Behind the Scenes at the Getty : It’s business as usual for the largely invisible staff of 235

E ven more than most museums, the J. Paul Getty Museum remains a mystery to the public. Beyond the immaculate facade of its pastel Roman villa and plush galleries, little is known of the museum’s inner workings or the people who keep it running.

An occasional controversy or big-ticket purchase puts the museum under a hot media spotlight and slaps its name on the front pages of major newspapers. On such occasions, museum director John Walsh appears, in print, explaining museum policies or commenting on art historical and ethical issues. Marion True, curator of antiquities, is often quoted on spectacular new acquisitions and issues of cultural patrimony.

Conservator Jerry Podany sometimes explains his highly technical procedures as he studies and authenticates ancient artworks. George Goldner, curator of drawings and acting curator of paintings, is cited as architect of the museum’s collection of drawings and more recently for spearheading the purchases of expensive paintings at auction. Paintings conservator Andrea Rothe has been an eloquent defender of a non-Getty project--the restoration of the Sistine Chapel.

But this handful of high-profile people are only part of what goes on at the Getty. Behind the scenes about 235 other members of the staff conduct business as usual. And, according to Walsh, they are some of the museum’s best keep secrets.

The museum’s major resource has never been the ability to buy a $35-million painting, Walsh says, but “intensely involved, excellent people who are highly motivated” by opportunities at the Getty.

Here’s a look at some of those people.

The first human contact most people have with the J. Paul Getty Museum is a voice answering the telephone when they dial (213) 458-2003. The voice belongs to one of 11 reservations agents--typically bright college students with an interest in art--lodged on the 10th floor of a Santa Monica office building. Working four at a time on part-time shifts with supervisor Eloise Kong, the agents field up to 1,000 calls a day. Most are requests for parking reservations (required because of museum’s residential location); others are for lectures and concerts.

The agents are trained to impart a lot of information in a little time, usually no more than a minute, and to log reservations on a computerized system. They also deliver the bad news when the museum is booked up--and listen to reasons that the Getty should make an exception, just this once: “My in-laws just came into town.” “We have visitors from Siberia who will only be here for one day.” “My term paper is due tomorrow.”

Some callers affect a snooty voice, in keeping with their idea of the museum’s image, while others are so happy to get a reservation that they send flowers or snapshots of their families.

Repetitive work inevitably leads to boredom, but the reservations staff combats frustration with camaraderie, an occasional pig-out on spaghetti, and recorded Beatles music on Sunday mornings. During slow times, agents read or do their homework. “It’s a little like a dormitory,” Kong said, noting that a recent addition to the office is a couch where telephone-weary agents can relax.

An agent’s job isn’t a dead-end career; it’s a temporary way to make a living while pursuing more exalted goals. Claudia Montero, for example, is an art history student; Loreen Matsushima is an artist who also teaches at the museum; Jill Hamilton is a student of French and international relations who may move into art conservation.

“What I’d like to be doing isn’t very realistic at this point,” said artist and assistant supervisor Annabelle Port.

“This is reality,” agreed Kong, herself a fine arts major.

Some visitors are so smitten with the Getty’s ocean-side environs that they linger in the gardens, barely setting foot in the galleries. The most botanically aware know that they are seeing something more than a smashing array of healthy plants in an extraordinary setting. The Getty gardens adhere as strictly as possible to an ancient Roman theme.

The museum is patterned after the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum (destroyed in AD 79 by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius), and the gardens were designed by Denis Kurtitz with equal attention to authenticity. He created two peristyle gardens in central courtyards, smaller gardens on opposite sides of the museum and a long, rambling herb garden containing fragrant plants that the Romans used for cooking and medicinal purposes.

“We can’t just run out to the nursery and buy the plants we need. We have to comb through catalogues from all over the world, collect seeds and propagate plants,” gardener Steve Cutting said.

It’s difficult enough to find a single example of a desired plant, much less an entire flat, so propagation specialist Daphne Heath spends most of her time turning one precious plant into several dozen or restoring modern versions of plants to their original forms. How do Getty gardeners know what grew in Herculaneum? By consulting ancient literature, Italian frescoes and other artworks of the period, Cutting said.

Pulling out reference books in his office, Cutting pointed out herbs, flowers, laurels and garlands in reproductions of ancient artworks. Strolling through the gardens, he matched up pictures with real plants.

Developing and maintaining authentic Roman gardens is not the only challenge for gardeners at the Getty, Cutting said. Both peristyle gardens are planted directly above the parking garage--in about a foot of soil.

Visitors who think that installing a work of art involves little more than plopping it down in an appropriate gallery won’t believe what George Johnson and Mark Mitton do for a living. On their own time, both men are artists, but they work full time designing and fabricating earthquake-proof mounts for the Getty’s artworks.

Helping the museum’s collection to survive The Big One, they put steel rods through marble sculpture and build metal armatures and foam cores that fit inside hollow bronzes. They fashion wire and plexiglass clamps for ceramics and glassware, make beds of compressed fibers to support sculptural furniture, faux-marble pedestals for decorative arts and metal mounts that attach tall clocks to walls but disconnect so that they can be wound each week. Once a mount is built, they connect it to a hidden device inside a pedestal or to a wall--most likely one that is covered with expensive, easily damaged fabric and doesn’t have conveniently located supports behind it. Every piece of art presents a unique problem.

