This is the second volume in the annual publication that showcases the work of the Getty Research Institute. This annual publication showcases work by scholars and staff associated with the Getty Research Institute and the other programs of the prestigious J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Journal offers peer reviewed essays that focus on an object or aspect of the Getty's extensive archival, rare book, and artistic holdings or that relate to the annual research themes of the Research Institute and the Getty Villa. It also presents a selection of short, dynamic pieces about new acquisitions, scholarly activities, and ongoing projects at the Getty.

The Getty Research Journal showcases the remarkable original research underway at the Getty. Articles explore the rich collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum and Research Institute, as well as the Research Institute's research projects and annual theme of its scholar program. Shorter texts highlight new acquisitions and discoveries in the collections, and focus on the diverse tools for scholarship being developed at the Research Institute. This issue includes essays by Scott Allan, Adriano Amendola, Valérie Bajou, Alessia Frassani, Alden R. Gordon, Natilee Harren, Sigrid Hofer, Christopher R. Lakey, Vimalin Rujivacharakul, and David Saunders; the short texts examine a Nuremberg festival book, translations of a seventeenth-century rhyming inventory, the print innovations of Maria Sibylla Merian, Karl Schneider's Sears designs, Clement Greenberg's copy of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, the Marcia Tucker papers, a mail art project by William Pope.L, the L.A. Art Girls' reinvention of Allan Kaprow's Fluids, and Jennifer Bornstein's investigations into the archives of women performance artists.

This collection of unique works by 150 Los Angeles graffiti and tattoo artists represents an unprecedented collaboration across the city’s diverse artistic landscape. Many graffiti artists carry sketchbooks, called black books, and they ask crew members and others whose work they admire to inscribe their books with lettering or drawings. A few years ago, the Getty Research Institute invited artists, including Angst, Axis, Big Sleeps, Chaz, Cre8, Defer, EyeOne, Fishe, Heaven, Hyde, Look, ManOne, and Prime, to consider the idea of a citywide graffiti black book. During visits to the Getty Center, the artists viewed rare books related to calligraphy and letterforms, including works by Albrecht Dürer and Leonardo da Vinci. The artists instantly recognized the connections to their own practices and were particularly drawn to a liber amicorum (book of friends), a form of autograph book popular in the seventeenth century. Passed from hand to hand, it was filled with signatures, poetry, and coats of arms, like a black book from another era. Inspired by this meeting of minds across centuries, these artists became both creators and curators, crafting their own pages and inviting others to contribute. Eventually 150 Los Angeles artists decorated 143 individual pages. These were bound together into an exquisite artists’ book that became known as the Getty Graffiti Black Book. This publication reproduces each page from the original artists’ book and recounts the story of an unprecedented collaboration across the diverse artistic landscape of Los Angeles.

This beautifully illustrated work brings together more than one hundred objects from the J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection of European decorative arts. Included here is a generous selection of French and Italian furniture from the mid-sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Masterpieces by André-Charles Boulle, Bernard (II) van Risenburgh, and others reveal the virtuoso craftsmanship that makes these objects such compelling examples of the furniture maker’s art. Many of the Museum’s finest pieces of porcelain, glass, and tin-glazed earthenware are also represented. Tapestries from Gobelins and Beauvais, bronze firedogs from Fontainebleau, and a lathe-turned ivory goblet of astonishing complexity from Saxony are among the other highlights of this handsome volume.

The artists’ books made in Russia between 1910 and 1915 are like no others. Unique in their fusion of the verbal, visual, and sonic, these books are meant to be read, looked at, and listened to. Painters and poets—including Natalia Goncharova, Velimir Khlebnikov, Mikhail Larionov, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Mayakovsky— collaborated to fabricate hand-lithographed books, for which they invented a new language called zaum (a neologism meaning “beyond the mind”), which was distinctive in its emphasis on “sound as such” and its rejection of definite logical meaning. At the heart of this volume are close analyses of two of the most significant and experimental futurist books: Mirskontsa (Worldbackwards) and Vzorval’ (Explodity). In addition, Nancy Perloff examines the profound differences between the Russian avant-garde and Western art movements, including futurism, and she uncovers a wide-ranging legacy in the midcentury global movement of sound and concrete poetry (the Brazilian Noigandres group, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Henri Chopin), contemporary Western conceptual art, and the artist’s book. Sound recordings of zaum poems featured in the book are available at www.getty.edu.

