The Easel

14th February 2023

Getty Museum Presents Porcelain from Versailles: Vases for a King & Queen

On matters of refined taste, eighteenth century Europe looked to France. At the top of any ‘must-have’ list was Sèvres porcelain. The Sèvres factory – originally owned by Louis XVI – had developed hard paste porcelain that fired white and enabled a variety of decorated surfaces. The vases owned by Louis and Marie Antionette, that somehow survived the Revolution, are regarded as among the finest achievements in porcelain. They are, says one writer “extremely important and extremely fabulous”.

When art entered the computer age

Before personal computers, computer art involved writing code for mainframe machines. Even then though, inspiration was drawn from modernists like Mondrian or the subsequent conceptualist and minimalist movements. Musicians were also quick to see potential in computers. The first work was computer drawings using typeface but quickly became more elaborate. Interest in computer art faded once the PC arrived but not before Rauschenberg had declared computer code “the new artistic material.”

Richard Avedon’s Overwhelming Murals

By the late 1960’s Avedon was running out of creative puff and looking for new inspiration. He launched into a series of huge group portraits of those he thought culturally influential. More interesting than the inevitable Warhol images are the dynamics between his subjects. Said Avedon “a portrait is a picture of someone who knows he’s being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he’s wearing or how he looks.”