Los Angeles, 19 May 2011 —The J. Paul Getty Museum announced today the loan of four pocket watches created by Abraham -Louis Breguet (1747 – 1823), founder of the Breguet watch company. These watches, part of the company’s historic timepiece collection, date to the late-18th/early-19th centuries and will join the Getty’s display of French decorative arts in the South Pavilion at the Getty Center. They will be on view through October 2011.

Born into a Swiss family of watchmakers, A.L. Breguet trained in Versailles and Paris before establishing his own Parisian workshop in 1775. His beautifully crafted and technologically innovative watches set new standards of quality that appealed to discerning clients among the French royal family and scientifically minded elites, including Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette. As indicators of luxury and elegance, Breguet watches appear in works by Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, and others.
In the decades following the French Revolution in 1789, Breguet’s continuing efforts to improve the accuracy and durability of his time-keeping mechanisms won fresh recognition from new patrons throughout Europe and the United States who appreciated the reliability of his watches and the streamlined appearance of their design. He was responsible for several major inventions, for instance, in 1790 a component known as a “parachute” that acts as a shock absorber, the Breguet balance spring in 1795 and the famous tourbillon regulator in 1801.

“We are delighted to welcome these watches to our French 18th-century Decorative Arts
galleries, where they will join other items treasured by Parisians of the era,” said Antonia Boström, senior curator of Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the J. Paul Getty Museum. “The Getty’s collection does not include personal timepieces and placing these objects within the context of our collection helps enliven the story we tell in those galleries of daily life through the exquisitely crafted objects found in the finest homes.”

Although all four watches on view were sold and used in the 1800s, three of them were designed in the late 1700s. They are all from the Breguet Museum in Paris, which houses more than 100 timepieces and items related to the history of the House of Breguet. “We are honored to share our cherished cultural heritage with visitors to the Getty Museum, and to convey the rich traditions of Paris in the 18th-century, in which Breguet played a very special role,” said Breguet President, Marc Hayek. “That was the dream that led my grandfather Nicolas Hayek to found the Breguet Museum more than 10 years ago, a dream I’m proud to help continue.”
Breguet is a sponsor of Paris: Life and Luxury, on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the
Getty Center through August 7, 2011. The exhibition re-imagines, through art and material culture, the complex and nuanced lifestyle of elite 18th-century Parisians who made their city the fashionable and cultural epicenter of Europe. The exhibition travels to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston where it will be on view from September 18 to December 10, 2011.

About Breguet
Breguet is the ultimate watch brand among the 19 watch companies comprising the Swatch Group Ltd. of Biel, Switzerland, the largest watch company in the world. With boutiques in Beverly Hills, New York, Cannes, London, Paris, Geneva, Zürich, Vienna, Moscow, Ekaterinenburg, Dubai, Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Singapore, Macao and Taiwan, the brand continues to uphold its reputation as the supplier of timepieces to people with discriminating tastes and an eye for the exceptional.
If Breguet holds a special place in European cultural heritage, it is because its founder, A.- L. Breguet (1747-1823), set the standard by which all fine watchmaking has been judged. Today, his heirs at Breguet still make each watch as a model of supreme horological art.
In addition to pursuing watchmaking excellence, Breguet is led toward the principle of preserving humanity’s historical and cultural heritage well beyond the watchmaking world through various prestigious patronage activities.
In recent years, Breguet has strengthened its cultural ties through partnerships
the LA Philharmonic, the Louvre Museum, the New York Philharmonic, and the Segerstrom Center for the Arts. Its partnership with the J. Paul Getty Museum is yet another step toward promoting and preserving the world’s great cultural institutions.

