The Getty Gets It Right : Perhaps money can buy artistic happiness : Pontormo

Sir Kenneth Clark came to the Wild West in 1978 to lecture at the Getty Museum which was just getting started as the world’s richest art repository. In those days he was a rare combination of authentically brilliant art historian and--because of his television series “Civilisation”--a cultural celebrity.

Kindly and tactful, he praised the progress made by the Getty’s antiquities department but when an interviewer solicited his opinion of the painting collection he demured diplomatically. The question was about to pass when he murmured, as if to himself, “Funny how they never get the pictures galleries right . . . “

He died in 1983 so we’ll never know how he would feel now. Probably he’d revise his estimate, if not change it. The Getty has made brave strides since the days when it’s hottest paintings were a Rubens of questioned authenticity and a campy-erotic academic Bougereau of a girl flirtatiously defending herself against Cupid.

Poor old museum. All the money in the world to buy the best paintings in the universe at a time when most masterpieces are eternally frozen in the corridors of Louvres, Uffizis and National Galleries. Sigh. If this were the Renaissance the Getty’s director, John Walsh, could just hire himself a condottiere and a bunch of Swiss mercenaries and go plunder a Prado.

In these pallid times, however, subtler methods are required. Today, you just pay multiple millions for the best available picture by a master famous only amongst connoisseurs, scholars and mavens and then sit back and wait for experts and opportunists to attack it as a fake.

The Getty is a fun place to go these warm summer days. If you need a fresh reason, the museum’s latest and arguably greatest coup has recently come on public view. It is, of course, the 1538 portrait of Cosimo I de Medici painted by Jacopo Carucci da Pontormo, a Florentine Mannerist master of whom most citizens had not heard before the Getty made him front-page famous by paying a record price for his picture at a New York auction.

Loll on the balcony a bit before going in. The view over the museums atrium garden somehow takes the mind off absurd matters like paintings going for $35.4 million. How can a painting be worth that? Well, how can a Batmobile bomber be worth $600 million. The garden is limpid fantasy but its faux Roman bronzes and splashy bleached lime fountain are more convincing than our media-generated reality.

When you step inside out of the dazzling California light you’re blinded for a minute and a chartreuse after-image blots out the works in the galleries. Might as well troop the collection while your eyes adjust.

Funny. The Getty used to say it would never collect modern art but significant numbers of its best and most important paintings are modern or close to it. Edvard Munch is surely a modern master and his 1893 “Starry Night” is like a more depressed pendant to Van Gogh’s version of the same subject. Terrific picture with its obsessive bruised-black shapes of haunted trees. Everybody counts the Belgian James Ensor along with the Norwegian Munch as a direct precursor of modern Expressionism. Ensor’s huge cartoon-like “The Entry of Christ Into Brussels” is a key historical icon and the Getty’s got it.

You know what? These Expressionists actually do fit in with the Getty’s Old Masters. Some certainly accidental combination of available works and curatorial sensibility has conspired to give the ensemble an aura of, well, oddness. There is something inescapably neurotic about Alesandro Magnasco’s icky and operatic “Bacchanale.” Dosso Dossi’s mythological scene has his characteristic disturbed visionary naivete.

It would be unfair to the collection to tack down such impressions as gospel. It is neither all on the walls nor arranged as the museum would like. Historically, it moves in fits and starts. Sense--if it is to come--will have to wait until sometime in the 1990s when they open their new citadel in Brentwood.

There are calm and classic works in the collection like the brilliant Degas owned jointly with Norton Simon, a sparkling small Veronese and a magisterial Van Dyke but frankly their presence only dramatizes the persistently offbeat note sounded even by some of their outstanding works. Carpaccio is known for poetic strangeness. George de la Tour’s “Beggars Brawl” resonates with terrible venality. Jean-Baptise Greuze’s moral allegories get caught with their hand in the cookie jar.

The Getty has never aspired to encyclopedic completeness. Its aesthetic sense is attracted to the same grail that seems to pervade the collective unconscious of at least every other high-ranking artnik in this geography. You want to see strong and dignified men tremble with something akin to religious ecstasy? Enter their august halls and whisper, “The Frick.”

Art barons around her just go all gooseflesh at the thought of the Frick Museum in New York--a private mansion opened as a small public museum where the the masterpieces, largely unrelated historically, are every last one a jewel. The place is Mecca for art connoisseurs.

And guess what. The famous Pontormo hung for a number of years in the Frick. No wonder the Getty wanted it. A piece of the Frick is as good as a saint’s tibia any day.

And here it is.

Not large. Standard cabinet-size portrait. Cosimo I de Medici is depicted at age 18 as a soldier leaning on his pike. His sword hilt stands erect and is so placed as to offend any right-wing senator who might perchance understand symbolism. The woozily elongated torso looks unreal with its pinched waist and manikin chest under a putty-colored tunic. The Mannerists were into stylishness with a vengeance. They loved sour piquant color and the trick is done here by a clanging red cap against a glum green background.

Cosimo’s face and hands are at once virile and delicately waxen. He wears and expression of adolescent languor--cherub lips slightly slack, eyes awash in aqueous fluid. Not many painters can give us that sense of the eyeball floating in its socket. The whole is slightly disembodied as if the figure were made of some gelatinous material that absorbs and radiates light.

The middle chunk of the 16th Century was not a happy time for art. The Mannerist epoch--wedged between the high classicism of Raphael and the beefy optimism of the Baroque--is an art shadowed with anxious doubt. In some ways Hamlet is the central figure of the time. Doubt was sparked by Martin Luther’s Reformation, anxiety by Charles V’s sack of Rome and the Spanish domination of Italy. The art that grew from this unstable soil is often seen as a harbinger of two facets of modernism--dandyism and asceticism. The poet John Donne started as a cavalier and ended and a metaphysical divine. Painting art produced both the attenuated chic of Parmigianino and the mysticism of El Greco.

La maniera became associated with impending doom and the cultivation of a sensibility that consciously waffles between decadence and austerity like the yuppies who do coke all night and go to the gym in the morning. It’s an end-of-the-world attitude that showed up among the symbolists as the 19th Century guttered out and is among us again as irony as the 20th Century fades--albeit the giantism of much current art argues for a kind of Mannerist Baroque.

Mannerist artists are often cited as personality-prototypes for modern artists--exquisitely ultrasensitive, brilliant and a bit mad.

Pontormo, born in 1494, was orphaned in childhood and raised by his grandmother in Florence. According to Vasari, he was a prodigy who studied with Leonardo da Vinci, Piero di Cosimo and Andrea del Sarto, among others. He had early success and as a teen-ager already showed temperamental signs when he complained that a work in which he had a minor role was unveiled without his permission.

As his success grew he became touchier, refusing to work for clients he didn’t like. He was a loner who built a house where the bedroom was accessible only by a ladder he pulled up after him. One biographer says he was a compulsive record-keeper meticulously noting even his most minor activities--including the times when the notes were made.

Pontormo spent the last 11 years of his life working on a chapel decoration which he would allow no one to see--including the patron who footed the bill. Vasari say he was so afraid of death he would allow no one to mention it in his presence.

It didn’t help. He succumbed in 1557.

And now the Getty has a prime work by this unsettled master. Its strangeness is part of its authenticity and seeing it one is content to believe that it was the finest Old Master painting left in private hands. Now it properly belongs to everybody and the Getty is slowly getting the pictures galleries right.