THE GETTY--AN ARTFUL RAIDER OF OPPORTUNITY

The J. Paul Getty Museum isn’t just a wealthy art repository, it is an international phenomenon whose every move ignites curiosity, consternation and controversy. Let it decide to build a new museum and study center in Brentwood. Famous architects grow giddy while grass roots guardians of the public weal bark like alarmed terriers. The Getty is elitist. The Getty disdains the man in the street.

Let it be rumored in England that the museum will bid on a masterwork at auction (as in its recent record purchase of a $10.5-million painting by Andrea Mantegna), and the London press sounds shrill fanfares of dismay. After the sale an indignant British museum director says the Getty has not played fair and he intends to mount a public subscription to retain the picture. The Getty will force prices out of reach of any but themselves. The Getty will plunder the artistic patrimony of the Sceptered Isle.

Let the museum hire a curator from a magnificent Manhattan culture palace and that island is abuzz with muffled vituperation. “What they do is certainly legal and probably ethical,” said one well-placed factotum, “but they lack, well, dignity. They are in their buccaneer phase and are just going to have to learn better.”

On a sunny Malibu Monday when the museum is closed to the public, there is absolutely nothing sinister about driving onto the grounds. Birds chirp, auto tires plunk over huge stones paving the drive and security guards speak with hushed politeness. The rather outrageous architecture of the re-created Roman villa that is the museum looks less like Kalifornia Kitsch and more like an academic’s paradisiacal fantasy.

Neither is there much of the swashbuckler about Museum Director John Walsh, who has agreed to answer questions and get a visitor caught up on recent activities. Walsh, an impeccably credentialed expert in 17th-Century Dutch painting, came to the Getty from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston via other curatorial posts at New York’s Frick Collection and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He taught art history as a professor at Columbia and Harvard universities and Barnard college.

Not yet two years as director, Walsh, 47, is looking less boyish. He sits in an office apparently furnished out of an English antiques’ magazine. Dress is slightly rumpled-conservative, he stoops a bit from his Lincolnesque height and his manner--a mixture of soothing charm and candor--is laced with weary amusement. (This rue may come from awareness of being in a position without much wiggle room. Assertiveness is immediately interpreted as arrogance. Modesty, usually a becoming virtue, is a mainline to the sound of pious cant--like the howler he got off after the Mantega purchase when he referred to the Getty as a “small and specialized institution.”)

“Buccaneers?” he chuckled. “Someone said we were buccaneers? I wonder what made them say that? Maybe after we bought the photographs.” (A headline-making purchase of some 20,000 photos made last year at an estimated worth of $20 million, which Walsh says is much too high.)

“We had said we would not get into modern art but the photo collections were there and we saw it as an opportunity we could not pass up. There are no great photography collections out here. It was a chance to do something that would make a difference. Most of the pictures are 19th Century but we did rather slip into modern art. Maybe after that people got the impression we would do anything. Well we won’t.”

In the process of acquiring its photographic collections, the museum hired the Met’s curator of photography, Weston Naef. The museum’s curatorial staff has been significantly expanded by adding, among others, Myron Laskin from Canada’s National Gallery at Ottowa as curator of painting and Peter Fusco from the County Museum of Art as curator of a new department of sculpture and works of art. The expansion has inspired below-stairs complaints about talent raids.

“Of course we raid other museums,” Walsh confessed amiably. “That’s how you get good people. But we do not make outrageous offers. Our salaries are competitive but not unfair. We raid and in turn will be raided. That’s the way these things are done.”

“Opportunists? That is no insult. I’m delighted to be perceived as an opportunist. Along with a good eye and good taste one of the indispensable attributes in this profession is to seize opportunities to do great things in the field.

“There is a general level of anxiety out there because people know we are buying but the truth is we are really acquiring in a fairly narrow swath when you think of what we are not doing. No contemporary art, no Oriental, Indian, Islamic or pre-Columbian. No costumes, no arms and armor. . . .

“The museum is stuck with a number of fantasies that people have about it. There is something fantastic about the basic idea that Mr. Getty, in life, had the reputation as one of the world’s greatest skinflints and then after death revealed himself as probably the most generous benefactor art has ever had. I can’t help feeling he’s somewhere having a good chuckle over the whole thing.”

The irony deepens contemplating the fact that Getty loved England and spent most of his later life in the country that now regards his museum as a ravenous bete noir that feeds on its great artworks.

“I think that England’s fears grow out of their own situation but they blamed them on something they could name, that is us. England has staggering inheritance taxes which put great pressure on the landed families to sell their art. They translated that into a belief that our museum--backed by something insidious called, “foreign oil money”--was impelled by our tax laws to spend millions each month on art, their art. Of course that’s not so.

“England is in an ambiguous situation which is reflected in her export laws. The U.S. and the Swiss have open art markets. Spain and Italy are closed and France is nearly closed so there is no question about that. England tries to both preserve the sellers’ rights and retain their national patrimony. It’s a situation that invites trouble.