Inspired by the Getty Museum’s extensive French decorative arts collection and the correspondingly strong holdings of French illustrated books in the Getty Research Institute, Paris: Life & Luxury will provide a rich cultural and historical experience that closely mirrors daily life in 18th-century France.
Bringing together approximately 160 objects, roughly half of which will be on loan from twenty-six museums and private collections around the world, the exhibition will include a wide range of paintings, sculpture, applied arts, drawings, metalwork, furniture, architectural fittings, lighting and hearth fixtures, scientific and musical instruments, clocks and watches, textiles and dress, books, and maps.
David Bomford, acting director of the J. Paul Getty Museum said, “Paris: Life & Luxury will transport visitors back to Paris in the mid-1700s.
More than celebrating the period or perpetuating the mythology of its charm and gallantry, this exhibition re-imagines the varied and complex range of values and practices of the city’s elite within a rich material context.”
Charissa Bremer-David, curator of sculpture and decorative arts at the J. Paul Getty Museum and the exhibition’s co-curator added, “The exhibition will be a rich and deep sensory experience, engaging the viewer’s initial attention with the compelling visual appeal of superlative and virtuoso works of art. From this breadth and diversity, visitors will learn generally about the contributions of the French, and in particular the Parisian, to the visual and performing arts, language, literature, history, science, and even culinary arts during this time period—in short, about their major contribution to the humanities at large.”
Following a structure based on the traditional visual allegories of the Four Times of Day, the objects in the exhibition are grouped according to their associations with common activities as pursued in the chronology of a single day, from morning to night. As such, objects of diverse mediums are juxtaposed, as they would have been within an 18th-century Parisian domestic setting, regardless of modern museological or academic categories. Through constellations of art and related artifacts, the exhibition follows the conventional activities in the cycle of a Parisian day, such as dressing, writing, collecting, eating, and evening entertainment —allowing visitors to envision the activities and accessories of quotidian life, in order to find resonances with their own daily lives.

The notional day begins with the act of rising from bed and is exemplified in this installation with an exceptionally rare survivor, a bed with side curtains and a “flying” canopy suspended from the ceiling, a form known as the lit à la duchesse (or “duchess style bed”).
Traditionally, this type of bed was reserved for the most formal, prestigious bedroom in the house and was used by important members of the family to receive visitors. In this exhibition, impressive set of embroidered yellow silk-satin hangings, which measure fourteen feet tall when assembled, is displayed for the first time since arriving at the Getty Museum in 1979.
The pursuit of daily correspondence and business affairs follows in the next section, with furniture and accessories related to writing, record keeping, and document filing. Financiers and merchants often worked in offices, called bureaux, located within the home (forerunners to the modern “home office”) but typically set apart from the domestic sphere, as portrayed in Maurice-Quentin de la Tour’s pastel portrait of Gabriel Bernard de Rieux (1687–1745), a prominent member of the Paris Parliament.
The interior depicted in the almost lifesize portrait of Président de Rieux is evoked in all its detail by the adjacent display of many similar objects, arranged in comparable positions so that their artistic and physical characteristics, as well as their scale, can be conveyed.

The activity of collecting—particularly art—will be explored in a section of the exhibition, which evokes a private Parisian galerie. Erudition and refined taste were visually expressed through the assembly and accumulation, in accordance with one’s means, of choice works which, when arranged and displayed in a dedicated room, could provide occasion for private enjoyment by the single visitor or convivial appreciation by a group of interested guests. The assembled works often reflected the knowledge of the collector and his chosen models of virtue, drawn from the classical canon of books he read, especially the sacred scriptures, or the epic and mythological stories of ancient Greece and Rome.
In mid-18th-century Paris, the main meal was customarily consumed at midday and a section of the exhibition considers the portrayal of the ingredients of the meal made under the vastly prolific and intensely versatile direction of the artist Jean-Baptiste Oudry (1686–1755).
These include: still life paintings of The Four Elements painted by Oudry (which show game, fish, poultry, and vegetables); a pair of wool and silk tapestries portraying picnickers and hunters; his engraved illustration, featuring a lavishly set table, for the tale of The City Rat and the Country Rat, in the 1755 edition of Jean de La Fontaine’s famous animal fables; and the Machine d’Argent , a still life sculpture in silver, by François-Thomas Germain, under Oudry’s intervention, which features a rabbit, two game birds, several types of mushrooms, and a variety of vegetables.
A section devoted to scientific pursuits examines the Enlightenment’s interest in the natural world, as experienced and observed empirically, and reveals how its proponents, the philosophes, were committed to the wide dissemination of knowledge. This is demonstrated by several volumes of the philosophes’ key publications, namely the Encyclopédie (text 1751–1762 and plates 1762–1772) by Denis Diderot (1713–1784) and Jean le Rond d’Alembert (1717–1783) and the Histoire Naturelle (1749–1803) by the Comte de Buffon (1707–1788), opened to illustrated pages.
A lesser known aspect of the Enlightenment era will be introduced through objects associated with a small Parisian circle of knowledgeable and proficient “amateurs,” or independent men of science, individuals whose private activities benefitted society at large.

