LOS ANGELES, CA.- The J. Paul Getty Museum has acquired a collection of 209 photographs by French photographer Eugène Atget, two magnificent busts by French sculptor Charles Cordier, and a pair of rare bronze reliefs by the Italian Renaissance sculptor and architect Bartolomeo Ammannati.

“The transformational acquisition of Atget photographs, a portion of which is a gift to the Museum, makes our holdings of this artist among the most significant in the country,” said Timothy Potts, Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “We are especially grateful to Dan and Mary Solomon for their astute eye in building this collection and their generosity in offering it to Getty, where it will further enrich our representation of late 19th and early 20th century French photography by its most innovative and forward-looking practitioner.”

Potts continues: “The pair of portrait busts by Charles Cordier, representing a man and a woman of North African descent, are the most renowned and splendid of a series of studies the artist made of Black subjects as representations of universal beauty. These lavishly polychromed bronze and stone portraits will become one of the highlights of our 19th-century sculpture collection and provide a much-needed opportunity to critique the representation of Black subjects and narratives in colonial times.”

On the reliefs, Potts adds: “The two bronze reliefs by Ammannati are rare masterpieces of Renaissance sculpture by one of Michelangelo’s closest colleagues and friends. One of the reliefs is indeed an homage to the greatest of all 16th-century sculptors, and the impact of his achievement on Ammannati is clear in the second relief showing a pair of river gods.”

Eugene Atget Photographs

The Museum has added 209 photographs by Eugène Atget, who occupies a central position in the history of photography as a strikingly original figure. Atget’s career bridged the 19th and 20th centuries and his influence on the medium continues to this day. The group is a partial gift from Southern California collectors Dan and Mary Solomon, longtime supporters of the Getty Museum.

In his obsessive visual documentation of Paris and its environs, he invented new approaches to street photography and unlocked the genre’s potential for surreal poetry.

This acquisition represents all of Atget’s major series (Landscape-Documents, Picturesque Paris, Art in Old Paris, Topography of Old Paris, Saint-Cloud, Versailles, Sceaux, Tuileries, and Environs), as well as his varied subjects ranging from petits métiers (street merchants) to medieval alleys, modern shop fronts, stairways, architectural details and accessories, utilitarian vehicles, parks and trees, statuary, window reflections, interiors, sex workers, and encampments on the outskirts of Paris.

The acquisition includes early prints of several iconic subjects as well as two rare albums of Parisian views assembled during Atget’s lifetime. Among the past owners of Atget photographs in the Solomon collection are several important artists and writers including Tristan Tzara, André Derain, Ilse Bing, and Richard Avedon.

“Assembled methodically over the past 25 years, Mary and Dan Solomon’s Atget collection is the finest in private hands, and dramatically transforms Getty’s Atget holdings,” said Jim Ganz, senior curator of photographs. “Its acquisition gives the Museum the most important institutional collection of Atget in the United States after the Museum of Modern Art in New York.”

Sudanese Man and Woman from the French Colonies by French 19th-century ethnographic sculptor Charles Cordier.

Charles Cordier played a pioneering role in the revival of polychromed sculpture in France, often combining rare colored marbles with cast bronze to create visually arresting and complex representations. As the most significant sculptor to apply his art to the nascent field of ethnography, Cordier gained international fame for his sensitive depictions of Black and Asian sitters. “Getty’s new acquisitions count among the largest and most celebrated works of this artist, who always advocated for ‘the idea of the universality of beauty’” said Anne-Lise Desmas, senior curator of sculpture and decorative arts.

Cordier modeled the Sudanese Man during a governmental mission to Algeria in 1856. The sitter, a native of French Sudan (present-day Mali), lived in Algiers and had the respected role of tam-tam player for religious festivities organized before the start of Ramadan. Cordier most likely met the model for the Woman from the French Colonies, which he sculpted in 1861, in Paris. Characteristic of the racialized terms commonly used in Europe, Cordier titled the busts “Nègre du Soudan” or “Nègre en costume algérien” and “Câpresse des Colonies,” a term defining a person born from a Black parent and a biracial parent and who usually lived in the French colony of the Antilles.

The busts were shown by Cordier at exhibitions in London, Paris, Vienna, and Monaco. They exemplify his skills at portraiture, dignifying the sitters while preserving distinct features such as scars on the man’s cheeks. They also demonstrate his experimentation with polychrome materials like marble onyx for the vestments, silver for the ornaments, enamels for the jewels, and silvered bronze for the heads

The Apotheosis of Michelangelo and Allegory of the Tiber and the Arno, by Bartolomeo Ammannati

With this acquisition, Getty adds two magnificent representations of the genre of relief sculpture by Bartolomeo Ammannati, a prominent sculptor and architect of the Italian Renaissance. Sculpturally complex and rich in iconography, these sculptures were created as a tribute to the great Renaissance artist Michelangelo shortly after the latter’s death in 1564.

The Apotheosis of Michelangelo brings together a lively gathering of 44 figures with varied gestures and distinct facial features, all paying homage to Michelangelo. Among the individuals around him are celebrated contemporaries including Raphael and the respected poet Laura Battiferri, who married Ammannati in 1550 and composed a sonnet and chant for the funeral ceremony honoring Michelangelo.

Allegory of the Tiber and the Arno is a high-relief bronze displaying two gods that personify the rivers of Rome and Florence, the principal cities where Michelangelo worked. “The exquisite quality of the unique casts has preserved the delicate surface of the original wax models, a testament to Ammannati’s excellent skills as a sculptor in bronze”, said Anne-Lise Desmas.

The sculptures will go on view at the Getty Center later this year or early in 2023. Highlights of the Solomon collection of Atget photographs will be shown in Getty’s Center for Photographs in the spring of 2023; planning is underway for a major exhibition to mark the centennial of Atget’s death in 2027.