Something’s still missing

For a project once dubbed the Commission of the Century, the Getty Center is marked by one major success and one major disappointment. The place is wildly successful as a tourist attraction, drawing nearly 14 million visitors in the last decade. But even though many (and maybe most) visitors are locals, the Brentwood complex hasn’t deeply embedded itself into the cultural fabric of Los Angeles.

The trustees’ choice of an ocean-view hilltop location pretty much secured tourism success, but it’s not entirely responsible for the failure. Building a campus physically separate from the city only erected an unnecessary hurdle. The deeper source of the problem lies elsewhere.

Just in time to be an anniversary emblem of the predicament, the Fran and Ray Stark Sculpture Collection, acquired in late 2005, was installed around the center’s campus in June. Parts of it are now the first things a visitor sees when arriving at the tram station for the ride up the hill. And the selection of 28 Modern sculptures careens between sheer magnificence and mind-boggling mediocrity.

A curatorial indifference to a high minimum standard of quality recapitulates the glaring flaw in the art collection left by J. Paul Getty at his death more than 40 years ago, when Rembrandt’s grave “St. Bartholomew” kept company with the clumsy frippery of a Dutch society portrait by Nicholaes Pickenoy. These motley sculptures won’t injure the steady clip of Getty Center tourism, but culturally engaged Angelenos have no particular reason to return again and again to see them.

When the Getty launched new collecting fields in the 1980s -- medieval manuscript paintings, photography -- it was with jaw-dropping acquisitions that ignited the imagination. Modern sculpture is also a new arena, but this haphazard selection mostly just looks extravagant. The Getty’s problem, in other words, has been an insufficient art commitment.

Odd but true. The institutional mission laid down by its oil tycoon benefactor is for “the diffusion of artistic and general knowledge,” and the general has gotten in the way of the artistic. Fully experiencing a work of art is the highest form of that enlightenment -- and the better the art, the more profound the experience. There’s no replacement for it.

The Getty has certainly added first-class masterpieces to its museum collection -- Titian’s 1533 court portrait of an Italian general, poignantly attended by an adoring page; Rubens’ rediscovered panel-painting of boisterous mortal combat between man and animal, taken from a famous scene in Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” and more. But for every one of those, there has been an irreplaceable Duccio devotional painting (now in the Metropolitan Museum), a Velasquez portrait (now in the Prado), an eccentric bust by F.X. Messerschmidt (now in the Louvre), the “Borromeo Madonna,” attributed to Donatello (now in the Kimbell), Raphael’s portrait of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s grandson (now in a private collection) or a late-medieval sculpture by the pivotal German genius Tilman Riemenschneider (now in a British foundation) on which the Getty inexplicably took a pass.

In the context of art that got away -- and only those works for sale publicly, not privately, can be known -- some acquisitions induce a wince.

James Tissot was an adept Victorian portraitist and religious painter, and his best work may well be found among the paintings he made before leaving Paris for London in 1870. But however fine his 1866 “Portrait of the Marquise de Miramon, nee Therese Feuillant,” which the Getty recently put on view, the picture remains a fine example by a second- or third-tier artist.

In myriad areas the Getty Center does rate high on the achievement scale for specialists and art professionals. The Research Institute’s nearly million-volume library is a marvel. Residencies and grants to scholars and institutions globally have been a boon. The Conservation Institute has rescued treasures -- including video art -- no one else would (or sometimes could), inventing new techniques and training other conservators in the process.

That’s all good. For the Los Angeles public, it’s also the submerged and hidden mass of the Getty Center iceberg, whose tip consists of the art on view at the Brentwood site.

The collection surged from passable to admirable in the run-up to the 1997 opening, but it’s seemed pretty much stalled there ever since, inching forward much too slowly for my taste. Artistically, the sure-bet has been the exhibition program -- especially the major presentations in the temporary-exhibitions pavilion.

The Getty Museum’s 10-year run of exhibitions isn’t just admirable; it’s great -- a virtually unbroken string of exceptionally engaging shows. When the building opened, there was some grumbling that the modest size of the special exhibition gallery--about 7,000 square feet -- couldn’t accommodate a blockbuster extravaganza. In reality that supposed flaw is an asset.

With no room for extraneous fluff, sharply focused presentations have included the surprising (brilliant Dutch Mannerist sculptor Adriaen de Vries), the experimental (new commissions by 11 L.A. artists) and the seemingly impossible (Byzantine icons that almost never leave Sinai, Egypt).

“Medieval Treasures from the Cleveland Museum of Art” is the current stellar offering (through Jan. 20). Unexpectedly, its coincidence with the Getty Center’s 10th anniversary is also instructive.

Cleveland’s museum maintains one of North America’s great permanent collections of early Christian, Byzantine and medieval European paintings, sculptures and decorative arts, assembled over six decades by two distinguished connoisseurs, William M. Milliken and William D. Wixom, beginning in 1916. The show quotes Milliken’s collecting philosophy -- “to buy quality, never to fill in a gap in the collection.” Leaving a gap, he continued, was better than plugging it with “a mediocre work of art.”

Ironically, a painted and gilded sculpture by Riemenschneider is the show’s signature image. A crisply carved figure of Saint Lawrence elegantly clutches a prayer book in one bony hand and, in the other, the iron grill on which legend says the martyr was summarily roasted because he wouldn’t renounce his faith. It’s an astounding object.

The Christian saint is carved from linden wood for structural sturdiness -- linden resists warping -- but the wood is also associated in medieval German lore with the Virgin Mary. The complex form is a cylinder overlaid on a lozenge and a sphere, all visually sewn together by a supple S-curve. Gilded for maximum effect, it would flicker in candlelight like a flame. A symbol of heavenly protection and peace is magically materialized.

This incarnate exercise in intricate geometric perfection evokes a universe of faultless order and supreme grace. Seeing it just made me miss all the more the Riemenschneider the Getty didn’t buy six years ago, while the Tissot portrait promptly murmured “gap-filler.”

It’s fashionable now to say that the connoisseurship model of museum art collecting (like Cleveland’s) is obsolete. Yet fashion is charming precisely because it’s foolish.

It’s similarly lacking in good sense or judgment not to put the permanent collection first in line among worthwhile Getty priorities, especially because the museum’s collecting ambitions are not encyclopedic. Depth is way more important than breadth.

With a new administrative team now in place, maybe the 20th anniversary will look different.

christopher.knight@latimes.com