In order to better understand “life after sunset” (before the age of electric lighting), the penultimate gallery of the exhibition focuses on two types of leisure occupations: musicmaking and game-playing.

In order to recreate an era when night-time gatherings were dependent upon the illumination cast by firelight and candlelight, the overall light-levels in the final gallery are lowered. A five-legged card table is installed in its open, extended position, with candles and candlesticks placed in the recesses, to suggest how the objects might have been used together. The installation also includes an actual Parisian harpsichord of 1754 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), which survives with both its original sound box and its original lacquered surface decoration of chinoiserie motifs. The harpsichord is complemented by ambient audio recording of Excerpts from the Suite in G major, Nouvelles Suites de Pièces de Clavecin (1726–27) by Jean-Philippe Rameau (French, 1683–1764).
The exhibition and the notional day culminate with a section devoted to private prayer in which a marquetry-veneered prie-dieu, or kneeler, a crucifix, and a hand-illuminated missal of 1720–30 are featured to demonstrate the significant role of religion in this predominantly Catholic city.
Communal observance of faithful practices and private piety were an integral part of daily life, particularly quiet meditation, study of the scriptures, and self-reflection. This was facilitated in the domestic sphere by specially designed furniture such as the prie-dieu, by cabinetmaker Jean-Baptiste Tuart (master 1741), which also functioned as a writing desk and storage cabinet (Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris). This combined functionality illustrates how Parisian design and craft responded creatively to the multilayered needs of clients.

Paris: Life & Luxury is organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum and curated by Charissa
Bremer-David, curator of sculpture and decorative arts, with Peter Björn Kerber, assistant curator of paintings. Contributors to the exhibition’s accompanying publication are Charissa Bremer-David, Peter Björn Kerber, Mimi Hellman, Joan DeJean, and Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell. The exhibition is on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center, Los Angeles from April 26 through August 7, 2011 before traveling to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where it will be on view from September 18 through December 10, 2011.
The Los Angeles installation of Paris: Life & Luxury is sponsored by Breguet, the
premier luxury watch brand founded in 1775 by Abraham Louis Breguet.

Visiting the Getty Center
The Getty Center is open Tuesday through Friday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. It is closed Monday and major holidays. Admission to the Getty Center is always free. Parking is $15. No reservation is required for parking or general admission.
Reservations are required for event seating and groups of 15 or more. Please call (310) 440-7300 (English or Spanish) for reservations and information. The TTY line for callers who are deaf or hearing impaired is (310) 440-7305.
Additional information is available at www.getty.edu.

Features paintings and sculptures that mark the artist’s transition from impressionism to modernism

Los Angeles—The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Renoir in the 20th Century, an exhibition focusing on the last three decades of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s career, until his death in 1919. The exhibition presents approximately 80 paintings, sculptures, and drawings by Renoir, interspersed with select works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Aristide Maillol, and Pierre Bonnard, to illustrate the developing avantgarde’s debt to the older master.

Curated by LACMA curator Claudia Einecke and Chief Curator of European Art J.Patrice Marandel, the show offers an unprecedented look at Renoir through the lens of modernism, bridging the perceived divide between the art of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Co-organized by the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, the Musée d’Orsay, and LACMA, in collaboration with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the exhibition will be on view from February 14 to May 9, 2010.
“Renoir in the 20th Century is unlike any other Renoir exhibition,” says Einecke. “By focusing solely on his later works, it reveals a Renoir who is largely unknown, in a completely new and unexpected context. The juxtapositions with Picasso and his modernist peers are astonishing.”

During the last thirty years of his career, Renoir moved on from impressionism to an art aiming to be decorative, continue the great tradition of European painting, and be modern, all at once. The resulting paintings and sculptures became an enduring source of inspiration to a generation of younger artists who were feeling their way into modernism in the early twentieth century.
Renoir was acclaimed as an emblematic figure of impressionism in the 1870s, but even as that movement was winning wider acceptance, he embarked on new paths of experimentation and innovation. He challenged the basic principles of impressionism and, in an overt reference to the past, turned to traditional drawing and studio work.

This period of crisis and research ended in the early 1890s, a decade that brought Renoir public and institutional recognition as well as commercial success. Without rejecting impressionist techniques, Renoir invented a style he described as classical and decorative. As a declared figure painter, he concentrated on the female nude, portraits, and studies from the model, in the studio or outdoors, and experimented with new techniques.

