GETTY’S VISITING GUINEA PIG SCHOLARS

When the accompanying New Yorker cartoon was circulated among the Getty’s first batch of visiting scholars, most accepted the humor as inadvertently timely. So did Janet Cox-Rearick, a New York art historian--until she saw that the cartoon was the work of her brother-in-law, Joseph Farris, who has been hearing a great deal about the innovative new program at the Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities in Santa Monica.

Farris didn’t get the setting right. Scholars don’t nest in domestic quarters; they have small, sleek offices with coastal views, computers of their choice and swarms of worker bees to retrieve books and papers from the vast library and archives.

The cartoon did, however, capture the puzzlement that surrounds the “guinea pigs” of the Getty’s nascent program: What brings these favored people to Southern California and why aren’t they working like the rest of us? Is this an academic boondoggle?

Only if you insist upon immediate, tangible results and have no faith in the long-range benefits of research and think tanks.

“The program will have an effect on the field--in publications and ideas generated or finished here--but that’s down the road,” said Herbert H. Hymans, the center’s assistant director who is in charge of visiting scholars and conferences.

“It’s a little bit like baking bread,” echoed Center Director Kurt W. Forster, when asked to assess the impact of the scholars’ efforts. “What is in this loaf will be found when it is sliced.” With dozens of projects in the works and others taking shape in the minds of the scholars, the bread is still in the oven.

The center charges its visiting scholars “with absolutely no obligation to produce,” Hymans said. “What we’re really providing is time, free from teaching and administration. “

The 11 invited scholars (seven Americans and four Europeans) in the 1985-86 program have pursued individual projects of their own choice, but they also have pooled their knowledge with a diverse group of specialists. Freed from their academic posts by the center (which matches their salaries and provides housing), they can concentrate on studies which would otherwise be sandwiched between more mundane duties.

Getty scholars are participants in the J. Paul Getty Trust’s master plan to integrate the often isolated territory of art history into the wider sphere of the humanities. Though the Center for Art History and the Humanities is only one of seven trust enterprises, its emphasis on “fostering an interdisciplinary re-examination of art in cultures past and present” exemplifies the trust’s philosophy.

“It’s enriching to be thrown in with such a bunch,” said Janet Cox-Rearick, who teaches Italian and French Renaissance art at Hunter College. “My first conversation with (fellow scholar) Jan Kott was on the sex of the serpent in the Garden of Eden.” Noting that “the bunch” is larger than the 11 resident specialists, she said that a casual meeting with Edward Maeder, the County Museum of Art’s curator of costumes and textiles, recently led to a serious plan for a joint study of Renaissance costumes in painting.

The visitors describe a work-a-day, study-filled life in a stylish complex designed by architects Batey & Mack on the upper floors of a Santa Monica bank building, a temporary location until a facility in Brentwood being designed by Richard Meier is completed.

Researching everything from Renaissance paintings to the influence of Roman aesthetics on literary traditions, the scholars use the Getty’s art history and archives, as well as major resources at UCLA and other local institutions. The Getty’s library has grown from 30,000 to 450,000 volumes in less than three years and is expected to be the world’s largest by 1990. Among recent purchases are whole libraries and lifetime collections of experts, including Douglas Cooper, the world’s leading scholar of Cubism, and Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, a renowned architectural historian.

The scholars who work with these materials are invited “with a view toward what they have done and how they would fit into our interdisciplinary program,” Hymans said. “We don’t take a narrow look at art historical research; it’s a broader view of, say, art and science or art and architecture.”

Forster and an advisory committee compile lists of candidates for the program, Hymans explained. “Then we look at their achievements and at our resources to see if the pairing would be productive. This year we invited with no view to a pattern or nucleus.”

Though the first year’s roster is dominated by art historians, it also includes a cultural historian, Carlo Ginzburg, from the University of Bologna; a musicologist, H. Wiley Hitchcock, a professor at the City University of New York and founding director of the Institute for Studies in American Music at Brooklyn College; a historian of Roman architecture, William MacDonald, who formerly taught at Yale University and Smith College, and a historian of popular culture, Jan Kott, professor emeritus of literature and theater at the State University of New York, Stony Brook.

The mix of expertise and erudition suits Thomas Gaehtgens, who took a leave from directing the Art History Institute at the Free University of Berlin to work at the center. “I know my field and the people in it. My inspiration comes from contact with different fields. This year was really just paradise.

As members of an intellectually lively group, objects of curiosity and visitors in an intriguing city, the scholars agree that the program has inherent distractions. “I probably would have done more work if had gone off by myself to the South of France,” Gaehtgens said. “And the idea that you can leave administrative duties behind is an illusion. I still get telephone calls and letters (from colleagues and students in Berlin). But what is special here is the intellectual challenge provided by living together and meeting at the center.

“Oh, we talk about politics, how to get to Joshua Tree Monument (for an organized excursion), where to buy the cheapest T-shirts and which are the best restaurants. But at the same time, there is the inspiration of intellectual exchange. Whether we write a little more or a little less while we’re here doesn’t matter. What’s important is the exchange with other visiting scholars and with the enormous number of people who drop in here.”

A specialist in both Renaissance and 19th-Century art history who also has a strong interest in 20th-Century American art, Gaehtgens has spent the year working on a catalogue raisonne of Joseph-Marie Vien (a French history painter and teacher of Jacques-Louis David) and advancing his study of American painter Marsden Hartley’s work. He points to the Getty’s cache of auction catalogues (dated from 1599 forward) as a boon to his Vien study and says he also found letters from Hartley to German painter Franz Marc in the archive.

Cox-Rearick, who has authored a major Princeton publication called “Dynasty and Destiny in Medici Art,” was writing a book on Bronzino’s Chapel of Eleonora of Toledo (at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence) when she was invited to study at the Getty center. “This was an ideal opportunity to pull my notes together and learn how to use a word processor,” she said. “The library here is amazing and, of course, the museum has Bronzino’s ‘St. John the Baptist’ (from the same chapel), so I’ve had an opportunity to study that.”

She and Hitchcock, her husband, arrived several months later than most of the other scholars, but they extended their stay through July, giving up their treasured habit of working each summer at Villa I Tatti, a fabled center of Renaissance study in Florence that was once the home of Bernard Berenson.

“I love the work setup. I can’t get enough of it,” Hitchcock said. Though the Getty’s art history resources are not well suited to his musicology needs, he has used UCLA’s library (on line for scholars’ use at the Getty) and he has participated in academic programs at Southern California universities.

Author of “Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction” and co-editor of the “New Grove Dictionary of American Music,” Hitchcock came to Los Angeles with “a general goal” of getting acquainted with California’s composers and music community and “a specific goal” of studying the parallels between Minimal art and music.

Next year’s scholars, due to arrive in September, will also compose an interdisciplinary cadre, but their study will have “a double focus,” Forster said. “The larger subject is how art is produced in real-life circumstances. The narrower focus is on art in 17th-Century Dutch culture.”

The new group of scholars--including specialists in economic and political history--will study “the emergence of a bourgeois approach to art,” Forster said. “Instead of being directed by a system of courtly or ecclesiastical patronage, art entered the public domain in 17th-Century Holland.”

Citing “a lot of excitement and interest” in the theme, Forster said he expected that a “substantial publication” will result and hoped that exhibitions on art and life in Holland will develop. He also looks forward to more interaction between the scholars and personnel at the J. Paul Getty Museum and other branches of the trust.

While imagining the flavors that may emerge from next year’s batch of bread, Forster remains a patient baker: “We don’t impose. We bring people together from different parts of the world who have a common interest and give them an opportunity to be creative, hone their ideas and relate to each other.”