European Drawings - 1, Catalogue of the Collections

FOREWORD

The Getty Museum's collection of drawings is seven years old, a small child among the mature

museum collections of the world, but a child with promise.

In the spring of 1981 , George R. Goldner, who was then head of the Museum's photographic

archive, proposed to the Trustees that they bid at auction for the Rembrandt chalk study of a nude, the so-

called Cleopatra. Dr. Goldner's timing was perfect. For while J. Paul Getty had never bought drawings, and

although since his death in 1976 the Trustees had not strayed outside the three established areas of the col-

lection—antiquities, French furniture and decorative arts, and European paintings—Getty had left a huge

bequest, and it was clear that the Museum's collection could now be broadened as well as strengthened. Dr.

Goldner, a specialist in Italian art, argued that the Museum could form a collection that eventually might

become one of the finest in the world. He reasoned that there were enough private collections to provide

a relatively generous supply of important examples for a long time to come, and that buying the Rem-

brandt seemed a brilliant way to start. The Trustees agreed, and their bid for the Rembrandt was successful.

By the time I arrived at the Museum in 1983, Dr. Goldner, who was in charge of drawings part-

time, had secured some forty of them for the collection and had demonstrated that he was obviously the

man to head a new department of drawings. Later that same year Nancy Yocco joined the department as

conservation assistant. In 1984 a study room was created and a gallery fitted out for rotating exhibitions

from the collection; in 1985 Lee Hendrix became assistant curator. Since then the department has been

working intensively at collecting, exhibiting, publishing, lending, and facilitating scholarship.

There are now more than two hundred drawings in the Museum's collection. The reader will see
from the proportion of examples of various schools and periods that we have been concentrating during

this period on the rarest material, mainly from the Italian and German Renaissance; trying to find the best

drawings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; acquiring nineteenth-century drawings only when

the greatest opportunities arose; and adding superb drawings by artists whose names will never be house-

hold words.

The rate at which the collection is growing ensures that this catalogue will immediately be out-

dated, so we intend to issue a sequel in five years or so. This volume, like the collection itself, owes every-

thing to the energy of and skill of the curator.

John Walsh

Director