Like his contemporaries and friends Paul Cézanne and Claude Monet, Renoir became a point of reference for a new generation of artists. Picasso, Matisse, Bonnard, and Maurice Denis, among many others, expressed their admiration for the master, and in particular for his “last manner,” referring to his work at the turn of the century. Great champions of modern art, such as Leo and Gertrude Stein, Albert Barnes, Louise and Walter Arensberg, and Paul Guillaume, collected Renoir alongside Cézanne, Picasso, and Matisse.

As an artist who was forever exploring and keen to take up challenges, Renoir wanted to test himself against the great masters from the past, notably Titian and Rubens, but also Fragonard and Watteau, whom he admired in the Louvre and during his travels. His research was driven by his rejection of the modern world and a preference for a timeless Arcadia peopled by sensual bathers and inspired by the south of France, where he stayed often from the 1890s onward. Renoir saw the Mediterranean landscape as an antique land, at once the cradle and last refuge of a living, familiar, and topical mythology.

In his last years, Renoir persistently returned to a narrow group of themes which he explored even in unaccustomed media, such as sculpture. At the same time, in the first decade of the twentieth century, his work from life and from models yielded new compositions, of which his odalisques and, above all, the Large Bathers of 1918-1919 (Musée d’Orsay) were the crowning glory. Renoir himself considered Large Bathers an achievement and a springboard for future research. This was, indeed, how the painting was seen by many artists in the early twentieth century, especially in the controversies surrounding the development of cubism and abstraction: it offered a working balance between objectivity and subjectivity, between tradition and innovation, which pointed the way to the classical modernity of the 1920s.

Since then, appreciation of “the late Renoir” has changed somewhat, and his paintings from this period are now little known. Although his landscapes and portraits have given rise to major exhibitions in recent years, there have been no studies or exhibitions focusing specifically on Renoir’s last years, as has been the case for Monet or Cézanne. Renoir in the 20th Century is designed to remedy this and explore this very fertile period in Renoir’s career.
Curators and Catalogue
Along with LACMA curators Claudia Einecke and J. Patrice Marandel, Sylvie Patry, of the Musée d’Orsay, and Joseph J. Rishel and Jennifer A. Thompson, of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, also serve as curators on the exhibition. The fully illustrated catalogue for Renoir in the 20th Century will be published in French by Réunion des Musées Nationaux and in English by Hatje Cantz.

This captivating, large-scale work has never before traveled to California.
“The Frick Collection is one of the world’s most acclaimed art institutions and was especially admired and respected by Norton Simon,” says Walter Timoshuk, President of the Norton Simon Museum.
Located on Fifth Avenue, The Frick Collection is housed in the former mansion of industrialist Henry Clay Frick (1849–1919) and is home to an internationally celebrated collection of Western fine and decorative arts, with works by Bellini, Fragonard, Gainsborough, Goya, Holbein, Ingres, Manet, Monet, Rembrandt, Renoir, Titian, Turner, Velazquez, Vermeer, Whistler, and others.
Comtesse d’Haussonville will be on view at the Norton Simon Museum from October 30, 2009, through January 25, 2010. Two preparatory drawings by Ingres will accompany the painting—one a direct study, executed around 1843 or 1844, which shows this same pose and his process in dealing with the folds of her elegant dress; the other a preparatory detail drawing for an 1839 commission for his monumental work, The Golden Age. All three works will hang alongside the Norton Simon’s portrait of Baron Joseph-Pierre Vialetés de Mortarieu, also by Ingres.

