A Day at the Getty

[ling]

After breakfast, we headed over to the Getty Center.

View from the Getty

It’s situated on the top of a hill and you can only get there by tram. The Hubs mentioned that it would be a great holdout if there was ever a zombie attack, but then we later discovered a service road did lead to the building. The Hubs then said all we would need to do was blow up that service road.

The Getty is free, but you do have to pay for parking ($15). I’d suggest going with a car full of people to be both eco-friendly and economical.

It’s part art museum and part garden. I especially liked this hedge that looked like a maze.

We spent all day there looking at paintings. There was a whole section on religious imagery starting from the 1600′s (I think) to the present. There were various paintings of popes. I especially liked the painting of the Sleepy Pope. I would show you some paintings, except I was admonished for taking them. The security people told me that I couldn’t take any photos.

I also couldn’t drink any water. Not in any of the exhibits. Not in the museum stores. And definitely not in the hallways. We had to leave the building to get a drink of water.

You also couldn’t walk on the grass. But only some grass.

As you can see, there are tons of people on the grass, but when we walked on the grass, we got yelled at. I couldn’t tell the difference between walk-able grass and off-limits grass.

So everywhere I turned, a security personnel was there to tell me I couldn’t do whatever I was doing. I half expected them to tell me that I couldn’t look too long. But I digress.

Amongst the paintings, there were also a lot of scary looking baby paintings. My theory is that babies back then popped out of the womb looking wide-eyed and psychotic.

Most of the paintings aren’t well known at all, but are indicative of the era. They did have some famous one’s, but we kind of breezed through those. I think it was because we’ve seen them before, and so we didn’t need to painstakingly read all about them.

While we were there, they had a special exhibit on Gods of Ankor and Paris: Life and Luxury where we learned all about what a wealthy person did during the day in Paris. Of course, no pictures. I was done getting yelled at. Right now, they have an exhibit that I wish was there when we went. It’s all about fashion in the middle ages! But alas, we were a few weeks early.

I quite enjoyed spending the day there. I’m not really big on paintings, but I did enjoy looking at them. There were little descriptions about the paintings next to each one, and I think I like the history aspect of them. There was one that Jenn was looking at that explained why there was a random lily in the foreground. Well it turned out at some point in time, they chopped that painting in half and sold it in parts!

The Hubs, of course, totally enjoyed it. Work sent me to Chicago once and I took The Hubs with me. While I worked, he went down to the art museum and spent the day looking at all the paintings.

In summary, the Getty is totally worth a visit if you’ve got a lazy weekend afternoon.

Crossposted to Samantha Ling, Dreamwidth and Livejournal