lovely. I spotted a grand portrait by Antony Raphael Mengs while I was walking through the galleries at the Getty. “That roly-poly royal looks familiar,” I thought, remembering all the portraits of Saxon princes and dukes and margraves I saw a year ago when I was in Dresden. Indeed, the subject, Prince Friedrich Christian, was the son and heir of Frederick Augustus II, the Elector of Saxony, and the grandson of Augustus the Strong, both art collectors of the first order. German royals all have fat, prosperous, square looks.

Prince Friedrich looks like his dad. Mengs was a young man on his first gig as a court painter, so this was his start. He later was the chief court painter of the Spanish kings. Friedrich suffered from what we think was cerebral palsy and was considerably enhanced in bearing by Mengs. In 1763, Friedrich succeeded his father as elector but died after a reign of only 73 days. The portrait was still in the private collection of the Margraves of Meissen when a British art dealer bought it at Christie’s in 2022. In 2023, the Getty bought it, a primo royal portrait and a coup since it had stayed in the family for so long. The Getty has the means and the connections to make these small miracles happen.

In the porcelain department — and it’s a very chic, exclusive department indeed — the Getty found an adorable Sèvres cup and saucer made in 1782 to commemorate the birth of Louis XVI’s and Marie Antoinette’s first son in late 1781. The French king’s heir was called the dauphin, which means dolphin in French, not for a prophetic affinity for Flipper but for what was once the French province Dauphine in southeastern France. A dolphin was its symbol. The cup and saucer have lovely little dolphins painted on them as well as swags, a gold crown, and a dolphin-shaped handle. The Getty buys exquisite things, big and small. Small things are often the best.

The Getty’s technically free to the public, and its $5 charge for parking in its garage has always seemed reasonable to me, though I believe that museums should be free. I looked at it as a gesture and a tiny sign of serious purpose. The Getty has jacked the parking fee to $25 a car, which is not a gesture but a stealth admission charge. With 11 billion bucks in the bank, does the foundation need to stick its hands in the pockets of Angelenos who are struggling with inflation, high taxes, and gas prices sent sky-high because of phony, useless environmental rules?

I always enjoy visiting the Getty. I spent some time in the permanent-collection galleries, mostly looking at the Getty’s Impressionists. In 1998, right after the Getty Center opened, it bought Sunrise, by Claude Monet, painted in 1872 or 1873 near Le Havre’s harbor the same weekend that the artist did Impression Sunrise, now at the Musée Marmottan in Paris and touted as the first Impressionist painting. This month is the 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist show in Paris so I wanted to visit it.

We don’t know which one Monet painted first. Below the brilliant orange of a rising sun and among its orange reflections in the water are blues, greens, and grays, painted in dabs, streaks, and strokes to create the impression of ships, water, and smoke. At 19 by 24 inches, it’s not big. It looks like an impromptu sketch, but Monet considered it finished. Paintings like this launched a new way of making art. I was there for its magic. It’s food for the soul.