In 1934, the Soviet photo agency Soiuzfoto published an illustrated version of Joseph Stalin’s “Report to the Seventeenth Party Congress on the Work of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U.(B.),” comprising seventy-five photomontages by a trio of young artists named Brigade KGK. In this essay, I treat the satirical photomontages that Brigade KGK created for Stalin’s report as a search for a suitable artistic idiom of official humor. I argue that Brigade KGK used stretched and distorted imagery to demonstrate the comic possibilities inherent in photography’s materiality, where others subordinated it to the traditional art of drawing. The essay situates Brigade KGK’s work in relation to debates in the final years of the first five-year plan, at a time when supporters of German artist John Heartfield criticized photomontage as a purely mechanical technique and discredited its supporters as petty-bourgeois formalists.

The article presents a group of twenty-two mostly unpublished terracotta loom weights in the Villa collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum. Most have been classed as coming from the southern Italian Peninsula and are discoid or hemispherical. A functional analysis based on experimental archaeology demonstrates that these loom weights were used for weaving fine cloth. Their decoration includes dots and lines, imprints of coins, and images pressed in a mold of figures from mythology, and the iconography draws on themes from domestic life and women’s experiences. The assemblage of pyramidal and discoid or hemispherical loom weights may reflect chronological and cultural differences (e.g., Greek versus Italic) in weaving technology on the southern Italian Peninsula. Based on comparative material, we suggest dating the discoid and hemispherical Getty loom weights to the third to second centuries BCE, with a plausible context in or near Herakleia or Taranto. YOUR ACCESS OPTIONS

This technical-art historical study sets out to clarify central questions about the relationship of US-American artist Jay DeFeo (1929–89) to materiality, in particular the role media choices played in the development of her visual vocabulary. To that end, the essay traces distinct stages of DeFeo’s experimentation and maturation through a wide array of documents, many of which have, to date, gone unpublished: color charts, photographs of works in progress and studio contents, interviews, lectures, letters, and journals. We discuss the insights yielded by these archival sources alongside results of scientific analysis of fifty-eight samples from paintings representative of her entire oeuvre.

The collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Villa contains an Aegean Bronze Age ceramic jar with stippled decoration that is described as an imitation of the dimpled shell of an ostrich egg. This essay takes a closer look at the historical development of the long scholarly association of ceramic vessel shapes and motifs with the imitation of ostrich-eggshell vessels in the Aegean Bronze Age, deconstructing any meaningful relationship between them. In doing so, it also classifies the Getty jar in current typology and redates it to provide a more precise identification.

A sixteenth-century source documents that Veit Stoss, arguably the leading German sculptor in the years around 1500, created small-scale crucifixes for connoisseurs. A few small sculptures of other subjects by Stoss were known for some time, but not a single crucifix. The first such work resurfaced only in 2011. It has now been acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum. This article aims to situate the work relative to six large crucifixes Stoss created during the years he worked in Kraków (1477–96), then the capital of Poland, and in Nuremberg, the big economic hub of southern Germany where he worked for over three decades. Among the works discussed is another crucifix barely known until today, but preserved in the small church of Iwanowice, near Kraków. Like other crucifixes by Stoss, the new acquisition is distinguished by the artist’s sublime knowledge of anatomy, most likely based on personal anatomical studies.

Halfway through the nineteenth century, three pioneering architectural publications came out almost simultaneously: James Fergusson, The Illustrated Handbook of Architecture (1855); Wilhelm Lübke, Geschichte der Architektur (1855); and Franz Kugler, Geschichte der Baukunst (1856–78). These surveys were the first that aimed at narrating a world history of architecture. While today the canonical images and histories in architectural surveys are regarded as clichés that confirm dominant values and established practices, this essay argues that at the time of its invention it was a critical and dynamic genre. Conscious of the pioneering nature of their books, Fergusson, Lübke, and Kugler accounted extensively for their aims and methods. All too soon, however, the genre of the architectural history survey text became a victim of its own success. The critical nature of the survey’s origin was put to an end by its spectacular succession of reeditions in the subsequent decades.

Previous articleNext article No AccessPlate 1: MuralPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Getty Research Journal Volume 9, Number S12017 SupplementExamining Pollock Sponsored by The Getty Research Institute Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/695877 Views: 89Total views on this site © 2017 The J. Paul Getty Trust. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

This article considers printmaking and photography as media of inscription in late nineteenth-century Mexican archaeology. Specifically, it analyzes a debate about the relative virtues of drawn and...