The Getty—gorgeous space and grounds; forgettable collection. Two (personal) exceptions:
1. Monet’s Haystacks. I saw this painting for the first time when I was eight years old at a traveling exhibition and fell in love with the purple on the shadow side of the haystacks. Who knew such vibrant, unusual shades existed?? (Monet, apparently.)
2. The Irving Penn: Small Trades exhibit. Penn photographed hundreds of day laborers with the tools of their trade in the early 1950s in New York, Paris, and London as a personal corollary to the fashion photography he was doing for Vogue at the time. The photographs are fascinating in and of themselves for their curious context-lessness (all are taken against a backdrop in black and white), but to my delight—I could always tell the New York faces. I tried to figure out what they had in common, but couldn’t.
