CONTEMPORARY CHINESE PHOTOGRAPHS PURCHASED BY GETTY MUSEUM; GUERRILLA GIRLS ARCHIVE ACQUIRED BY GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE
Wang Qingsong’s theatrical, large-scale photographs have climbed in price to over eight hundred thousand dollars, from forty thousand in 2006, writes Katya Kazakina for Bloomberg. Now, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles has purchased three prints by Wang and six by Hai Bo, who contrasts photographs of friends and relatives taken during China’s Cultural Revolution with their recent portraits. “If the Getty is spending money on Chinese contemporary photography, it says something,” Larry Warsh, a New York dealer who sold the photographs to the Getty, said in a telephone interview. The nine prints are the Getty’s first acquisition of recent Chinese photography, Judith Keller, acting senior curator of the Getty’s photography department, said in a phone interview. The museum is planning an exhibition of contemporary Chinese photography in late 2010. The Getty paid about one hundred thousand dollars for the works, Warsh said. Keller declined to confirm the price.
In other news, the Los Angeles Times confirms the blog Modern Art Notes’ reports that the Getty Research Institute has acquired the papers of the Guerrilla Girls for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition includes documents, letters, and artwork created by the radical-feminist art group from 1985 to 2000. News of the acquisition surfaced on Modern Art Notes on Monday, but the Getty told the Times that the purchase took place in the spring of 2008. The institute said that it hasn’t formally announced the acquisition yet and that it often waits several months in such cases for cataloguing to take place.
The acquisition comprises approximately thirty to forty boxes of material from the Guerrilla Girls’ common archive, according to one of the group’s founding members, who would identify herself only as “Kathe Kollwitz.” Over the years, the Getty Research Institute has acquired a number of works by the Guerrilla Girls, including forty-eight posters, most copies of their books, and the quarterly newsletter Hot Flashes.