“Why do artists love books?” This volume takes this tantalizingly simple question as a starting point to reveal centuries of symbiosis between the visual and literary arts. First looking at the development of printed books and the simultaneous emergence of the modern figure of the artist, The Art of Reading appraises works by the many great masters who took inspiration from the printed word. Authors Jamie Camplin and Maria Ranauro weave together an engaging cultural history that probes the ways in which books and paintings represent a key to understanding ourselves and the past. Paintings contain a world of information about religion, class, gender, and power, but they also reveal details of everyday life often lost in history texts. Such artworks show us not only how books have been valued over time but also how the practice of reading has evolved in Western society. Featuring over one hundred works by artists from across Europe and the United States and all painting genres, The Art of Reading explores the two-thousand-year story of the great painters and the preeminent information-providing, knowledge-endowing, solace-giving, belief-supporting, leisure-enriching, pleasure-delivering medium of all time: the book.

This two-volume encyclopedia covers buildings and sites of global significance from prehistoric times to the present day, providing students with an essential understanding of architectural development and its impact on human societies. This two-volume encyclopedia provides an in-depth look at buildings and sites of global significance throughout history. The volumes are separated into four regional sections: 1) the Americas, 2) Europe, 3) Africa and the Middle East, and 4) Asia and the Pacific. Four regional essays investigate the broader stylistic and historical contexts that describe the development of architecture through time and across the globe. Entries explore the unique importance of buildings and sites, including the megalithic wonder of Stonehenge and the imposing complex of Angkor Wat. Entries on Spanish colonial missions in the Americas and the medieval Islamic universities of the Sahara connect to broader building traditions. Other entries highlight remarkable stories of architectural achievement and memory, like those of Tuskegee University, a site hand-built by former slaves, or the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, which was built at the site of the atomic detonation. Each entry focuses on the architectural but includes strong consideration of the social impact, importance, and significance each structure has had in the past and in the present.

A celebration of the visual contributions of the bestiary--one of the most popular types of illuminated books during the Middle Ages--and an exploration of its lasting legacy. Brimming with lively animals both real and fantastic, the bestiary was one of the great illuminated manuscript traditions of the Middle Ages. Encompassing imaginary creatures such as the unicorn, siren, and griffin; exotic beasts including the tiger, elephant, and ape; as well as animals native to Europe like the beaver, dog, and hedgehog, the bestiary is a vibrant testimony to the medieval understanding of animals and their role in the world. So iconic were the stories and images of the bestiary that its beasts essentially escaped from the pages, appearing in a wide variety of manuscripts and other objects, including tapestries, ivories, metalwork, and sculpture. With over 270 color illustrations and contributions by twenty-five leading scholars, this gorgeous volume explores the bestiary and its widespread influence on medieval art and culture as well as on modern and contemporary artists like Pablo Picasso and Damien Hirst. Published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center May 14 to August 18, 2019.

The Getty Research Journal features the work of art historians, museum curators, and conservators around the world as part of Getty’s mission to promote the presentation, conservation, and interpretation of the world’s artistic legacy. Articles present original scholarship related to Getty collections, initiatives, and broad research interests. This issue features essays on a Parthian stag rhyton and new epigraphic and technical discoveries; gendered devotion and owner portraits in illuminated manuscripts from northern France around 1300; a technical analysis of heraldic devices in a missal from Renaissance Bologna; a new social and collective practice of drawing among French architect pensionnaires of the 1820s and 1830s at Pompeii; artist Malvina Hoffman’s representations of race during her travels to Southeastern Europe as part of her work with the American Yugo-Slav Relief; Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta’s painting Reverie—The Letter and the small-world sensation as a methodology for global art history; arguments that disprove the attribution of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s sculpture Head with Horns to artist Paul Gauguin; Head with Horns and Gauguin’s creative appropriation of objects; and the unpublished first draft of critic Clement Greenberg’s essay "Towards a Newer Laocoon."