Getty Museum reopens sculpture and decorative arts galleries

Starting this week, visitors to the Getty Center in Brentwood will have access to works recently acquired by the museum, including Pietro Cipriani's "Medici Venus and Dancing Faun" and a 9-foot bronze vase by the French sculptor Jean-Désiré Ringel d'Illzach.

The artwork will be displayed in the museum's newly reconfigured sculpture and decorative arts galleries in the West Pavilion, whose collection had been off-limits for the past six months.

The galleries were closed in late February to prepare for the installation of the recent Leonardo da Vinci exhibition that ran through June. During that show, art work from the collection was put in storage to make way for Da Vinci.

The newly reinstalled suite of galleries includes works from the Neoclassical period through late Neoclassicism and Romanticism, culminating with the Symbolist period.

David Bomford, acting director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, said in a statement that the reconfigured galleries are intended "to create a showcase" for the recently acquired works and to "reinvigorate" the general display of the sculpture and decorative arts collection.

One recently acquired work that visitors won't be able to view just yet is "The Vexed Man," an alabaster bust by Austrian sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. The work is currently on loan to a Messerschmidt exhibition opening in September at the Neue Galerie in New York, and then will travel to the Louvre in Paris in the first half of 2011.