Rare Book Week West: Exhibitions

If you're heading down to California this week for Rare Book Week West - and the 49th Annual California Antiquarian Book Fair  - here are a few special exhibitions at local institutions to tempt you (briefly) away from the bookseller stalls:

1) The Getty: In Focus: Daguerreotypes. "This exhibition presents a selection of one-of-a-kind images from among the Museum's two thousand daguerreotypes, alongside those from the collection of Graham Nash."

Also: Traversing the Globe Through Illuminated Manuscripts. "This exhibition features illuminated manuscripts and painted book arts from the 9th through the 17th century that bring to life in stunning ways the real and imagined places that one encounters on their pages."

2) The Huntington: Friends and Family: British Artists Depict Their Circle.  Portraiture from the mid-18th through the early 20th centuries. "This exhibition presents another, more personal side of British portraiture. A wide-ranging selection of small-scale portraits in various media shows how artists from the mid -18th to the early 20th centuries portrayed subjects well-known to them in the prevailing artistic styles of the day - from the fashionable pastels of the Georgian era, to the careful observations of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood a century later, to the avant-garde abstractions of the modernists." (Free admission if you've purchased a $25.00 ticket to the California Antiquarian Book Fair).

3) Los Angeles County Museum of Art: Living for the Moment: Japanese Prints from the Barbara S. Bowman Collection. Over one hundred prints of the genre known as ukiyo-e, or pictures of the floating world. "During the Edo period (1615-1868), commercially printed ukiyo-e showed the sensualist priorities of Japanese at a time when a shogunal government restricted nearly all aspects of life."