ART : The Grand Acquisitor : With his daring purchases for the Getty, George Goldner has also bought himself a reputation--as a connoisseur and fearless critic of the art world

“Esteemed connoisseur,” “brilliant acquisitor,” “wise manipulator,” “shrewd politician.” That’s George Goldner, curator of drawings and paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum, according to press accounts and private conversations. Headlines are even more to the point: “Meet the Art World’s Number One Spender,” screams the London Independent; “The Man Behind the Getty’s Getting and Spending,” croons the New York Times.

No doubt about it, Goldner is in the news, and he is generally praised. Credited with single-handedly creating the Getty’s revered drawings collection since 1981, he seems to be immune to Getty-bashing. The group of about 370 works is already considered the premier Old Masters drawings collection in the Western states.

Since taking over the painting department, as acting curator in 1989 and permanently a year later, Goldner has quelled complaints about the museum’s buying timidity--which emerged after a period of hysterical predictions that the Getty would corral the world’s cultural treasures and pack them off to Malibu. Goldner’s purchases of multimillion-dollar paintings have provoked excitement, envy and occasional charges of profligate spending, but few critics have seriously questioned his judgment.

The paintings collection still doesn’t rate superlatives, but at Goldner’s behest the museum has purchased such beloved “star” pictures as Vincent van Gogh’s “Irises” and Pontormo’s “Portrait of Cosimo I de’ Medici.” He also has made important additions of works by Canaletto, Dosso Dossi, Gerrit van Honthorst, Edouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Peter Paul Rubens.

Another purchase, Sebastiano del Piombo’s portrait of Pope Clement VII, is awaiting an export license in Britain. Meanwhile, speculation is rampant that Titian’s “Venus and Adonis,” recently sold for $13.47 million to a consortium of dealers at a London auction, will wind up at the Getty. The museum has not made a commitment, Goldner says, but he admits he would love to have the painting. If he gets his wish, the Getty will gain what is being called the best Old Master work to come on the market in several years. Clearly, Goldner’s stock is up--and rising.

“I became much more intelligent when I got this job. I guess that means I’ll be more stupid when I leave it,” says Goldner in a typical demonstration of his dry wit. Appearing bookish and rather uncomfortable in a suit and tie, the 48-year-old curator looks the part of an unassuming scholar, but he is well known to his colleagues for his outspoken humor and intrepid criticism of the art world.

Art historians, conservators, academics, collectors and museum educators are all the objects of Goldner’s zingers when their preoccupations seem beside the point of aesthetic experience. Art itself is the thing for Goldner; the rest is “window dressing.” But it’s hard to take offense at an impassioned connoisseur who says he is too “politically incorrect” for academia and calls his views of the art world “reactionary.”

“Art is elitist,” Goldner says. “It’s phony to pretend otherwise. All objects are not equal and everyone cannot appreciate art equally. Everyone is not equally intelligent and perceptive. That may be an unhappy fact, but it is a fact.”

One obvious reason that Goldner is in the limelight is that he has access--however limited--to the Getty’s purse strings. To retain its tax-exempt status, the J. Paul Getty Trust must spend 4.25% of its endowment--currently valued at $3.9 billion--in three out of every four years. The only public clues to the museum’s acquisitions budget, however, are purchases made at public auctions and an item called “collections development” in the trust’s biannual reports. According to the reports, $71 million was spent on collections in 1989, $140 million in 1990, $60 million in 1991. Big bucks, but those figures include expenditures for all the trust’s collections, including libraries and archives, and the annual totals may not reflect long-term payment arrangements for major purchases.

Contrary to popular belief, the obstacle to forming a great collection isn’t supply, it’s money, according to Goldner. Limited by budgetary constraints to buying two or three paintings a year, it is difficult to refine the collection, much less build a significant one, he says. His acquisitions budget, which he cannot reveal, has remained constant while his buying power has diminished. Prices for Old Masters haven’t fallen significantly during the widely heralded slump in the art market. Meanwhile, the dollar has weakened.

“One of the major misconceptions--from inside the museum as well as outside--is that there aren’t great paintings left. There are,” Goldner says. “You won’t find a Leonardo or a Raphael, but great things appear. Opportunities are there; it’s just a question of money. To get what you want, you can’t fool around with the price.”

