Getty Research Journal, No. 21

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.