About the Comtesse d’Haussonville
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (French, 1780–1867) left behind a rich and varied body of work created during his long life. While many of his most known paintings are historical and religious depictions, his series of portraits, many of them of well-born, beautiful women, are among his most captivating. Ingres began his portrait of Louise d’Haussonville (1818–1882) in 1842, when he was 62 and the comtesse was 24. The picture shows the lovely young woman standing before a hearth in a well appointed room, a mirror on the wall reflecting the back of her head and neck. She wears an elegant, Delft-blue silk dress, its folds and details resplendent, a few pieces of gold jewelry, and an ornate red ribbon and tortoiseshell comb in her hair. One arm rests across her waist, the other is bent upward, and her hand is tucked under her chin. The comtesse looks directly ahead, and her slight smile and open expression invite the viewer into this lovely scene.
“Her contemplative pose, with hand to chin, is a motif Ingres revisits time and time again in portraits, history paintings, and surviving sketches,” says Carol Togneri, Chief Curator at the Norton Simon Museum. “The opportunity to have this beautiful portrait, as well as two working drawings that show his interest in this important detail, allows us to consider Ingres’s relationship and homage to antique art.”
“Although Ingres felt that posterity would judge him by his allegories, religious subjects and history paintings, it is his portraits – painted and drawn – that continue to mesmerize us today,” says Colin B. Bailey, Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator of The Frick Collection. “One of his most arresting is that of the twenty-seven-year-old Louise-Albertine de Broglie, comtesse d’Haussonville: daughter of a peer of the realm, wife of a member of the National Assembly, and future author of romantic novels and historical studies.
Through the sheer force of her personality-confident, thoughtful, and refined-d’Haussonville dominates this composition, which is a tour de force of verism in the rendering of dress, jewelry and fashionable accoutrements. Ingres worked intensively on this portrait during the first six months of 1845, and was delighted with its favorable reception, repeating the comment of a prominent politician to the sitter in a letter to his closest friend: ‘M Ingres must be in love with you to have painted you this way.”

About the Art Exchange Program
In 2007 the Norton Simon foundations entered a new phase in their history by forming an art exchange
program with both The Frick Collection in New York City and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Works of art from the Norton Simon foundations are lent to both of these estimable institutions for special viewings and, in return, masterpieces from their collections are presented at the Norton Simon Museum. The exchange is an opportunity to promote the Norton Simon collections to a much wider audience while simultaneously providing Southern California audiences the chance to view some of the world’s most significant and visually compelling paintings. The program launched in summer 2007 with the lending of the Norton Simon’s Rembrandt Portrait of a Boy (1655-60) to the National Gallery of Art. The first incoming loan was Johannes Vermeer’s A Lady Writing from the National Gallery of Art in fall 2008.

About the Norton Simon Museum
The Norton Simon Museum is known around the world as one of the most remarkable private art collections ever assembled. Over a thirty-year period, industrialist Norton Simon (1907–1993) amassed an astonishing collection of European art from the Renaissance to the 20th century and a stellar collection of South and Southeast Asian art spanning 2,000 years. Among the most celebrated works he collected are the Branchini Madonna, 1427, by Giovanni di Paolo; Madonna and Child with Book, c. 1502–03, by Raphael; Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose, 1633, by Francisco de Zurbarán; and Portrait of a Boy, 1655–60, by Rembrandt van Rijn.
The collection is particularly notable for its 19th-century works, including the Mûrier à Saint-Rémy (Mulberry Tree), 1889, by Vincent van Gogh, and a stunning selection of over 100 works by Degas. Masterpieces from the 20th century include works by Picasso, Modigliani, and Brancusi. Highlights from the Asian collection include the bronze sculptures Buddha Shakyamuni, c. 550, India: Bihar, Gupta period, and Shiva as King of Dance, c. 1000, India: Tamil Nadu; and the gilt bronze Indra, 13th century, Nepal.

Location: The Norton Simon Museum is located at 411 West Colorado Blvd. at Orange Grove Blvd. in Pasadena, California, at the intersection of the Foothill (210) and Ventura (134) freeways. For general Museum information, please call (626) 449-6840 or visit www.nortonsimon.org.
Hours: The Museum is open every day except Tuesday, from 12:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., and 12:00
noon to 9:00 p.m. on Friday.
Admission: General admission is $8.00 for adults and $4.00 for seniors. Members, students with I.D., and patrons age 18 and under are admitted free of charge. Admission is free for everyone on the first Friday of every month from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. All public programs, unless stated otherwise, are free.
The Museum is wheelchair accessible.
Parking: Parking is free and no reservations are necessary.
Public Transportation: The City of Pasadena provides a shuttle bus to transport passengers through the Pasadena Playhouse district, Lake Street shopping district, and Old Pasadena. A shuttle stop is located in front of the Museum. Visit www.cityofpasadena.net/artsbus for schedules. The MTA Bus Line #180/181 stops in front
of the Museum. The Memorial Park Station on the MTA Gold Line is the closest Metro Rail station to the Museum, located at 125 East Holly Street and Arroyo Parkway. Please visit www.metro.net for schedules.