ART : COMMENTARY : Lifting the Veil : Richard Meier’s design for the Getty Center will at last put a unified face on a far-flung and sometimes confusing art empire

Most people who know of the J. Paul Getty Trust know that it is rich. Immensely rich. With an endowment of $3.2 billion, it is surely the richest private art organization around.

Yet, beyond astronomical capital assets, and the wide-eyed envy such sums induce among mere mortals, the difficulty of saying just what else the Getty might be is almost equally immense. Even most art professionals, who might be expected to have a better grasp than anyone, are not quite sure about all that the Getty is and does.

That has just begun to change. The money is the tip of a Getty iceberg whose submerged bulk is now in the process of surfacing. Chief among the reasons is the architectural plan for a 24-acre, 1-million-square-foot Getty Center complex, unveiled earlier this month. Seven years in the design phase, and planned for construction during the next five years in the Brentwood hills above the San Diego Freeway, the complex will put a coherent face on a hitherto obscure visage.

The problem with the Getty’s identity stems from events of fairly recent vintage. Not so long ago, it was more than easy to identify. The Getty was simply a museum, if not an especially good one, founded by a wealthy oilman and housed in a splashy building on a Malibu bluff.

When the oilman died, leaving his entire fortune to the little-known trust that operated the easy-to-identify museum, things began to get a bit confusing. In 1982, with more than 1 billion newfound dollars in its pocket, the J. Paul Getty Trust suddenly joined the J. Paul Getty Museum in the realm of public visibility.

But the story doesn’t stop there. Thanks to some deft business moves, the Getty Trust’s billion soon doubled, then tripled--proving to any remaining doubters that here was an art foundation with the fiscal wherewithal to have an enormous impact. As the money grew like kudzu, so did the Getty’s ambitious programs.

Now there are eight. The Getty Museum remains the centerpiece, its once-lack-luster reputation slowly being transformed by a variety of spectacular art acquisitions--including one of the most important Modern paintings ever made, James Ensor’s monumental “Christ’s Entry Into Brussels in 1889.” In addition to the museum, the J. Paul Getty Trust is also the parent of:

* The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, which bucks the notoriously insular and turf-conscious academic world by vigorously advocating cross-disciplinary research.

* The Getty Conservation Institute, which tries to further international scientific knowledge and hands-on professional practice in the conservation of works of art--ranging from the decaying Buddhist caves of Dunhaung, China, and the peeling murals of Nefertari’s ancient tomb in Egypt to Renaissance paintings damaged by bullets in the recent liberation of Eastern

Europe.

* The Getty Art History Information

Program, which transforms the latest developments in computer technology into systems providing access to, and global dissemination of, hard data about the history of art.

* The Getty Center for Education in the Arts, which aims to do nothing less than improve the quality--and the lowly status--of art education throughout the nation’s beleaguered schools.

* And the Getty Grant Program, which funds research, publications and other assorted programs related to the Getty Trust’s particular areas of interest--and a few that go beyond them too.

Still here? Good. Because the Getty has two more offspring, these a bit more anonymous because they don’t carry the Getty name up front.

One is the Museum Management Institute, which is a monthlong professional tuneup for employees of diverse museums from all over the world, conducted at UC Berkeley by the American Federation of Arts. The other is the Program for Art on Film, a joint project at New York’s Metropolitan Museum to create documentary film and video productions. If the programs that carry the Getty name can be described as the trust’s children, these two, both located outside Southern California and run in collaboration with others, are sort of step-kids from blended families.

As the Getty multiplied during the past decade into myriad entities, each with its own staff, goals and bureaucracy, as well as different agendas, successes and failures, any coherent sense of what “the Getty” might actually be was scattered into a zillion bits. Even the offices established for its mushrooming programs were dispersed here and there, in nondescript high-rises in Century City and Santa Monica, up the coast in Malibu and down the coast in Marina del Rey technical labs. Who, loitering on the outside looking in, could possibly keep track?

In fact, not completely keeping track seems to be precisely the way the Getty Trust wanted it. Chairman Harold Williams has said that as new programs were being conceived and established, he wanted each to have a certain independence--an individuality that would be shaped by the professional talents of the different program chiefs, and that wouldn’t be tamped down by any feeling, real or imagined, that they were under the Omnipotent Thumb of an All-Seeing, All-Knowing Getty Trust.

