GETTY TRUST BUYS MAJOR ART LIBRARY

The J. Paul Getty Trust has purchased the late Wilhelm F. Arntz’s art library and archive for about $1.8 million, The Times has learned. Considered by experts to be the largest and most comprehensive 20th-Century art library in private hands, the cache contains about 60,000 pieces including books and catalogues, manuscripts, illustrations, sketchbooks and ephemera collected in Germany by an eminent scholar.

“It is one of the finest collections in existence, one we can build on for decades,” said Anne-Mieke Halbrook, librarian of the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities.

Halbrook characterized Arntz’s objective as “to compile as complete a documentation as possible of 20th-Century art, particularly German.” She said the library and archive encompass “all aspects of 20th-Century art” but are “most complete” in materials on the seminal German Expressionist schools of Der Blaue Reiter, Die Brucke and on second-generation followers of the movement.

Although the J. Paul Getty Museum does not collect modern art, the library covers “the entire range of art history,” according to Halbrook. Its aim is “to become a comprehensive library for the study of art history within the context of the humanities,” she noted. In 3 1/2 years the Getty library’s holdings have grown from 30,000 to 500,000 volumes, including several other collections on modern art.

The Getty has a firm policy of not disclosing purchase prices, but the German press has reported the sale at about 4 million deutsche marks (about $1.8 million at the time of purchase).

Though the transaction took place late last spring, the trust made no public announcement of the acquisition. When the news came to light here recently, it had the ring of a typical Getty story: Super-rich American institution buys national treasure and spirits it off to California while natives mourn the exodus of their cultural heritage.

But this time the familiar elements have a different twist. For one thing, the purchase took place in Germany and not England where resistance to the Getty’s buying power has been most vociferous. For another, the German press did not blame the Getty for whisking away the German-based archive.

Editorials by Reinhard Muller-Mehlis, in Dusseldorf and Munich newspapers chided the Munich Ministry of Culture for being “slow-witted” and the German government for being “too weak” to keep the Arntz material in Germany. A reader, Gerhard Sohn, wrote a letter to the editor of the Dusseldorf Handelsblatt charging that the loss of the art library and archive was only one piece of evidence of Germany’s “inexcusable negligence” in preserving its heritage.

Noting the presence of the Robert Gore Rifkind collection of German Expressionist graphics and books at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Sohn wrote that “the absolute greatest documentation of German Expressionism” is already in California and that now it would be joined by the Arntz collection, “surely the most significant archival material” of the same early 20th-Century period. “For scientific work in this area of specialization a visit to the United States will be almost inevitable,” he concluded.

Petra Kippoff, an art critic for Die Zeit in Hamburg, currently visiting Los Angeles to report on local museum openings, said that the sale attracted little public notice in Germany. “I heard rumors, but the news never really got around,” she said, noting the Getty’s preference for avoiding publicity.

The Getty made the purchase through Elmar Seibel, a Boston antique book dealer, after the death of Arntz on Sept. 24, 1985, and of his wife, Gertrud Arntz-Winter, about two months later.

The Arntzes’ estate was left to their daughter, Brigitte Strube, a New York lawyer. Several German institutions expressed interest in buying the collection, but while they sent appraisers, looked for funds and negotiated with Strube, she struck a deal with the Getty.

Rifkind, a Los Angeles attorney and collector of German Expressionist art, said that he had acted as a catalyst in the transaction. During a telephone interview, Rifkind explained that he had met Arntz in 1972 at an auction in Hamburg and that the two developed a friendship.

“He was critical of German museum directors and he rarely let them see his library, but he really took a shine to me because he liked what I was doing,” Rifkind said.

Rifkind said he subsequently visited Arntz at his home in Haag, near Munich, and became familiar with the collection. Aware that the Arntz library would be for sale upon the elderly man’s death, Rifkind said he notified Harold Williams, head of the Getty Trust, of the breadth and quality of the collection.

Rifkind also invited Seibel to accompany him to Arntz’s library on a return visit so that the dealer, who acts as the Getty’s agent, could see the collection. Arntz and his wife died within a year of that visit.

According to Rifkind, Arntz had been a lawyer for the German National Socialists (Nazis) and was incarcerated by the British during World War II. He lost his collection then but was able to rebuild it at “a very small cost” because of his knowledge and a general lack of interest in the material, Rifkind said.

Articles in the German press indicate that Arntz was an acknowledged expert in modern art and an assiduous collector of everything from books to exhibition announcements and post cards. He published his research in the Arntz Bulletin and authored auction catalogues of modern art. Halbrook said the “extraordinary” holding represents his life’s work.

The collection arrived at the Getty last summer but only came out of storage two or three weeks ago. Some material has been placed in the Getty Archives for scholarly use, Halbrook said, but it will take several years to catalogue the vast Arntz library and make it available to researchers.