“I think the attitude of the English press and public is slowly changing. They are beginning to make a distinction between the cumulative collections of the great houses and, say, a single Italian picture held there out of public view since the 19th Century. How can that be part of the national heritage when it has never been part of the national life?

“Occasionally we feel a little wounded at the attitude that California has no heritage. Why should an Italian Renaissance painting mean more in England that in does here? It’s all part of that fantasy view that says, ‘What has Mantegna got to do with Malibu?’

“But we say we will not buy a work that is clearly part of a nation’s patrimony and we don’t. I think we are scrupulous. Recently we really wanted the German medieval ‘Gospels of Henry Lion.’ It would have been the acquisition of the century but we asked ourselves where it really belongs and purposely passed it up.” (The rare work was finally purchased at Sotheby’s by a German museum for a record $11.9 million.)

“We do such things regularly without fuss or announcement. We also say we are determined not to contribute to inflating prices on the art market. It just doesn’t make sense. We would alienate our colleagues and wind up paying the prices we helped inflate. Undoubtedly we are one of many forces nudging up prices but we try to get every work cheaply. We attend every auction with a limit on what we will bid. We hate to lose but we won’t pay unreasonable prices.

“I wish we could avoid ever announcing a price on a work of art. I hate the idea that Mr. and Mrs. Jones come into the gallery and can’t see the picture in front of them because they are so busy wondering why it is worth X million dollars. That’s not the point.

“And no we are not elitist. We’re working on plans to improve access to the museum by bus. The Brentwood facility will be tranquil but it will be even easier to reach. We have improved our little restaurant so people can relax and boost their blood sugar to enhance their enjoyment of the art. We want to open up more of the grounds for pleasureable wandering in a park like that of the Roman countryside. We’ve planted an herb garden of types used in antiquity. Come I’ll show you.”

On the way Walsh provided a whirlwind tour. “The decorative arts is shifting slightly away from the ‘grand parade’ sort of furniture towards things people actually lived with. Here’s a new batch of our Old Master drawings. People are surprised to see we have this many Rembrants. The Van Dyke is a great drawing.

“Look at all these paintings. We are not just interested in blockbuster masterworks. Here is a very nice classical landscape by an obscure Dane.”

The Getty makes headlines so frequently it creates an impression of being splashy and media-conscious but the truth is it tends to go quietly about its business like a traditional museum. Proof is in the number of fine works that simply materialize on their walls between one visit and the next. Since the last time most devotees turned their backs, Dierick Bouts’ widely publicized and briefly controversial “Annunciation” arrived looking delicately poetic but so have such unheralded masterworks as Jean Francois Millet’s legendary “Man With a Hoe” and and a whole gallery full of Dutch pictures of which Walsh is understandably proud.

Edvard Munch’s “Starry Night” comes as a surprise. The pioneer Norwegian expressionist is another example of the Getty being more modern than one expects but perfectly self-justifying in terms of both quality and significance. It was the first picture in Munch’s endless cycle called “The Frieze of Life.”

Despite the Getty’s various rationalized pronouncements about what it is and is not up to, one suspects that the bottom line is a quest for quality. When Walsh speculates about the future of the collection his most frequent points of aspiration are the Frick in New York and the Cleveland Museum, both famous for their selectivity and connoisseurship.

He sees the collections growing slowly under the guidance of curatorial expertise. But what about a windfall such as the persistent and persistently denied rumor of some eventual marriage between the Getty and Norton Simon’s collections?

“I have nothing to report. Mr. Simon is a thoughtful man and he is considering his options. More I cannot say. It would be a shame if that collection broke up or left town. It is an extraordinary testament to one man’s taste, brains and courage. There is nothing like it.”

Walsh winds up the tour with a stroll through a new conservation facility. It has been moved from the museum basement into a separate building originally erected as a residence for Getty. He never occupied the structure, which has been constantly remodeled as galleries, offices and now a high-tech lab.

Affable people in white coats momentarily stopped scrubbing a statue’s feet or piecing fragments of a Greek vase to say hello to the director.

“We care passionately about the condition of objects. Conservation is immensely expensive and requires great effort. The public never sees what goes on here but if it helps make the museum seductive and stimulating to laymen it is worth it. The best museums do that. They don’t cut corners or talk down.

“In school I switched from the study of modern poetry to art history. I can’t paint well myself but I think there is a contribution to be made by us highly empathic go-betweens. I like to sail with my family and to travel. Lately I’ve been visiting archeological sites to flesh out my sense of antique art. I miss teaching and full-time scholarship but my favorite thing is to put a new work in the galleries and stand back and watch people enjoy it. That’s why I think I am in the right job.”

Getty Director John Walsh:

‘Of course we raid other museums. That’s how you get good people. But we do not make outrageous offers. We raid and in turn will be raided. That’s the way it’s done.’