So--you should pardon the expression--Williams gave them some space.

Those programs have now been up and running for a number of years. Generally speaking, the result has been a slightly schizoid situation in which not one Getty, but two, have been loose in the world. There’s the “visible Getty,” which largely means the art museum and that huge pile of money; and then there’s the “invisible Getty,” which is everything else. The public knows something of the visible Getty, and specialists know fragments of the invisible Getty; but outside the upper echelons of the trust, it’s doubtful anyone really has a grasp of the whole.

The unveiling of the design for the Getty Center is the first step in merging the “invisible” into the “visible.” Uniting most of the Getty Trust’s activities into a single locale, the center will give coherent shape to the currently Balkanized institution.

In effect, Getty Center architect Richard Meier was charged with designing a functional group of buildings, but he also had to craft an expressive image that would register in the public mind. If the scheme he has delivered cannot, alas, be said to incite the imagination in startlingly provocative ways, it surely creates a sharp profile for the Getty.

Even before the plans were conceived, drawn and assembled in the form of a scale model, a popular metaphor began to emerge for the new Getty Center. It’s easy to see why “An Acropolis for Los Angeles” would fix in the mind. Reasons abound for that classical Greek cluster of temples overlooking Athens to emerge as precedent.

On the simplest level there’s the Getty Center’s hilltop site, with its extraordinary vistas stretching from the mountains to the ocean in the Mediterranean climate of Southern California. As the Acropolis lifts the Parthenon, the Erechtheum and the Propylaea aloft on a higher plane--both physically and metaphorically--so the proposed complex of buildings is set above the metropolitan horizon of Los Angeles.

Second, as an internationally resonant cultural powerhouse, the Getty looms large as a symbol of authority. Its image might be vague, but it’s still potent.

Then there is the current Getty Museum in Malibu, designed in the manner of a luxurious classical villa whose distinctly Roman contours evolved from Greek precedents. The villa houses, among much else, an increasingly exceptional array of classical antiquities--a rarity for a museum in the United States. Indeed, when the new Getty Center is finished in Brentwood, the antiquities will remain in the Malibu building, thus establishing the only museum of Greek and Roman art in the nation.

And there’s more. At the heart of the Brentwood design is an all-new Getty Museum, housed in a cluster of five pavilions. The ancient Mediterranean is in fact recalled by the very idea of a museum, a specifically Western European idea whose name derives from the Greek-- mouseion , or place for the Muses--and whose reach has been global.

As places to collect and study examples of natural and cultural history, museums were born of the 18th-Century Enlightenment and took shape at the first stirrings of the modern era. With increasing clarity, they spoke of a central tenet of what would make the modern world a place different from any other.

What made “the modern world” modern was not just its emerging commitment to the new. Modernity was also characterized by a powerful, related awareness of progress--of just how far civilization had come over the centuries, and of how “the new” was being erected on a firm foundation established by classical antiquity.

Not by accident has Neoclassical architecture been the most common building style for museums. In these modernized Greek or Roman temples, where the “forward march” of natural and cultural evolution would be enshrined, the perceived greatness of the present is framed by the established greatness of the past.

Therefore, last but not least in the arrival of acropolis as ruling metaphor for the Getty Center, there is its chosen architect. Richard Meier is a Modernist--even a High Modernist--in what many regard a Postmodern world. He’s even built an acropolis before: Meier has used that term to describe the raised podium and hilltop location of his widely acclaimed Athenaeum in New Harmony, Ind., completed in 1980.

In the architect’s design for the expansive cluster of six buildings that make up the Brentwood complex, the Getty Center puts forward a clear image to the world. Structural and programmatic, the design emphasizes an elaborate geometry of machine forms in which technology is everywhere in evidence, but the worship of technology is not. Meier’s design represents a rationalist standard for the Getty’s far-flung cultural program.

Rationalism is a hard-sounding term, full of clean, transparent planes of thought made brittle by metallic edges where logic sparkles with a crystalline clarity. In some respects the description also fits Meier’s architectural style. But, that hardness can be misleading. Meier’s rationalism can’t quite be plotted on a strict, uniform grid.

