Looking for a sense of direction
Christopher Wood on the malaise affecting the Getty Museum in Los Angeles
The Getty is under siege. As the richest museum in the world, it is bound to attract more than its fair share of attention, and criticism. Recently, it has received a huge amount of bad press, some of it deserved, some not. Following the resignation of Barry Munitz, the controversial chairman of the trustees, in February, there appeared in the New York Times a scathing attack on the Getty and all its works by a respected journalist, Michael Kimmelman. Other articles have followed, including a long exposé in Vanity Fair magazine in March. It appears everyone is having a go at the Getty. So what is one to make of all this? Where did the Getty go so disastrously wrong, and can it recover?
The trouble goes right back to the beginning, to the secretive and enigmatic character of J. Paul Getty himself, who died without ever even visiting his Roman villa at Malibu. I remember seeing him at Christie’s in the 1960s and marvelling that a rich man could look so utterly miserable. His will was regrettably vague, and gave no clear indication about how his money was to be spent. From the start, the Getty Trust (a creation of the trustees) fell into the wrong hands. The men administering it were bankers, lawyers and politicians, men with no sympathy for art and no understanding of how to run a museum. They distrusted the art historians and curators hired to run the Getty, and thought they could not possibly be trusted to handle all this money. So a gulf grew between the trustees and the directors, which has persisted to this day. From this basic fact stems all the troubles of the Getty. All museums with trustees have the same problem. The trustees appoint friends and cronies, who are reluctant to unseat each other and who are notoriously difficult to get rid of; they are now mostly appointed for a fixed term.
These trustees decided that the Getty Trust should not be merely a museum; it should also be a philanthropic institution. So they set about funding books, libraries, research projects, conservation, performances, symposiums and a host of other programmes, all of which absorbed huge amounts of money. So costly were these programmes that the museum was starved of funds to make new acquisitions. The trustees even created a rivalry between the museum and the programmes, whereby the museum had to compete with them for money. The financing of the museum, as happens in institutions, became more and more complex, labyrinthine, even Orwellian, thus putting more and more power into the hands of the trustees. Some argue that this whole philanthropic apparatus is a mistake, and merely a by-product of the vanity and folly of the trustees. That debate still rages.
The culminating display of power by the trustees was the creation of the new Getty Center in Los Angeles, which opened in 1997. This huge, white fortress, designed by Richard Meier, cost over $1 billion, and looms up on a hill beside the San Diego Freeway. It has staggering views over the whole of the city, and the ocean; it is not far from the original Getty Villa at Malibu, the museum’s first home. The entrance is pure James Bond. Cars are parked in huge underground bunkers, and visitors then go to a platform and catch a small train which takes them to the top. One’s first impression is not of a museum, but of a campus. There are at least nine or ten separate buildings, divided by walkways, balconies, and very modernistic gardens and waterways. It is all quite confusing, and one certainly needs a map to get round. I managed to locate all the buildings, except one particularly plain, slabby block, which friends at the museum told me was where they kept the money. This block was significantly larger than any of the others. The day I visited, the museum was teeming with visitors; the young declare it to be ‘way cool’.
Having been round all the galleries, seen the French furniture and Old Masters that were Mr Getty’s great loves, beautifully displayed, in excellent galleries, I pondered whether the Getty is in fact a great museum. The answer is resoundingly no, not yet. It can in no way be compared to great American museums such as the National Gallery and the Metropolitan, or even with Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and many others. This again raises a fundamental question. Is the Getty right only to buy those things that Mr Getty liked? Here again, the answer must be no. There simply are not enough major Old Masters available. Even when there are, the Getty has mysteriously failed to buy them. They recently turned down a Velázquez portrait, which was then bought by the Prado, raising the inevitable question, if it was good enough for the Prado, why was it not good enough for the Getty?
The obvious answer would have been for the Getty to move into 19thand 20thcentury art, an area where they could have made a significant impact. As it is, they made a few, rather haphazard forays into the 19th century, as yet achieving nothing important. Mr Getty did in fact buy Alma-Tadema and J.W. Godward, and Alma-Tadema’s picture ‘Spring’ is still the most popular in the museum. This is a source of continual annoyance to the directors and curators. So intellectual snobbery has played a part, too. The Getty has bought in other areas, such as Old Master drawing and photography. Here they have bought wonderful things, but what is lacking is an overall sense of direction, a clear focus on what the Getty wants to be. What the Getty needs, of course, as every museum needs, is a strong director with a vision, and a supportive board of trustees to back him up. The Getty has got it the wrong way round — the trustees have too much power, the director not enough.
Another great love of Mr Getty was Roman and Greek antiquities. These are now superbly displayed in the Getty villa at Malibu, which has emerged triumphantly from an eight-year restoration. For once, the Getty has got this spectacularly right and the villa has been hailed on all sides as a success. The downside is the controversy surrounding the now retired curator of antiquities, Marion True. She is awaiting trial in Italy for allegedly illegally exporting Italian antiquities. There is a great deal of sympathy for her in Los Angeles. She was well-liked and respected; it is thought that she was misled by dealers, who were being economical with the truth. Many other American museums are in trouble on the same score. This is not something that can justifiably be laid solely at the Getty’s door.
I found very little support in Los Angeles for Mr Barry Munitz, referred to by some as ‘the rat’. Quite why the Getty trustees appointed Munitz is not clear, but this is typical of the malaise affecting the whole institution. A rather Flash Harry character, fond of sharp suits and fast cars, Mr Munitz had a varied business past, including a period with a lumber company involved in cutting down giant redwood trees. He had also been disqualified from holding any directorships of banks or savings companies. And yet Mr Munitz was made chairman in 1997. He greatly enjoyed the publicity and the perks, but quickly began falling out with the staff. In particular, the director, Deborah Gribbon, a much-respected figure, resigned in 2002. Numerous others have left, citing philosophical differences with Munitz. Munitz also appointed the hugely unpopular Jill Murphy as a chief of staff; she was a young woman with no arts background, whom Munitz met when she was working as a waitress at California State University. Mercifully, to the intense relief of all the staff, she has also gone.
So, hopefully, a new era for the Getty is about to begin. It is not too late. There is still plenty of money, and plenty of talent. The curator of paintings, Scott Schaeffer, is an experienced museum man who also had eight years’ experience at Sotheby’s. One sad loss is Norman Kurland, the much-liked Getty Trust representative in London, who seems to have been swept out with the Munitz regime. But the Getty has, in its first 20 years, achieved some great things, and created two remarkable buildings. It is the next 20 years which will decide if it is to become a great museum. Meanwhile, the saga goes on.
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