“I don’t think we’ve ever repeated a mount,” Johnson said, noting that it can take thousands of hours to come up with a design that can be reproduced for $5 or $10.

Sometimes the idea is to design an apparatus that allows the art to float free of its support, according to its own rhythm. In other situations, artworks are firmly fixed to heavily weighted supports. A 16th-Century bronze mortar, for example, requires a 600-lb. ballast hidden inside a wooden pedestal. One constant principle for securing three-dimensional pieces is to lower their centers of gravity, often by putting lead bricks inside pedestals.

Johnson and Mitton have been on the job for about five years, working closely with curators and conservators. At first they plied their highly technical trade quite intuitively, but now a recent research project done with USC has validated their guesses and provided some guidelines.

Showing off their work in the galleries to a reporter, Johnson and Mitton soon attracted a crowd. Awestruck visitors watched as the pair lifted a massive Italian ceramic head of Christ off its pedestal. They uncovered an armature attached by cables to a mechanism inside the pedestal that allows the sculpture a safe range of movement. Moving on to another gallery, Johnson gave a push to a bronze Venus on an inlaid marble table and the figure whirled around like a graceful roller skater. Then the two men picked up the sculpture and revealed a foam core with embedded casters that is tethered to the wall by a transparent plastic cord.

“A successful mount is the one you don’t see,” Mitton said.

Stunned by what they had seen, the crowd went off in search of other invisible successes.

“Ooooo, what shall I show you?” Catherine Hess asked, as if she were a sweet freak ordered to choose a few treats from a well-stocked Parisian patisserie. In fact she was trotting out her favorites among the Getty’s distinguished collection of maiolica, the colorful tin-glazed earthenware from the Renaissance.

Surveying objects in storage, Hess presented a 15th-Century Tuscan jug that she fondly called “a wow object” because it’s the oldest piece in the collection and notably elegant, then offered an intricately painted 16th-Century plate done after Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving, “The Abduction of Helen.” Upstairs in the maiolica gallery, a jewel-like room that opens onto a balcony overlooking the museum’s west garden, Hess pointed out a 16th-Century dish, long thought to depict a betrothal.

“When I looked at it, I said, ‘No, this isn’t marriage. This is divorce court,’ ” she recalled. Research eventually revealed that the painting portrays a scene in Virgil’s Aeneid in which Queen Amata pleads with her daughter’s intended husband to stop fighting the Trojans. Hess is an assistant curator of sculpture and works of art who came to the museum in 1984 as an intern and joined the staff later that year. She innocently expressed an interest in maiolica at the moment when Peter Fusco, curator of sculpture, was contemplating the purchase of an English collection of maiolica that now forms the core of the museum’s collection. On a fast track to scholarly maturity, she took over the Getty’s maiolica and became an expert while writing the museum’s handsome catalogue on the subject.

Hess had studied Italian Renaissance painting and Italian literature at UCLA and spent three years in Italy, not knowing that her experience would coalesce in the rather coarse, colored pots that first caught her eye at the Huntington art galleries. “Little did I know that I would be riding the crest of the maiolica wave,” she said, noting that several books on the subject are now in the works and that contemporary versions of maiolica are popular items in decorator shops.

“It’s a different aesthetic,” Hess said, looking around the gallery of brightly glazed ceramics. “If you are used to Sevres porcelain, this can look pretty sloppy, but that’s why I like it.”

“This is one of our star boxes,” said Lee Hendrix, lifting a big black case of Rembrandt drawings from storage and presenting a few impressive examples. As associate curator of drawings, Hendrix specializes in northern European works--German, Dutch, Flemish--while chief curator George Goldner focuses on Italian, French and Spanish material.

Hendrix spends about 60% of her time looking for new acquisitions, narrowing them down to the best prospects and intensely researching those that the museum actually buys--about 30 a year. Her secondary commitment is to a series of changing exhibitions, each featuring a group of about 25 drawings.

Though the museum’s drawing collection has won high praise for its quality, it consists of only about 300 pieces. “We are looking for really superb examples by major artists and their circles of followers. We’re not trying to build a study collection--an extensive history of art fully representing each artist. We’ll never have a huge collection, but on the other hand we hope it will be representative of the major figures. In the case of Rembrandt our drawings illustrate the range of his draftsmanship,” Hendrix said.

Unlike widely published paintings by major artists, unknown drawings by masters are often squirreled away in private collections. “Each year we bring in three or four surprises” such as the recent purchase of unpublished drawings by Parmigianino, she said.

Hendrix came to the Getty in 1985 directly after completing her Ph.D at Princeton University. She did her dissertation on Georg Hoefnagel’s 16th-Century “Model Book of Calligraphy,” a beautifully illustrated manuscript on natural history in the collection of the National Gallery in Washington. At the time, it was the only copy in an American museum.

“There was another copy in a private collection, but no one had seen it and we only knew it from photographs published in 1927,” she said. “But the year I came to the Getty, the owner decided to sell it and, lo and behold, we bought it. It’s an art historian’s dream come true.”