Six separate structures house a public auditorium, various program offices, a dramatic research facility and a restaurant, but the museum building appropriately dominates the design. Looking at a model--even one so large and elaborate as the astonishing wood construction fabricated by model-maker Michael Gruber and his staff for this important project--it isn’t easy to know what architectural experience the Getty Center will actually convey for visitors. Reading the prepared description can even send a little chill down your spine.

The museum’s five small, interconnected buildings are grouped around an expansive courtyard, which encourages visitors to choose their own indoor-outdoor circulation path through the collections. The form is idyllically described as a cluster of “pavilions in a garden.”

Indeed, this description could apply to the plan of the center as a whole. Its six independent structures are skillfully dispersed yet subtly linked with one another, in part through careful landscaping that distinguishes the orderly construction site from the natural chaparral of the Santa Monica Mountains.

The most dramatic example occurs in a cultivated garden that physically links the museum on one ridge to the study center on the other. In the ravine between them, a curved and terraced orchard of orange trees steps down in orderly fashion from a long, rhythmic pergola to a perfectly circular pool below.

A certain chill greats the idea of “pavilions in a garden” because, the last time it was touted for a cultural edifice in L.A., the result was a debacle. William Pereira’s calamitous 1965 design for the County Museum of Art was a cluster of three pavilions set in a leafy urban park. Meier is certainly no Pereira, and his articulation of the scheme is enormously sophisticated, not kitschy. Nonetheless, the larger architectural metaphor is the same.

What does this metaphor describe? Creating an idealized shelter in a carefully cultivated landscape, the pavilion in a garden is a secularized description of humankind’s general predicament after Eden and the “fall from grace.” It’s meant to represent triumph over self-imposed chaos and shame. For Western culture, it has been among architecture’s most fundamental tasks. Meier’s Getty Center acropolis restates it once again, in thoroughly Modernist terms.

The museum will be clad in stone--a traditional material that Meier has long avoided--while the remaining structures will be largely sheathed in his favored, high-tech material of molded, porcelain-enameled panels. (The specific stone and the exact color of the panels have not yet been chosen, but neither will be Meier’s signature white. Beige is on the drawing board.)

In addition to the image of an acropolis, there emerges a picture more futuristic in concept. Meier’s classicism spans the centuries to conjure Space Station Getty--an efficient, self-contained, semidetached way station, whose links to the past are also conduits to an uncharted future.

As the critic Herbert Muschamp once put it, classicism is a style built of orders and laws and thus is perfect for a civilization that places the rule of law over the rule of men. The Modern classicism of Space Station Getty embodies a social ideal of Jeffersonian democracy. And, if a startlingly provocative declaration in the Getty Trust’s newly released annual report is any guide, that same social ideal is guiding its sprawling program.

In an introductory essay, Harold Williams does nothing less than set American educational priorities on their ear. The repeated failure of calls for education reform, incessantly made in the United States since the 1981 publication of “A Nation at Risk,” is laid squarely at the feet of our society’s crabbed and narrow aspirations.

Because much of the current enthusiasm for education reform is motivated by economics, math and science have been placed at the center of curriculum. We have forgotten, to our everlasting peril, that America’s innovative concept of universal education was not born of a desire to create competitive workers to fill the demands of what has since become a global marketplace. Instead, it was born of a desire to create citizens , informed men and women with the hearts and minds capable of participation in the rough and tumble of democracy.

On the campus of Space Station Getty, the call to education reform is motivated by the knowledge that creativity and critical thought are the core of the arts and humanities, and that it stands to reason that the arts and humanities should therefore be at the core of curriculum reform.

Williams’ essay amounts to a call for fundamental revolution. Transforming this welcome appeal from an abstraction into reality will be no mean feat--as a look at the Getty Trust itself makes plain. Its distinguished 18-member board of trustees, in whom ultimate authority is vested, unfortunately claims almost no ethnic or gender diversity. The Getty is hardly alone among powerful cultural institutions in this regard, but it’s a serious liability for the achievement of its stated aspirations for the life of democratic culture.

And therein lies both the strength and the weakness of Richard Meier’s grand design. Eloquently expressed is the firm foundation on which the Getty’s grand aspirations are built. Missing from the architectural form that will soon embody the Getty to the world is the imaginative leap necessary to a fundamental alteration of established expectations.