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[total list of events]

Tuesday, February 1st

10 am- 6 pm [LA]
exhibit: 'Jacques-Louis David: Empire to Exile'
The Getty Center (1200 Getty Center Drive; LA)
info: 310-440-7300; museuminfo@getty.edu
detail: This exhibition is the first major survey of the work of Jacques-Louis David (French, 1748–1825) in America, and the first to concentrate on his career after the French Revolution—a period marked by a push away from radical politics, his association with Napoleon and the Empire, and his own exile in Belgium from 1816 to his death in 1825. This shift of focus will open up new ways of looking at this preeminent figure in European art, and provide a much fuller understanding of his work outside the revolutionary context for which he is best known. This international loan exhibition comprises about 60 objects, equally divided between drawings and paintings. Through April 24th.

10 am- 6 pm [LA]
exhibit: 'The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852-1860'
The Getty Center (1200 Getty Center Drive; LA)
info: 310-440-7300; museuminfo@getty.edu
detail: This international touring exhibition is the first American survey of the work of one of the most important 19th-century photographers, Roger Fenton (British, 1819–1869), who exerted a profound influence on the medium despite a career that lasted only 11 years. He left behind a widely varied body of work that, with its diversity of subject, poetic content, and highly polished execution, represents one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of photography. Training as a painter in London and Paris, Fenton moved on to photography in 1851, first producing bold landscape and architectural views. In 1855, he was commissioned to photograph the Crimean war and his haunting studies of the chaos and bleakness of the front were among the first images ever to depict war. Later, he began to merge his background in painting with photography, producing a series of lush still lifes, portraits, and Orientalist subjects reflecting the 19th-century fascination with the Near East. Closes April 24th.

10 am- 6 pm [LA]
exhibit: 'French Neoclassical Sketchbooks and Prints'
The Getty Center (1200 Getty Center Drive; LA)
info: 310-440-7300; museuminfo@getty.edu
detail: Drawn from the special collections of the Research Library at the Getty Research Institute, this exhibition surveys sketchbooks and suites of prints that young artists produced at the French Academy in Rome between 1750 and 1800. During this period, pensionnaires, the select group of student painters and architects who studied in Rome, were driven to improve their skills and refine their aesthetics by exploring the ancient city and filling sketchbooks with ancient, Renaissance, and baroque sculpture, architecture, and painting. The exhibition calls attention to these sketchbooks and a large group of related prints as a distinct body of work. It considers the methods by which architects and painters such as Marie-Joseph Peyre (1730–1785), Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), Louis Gauffier (1761–1801), and Charles Percier (1764–1838) selectively extracted characteristics from their models while suppressing others—all in an attempt to generate a new classical aesthetic. Closes April 24th.