“Some people think that we’re always planning the next grand acquisition or having lunch with dealers,” said Kenneth Hamma, who has little time for either. The associate curator of antiquities had just returned from a dig in Cypress that he started seven years ago while he was a graduate student at Princeton University. The goal of the excavation, which Hamma expects to be realized in two more years, is to reconstruct an archeological chronology of Cyprus from the 6th Century BC and gain a clearer picture of how the island’s civilization corresponds to those of surrounding areas.

After leaving Princeton, Hamma taught Greek and Roman art history at USC for five years and joined the Getty staff two years ago, but he has journeyed to Cypress every summer as assistant director of the Princeton excavation. The popular image of archeologists falls somewhere between “a grand 19th-Century romantic vision and ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’,” Hamma said. “People don’t think about the dust, the sun or the sweat.” The trade-off for grubby labor and “ungodly hours” is the joy of learning, the excitement of local citizens and the peace of having a summer without telephones, he said.

Back at the Getty, Hamma is conducting a study of the museum’s terra cotta sculptures from Southern Italy, measuring a group of beautifully modeled heads and logging information into a computer. As the department of antiquities’ resident computer whiz, he has written a program for cataloguing the collection of 10,000 objects. Many of them will come out of storage in 1992, when the museum’s paintings and decorative arts move to the J. Paul Getty Center now under construction in Brentwood and the Malibu villa becomes the only museum in the country devoted exclusively to Greek and Roman antiquities.

As associate director for curatorial affairs, Deborah Gribbon coordinates activities involving the museum’s collections. She has taken on such challenges as earthquake preparedness at the Malibu museum and is planning the new galleries for the hilltop center in Brentwood. Tucked away in a cozy office at the museum, Gribbon claims no credit for what she calls the “truly departmental efforts” that she coordinates.

One of the best examples, and one that is close to Walsh’s heart, is an ongoing series of international scholarly symposia. Past programs on bronze sculpture and marble and an upcoming symposium on illuminated manuscripts bring together art historians, archeologists, conservators, geologists and other groups that generally “don’t talk to each other,” Walsh said. Their deliberations are disseminated to the field in Getty publications.

Gribbon is looking forward to a symposium on Stone Age Cypriot art, planned for 1990 in cooperation with Cyprus. The meeting, which will be held in conjunction with a small exhibition of Cypriot art and take advantage of Hamma’s expertise, will address religion, geology, economics, conservation as well as matters of artistic style and subject matter. “These are very intensive meetings, organized around critical issues of current research and geared to a scholarly audience. It’s a vital way of promoting scholarship,” she said.

“We try to make connections between the collection and the public,” said Schroeder Cherry, a museum educator who arrived at the Getty last October. “We want people to have an art experience in the galleries and to get away from the museum-as-field-trip concept.”

An artist and puppeteer, Cherry has completed his Ph.D in museum education at Columbia University and worked at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the New York City Transit, a community gallery in an old subway station. At the Getty he is in charge of special audiences--the hearing impaired, the disabled, family groups and people with limited understanding of English.

Engaging visitors in an impromptu talk in one gallery, Cherry pointed out differences between two Roman marbles, one depicting a “deliciously” carved little girl, the other a draped lady whose portrait head is attached to a stock body. His rapt audience stayed with him well beyond the typical “10-second look” that Cherry would like to abolish.

“It’s a matter of getting to know your audience as well as the material,” Cherry said. That can be a challenge in a community as diverse as Los Angeles and in a museum that requires its educators to impart information about its unusual building as well as its collections. But Cherry is undaunted, and he discounts the notion that the museum only attracts the elite. “We’re always booked,” he said with satisfaction.

“We publish 10 or 11 books a year, ranging from the popular to the highly obscure,” said Christopher Hudson, head of publications, as he flipped through a table full of illustrated materials. “They are permanent, portable records of what the museum does.” At one end of the spectrum is a handbook to the museum’s collections that visitors buy as an aide and a souvenir; at the other are detailed scholarly catalogues of antiquities.

Unlike museums that spend most of their publications budgets on catalogues of temporary exhibitions, the Getty concentrates on its collection. A new paperback series, “Getty Museum Studies in Art,” takes on one work at time and supplies a rich literary, historical and aesthetic context. A book by curator Louise Lippincott on Edvard Munch’s dark landscape, “Starry Night,” has launched the series.

“We started with one of the museum’s great enigmas. Before I die I hope there will be a dozen of these books,” Walsh said, adding that the series will deal with works in the collection that are “richest in associations,” such as James Ensor’s “Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889.”

Museum publishing differs from the corporate publishing world in that about 50% of the publications are not books at all, Hudson said. They are posters, graphic designs and brochures handed out free of charge in the galleries. “But we do less than other museums in terms of book store merchandise--posters, greeting cards, address books--and we only do them to publicize the collection.”

Compared to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s vast book and gift shop operation in New York, the Getty’s bookstore is tiny--only 300 square feet--but it is very successful. “It has the highest turnover per square foot of any museum book store in the country,” Hudson said.