Goldner can hardly avoid being known as the art world’s Mr. Money Bags, but much of the fascination with him stems from a perception that he has burst from nowhere to a position of extraordinary authority and prominence. “Anyone who can rise from an obscure position to head two departments at the museum and not even live in Los Angeles has my admiration,” one colleague says, referring to Goldner’s move to New York eight months ago. “He is the most adroit politician I know.”

As to his residence, Goldner says it makes sense for him to live in New York because he spends most of his time on acquisitions and he has better access to the market there. The Getty has neither a large collection nor a very active exhibitions program, so day-to-day operations are easily handled by his staff, he says. He spends 10 weeks a year in Los Angeles and eight weeks a year traveling in Europe.

The curator also has personal reasons for making himself scarce on the West Coast. For one thing, he’s a native New Yorker who readily admits to preferring his hometown. For another, he recently married Nancy Krieg, an Old Master paintings conservator whose business is there.

Regarding his meteoric ascent in the art world, Goldner claims that no shrewd plan propelled him to his present position. “I’ve just wandered around,” he says.

There seems to be a bit of truth in that, at least as he tells the story. In his youth he was nuts about sports but had no aptitude for them and had to settle for being an avid spectator. These days he muses about being sportswriter Jim Murray, imagining how he would spend his time watching and writing about athletic events.

Goldner entered Columbia University as a mathematics major, found himself “too stupid” for that, switched to economics but was quickly bored. His roommate and best friend, Vieri Salvadori, saved him by introducing him to Italy. A sojourn there with Salvadori’s family led Goldner to study art history at Columbia and at Princeton University, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on Italian sculpture.

His career began rather inauspiciously, teaching art history for three years at the State University of New York in Albany and for six years at Occidental College in Los Angeles. “I liked (teaching) very much. I enjoyed the students, but I detested the faculty as a rule,” he says. “I thought they were idiots. They were more concerned with demonstrations than with teaching, which is why we have a generation of people who can’t read and write. You can quote me on that.”

Goldner left Occidental in 1979 to take charge of the Getty’s huge archive of photographs of artworks. “I was ready for a change, and it sounded like a grand project. I had no thought of getting where I am today, but it did seem to be a situation that offered possibilities,” he says.

As it turns out, his ticket to art-world stardom was a Rembrandt drawing. Goldner had collected Old Master drawings for more than a decade and had followed the market assiduously. “I had thought for some time that the Getty should start a drawings collection, and I was looking for the perfect drawing to make that point,” he says. When Rembrandt’s red chalk study of a female nude appeared in 1981 in a Christie’s London auction catalogue, he had his ammunition--a beautiful, expressive image by an important artist.

“I’m an anti-policy person. I thought it made more sense to come forward with a great drawing and say we should have it than to develop a policy about forming a collection,” Goldner says. “I took the approach that there are a lot of good drawings left and we have a lot of money; if we buy some that become available, something good will come of it. That’s the approach of most good collectors. It’s more reasonable than sitting down with charts and mapping out a strategy.”

Harold Williams, director of the J. Paul Getty Trust, agreed to the purchase and the Getty bought the work for $576,000, a record for a Rembrandt drawing. Soon Williams said yes to a few more buys, and in 1982 Goldner became curator of the Getty’s fledgling drawings collection.

“To the credit of Harold Williams, he was willing to exercise some flexibility,” Goldner says. “We live in an era when there are very few great things and every good thing is called great by someone who has little concern for the truth or is ignorant. Even in the ‘80s, which was a very rich time for auctions, if you think of things that came up for sale which would be good enough to hang in the Musee d’Orsay or to illustrate an artist’s achievement, they were rare.

“In drawings, more was available and they had been undervalued. We snuck up on a market that had been asleep. Now the market has caught up with us, but we didn’t have more of a plan than that. You can’t have too rigid a view,” he says.

According to Goldner, we also live in a country where connoisseurship is a lost art. There are more true connoisseurs in London or Paris alone than in all of the United States, he says, and that is the fault of American education. Goldner didn’t learn his skill at Columbia or Princeton. He taught himself to be a connoisseur by collecting. If he claims any key to success, that is it.

“Collecting drawings was the best training for what I do now,” Goldner says. (He began collecting in the ‘60s but stopped when he began buying for the Getty to avoid any conflict of interest.) “For me to spend $5,000 of my own money when I was collecting isn’t much different from the Getty spending $10 million or $50 million today. The decisions are not different. You have to know how to make judgments based on quality.

“Art history teaches everything but how to appreciate objects,” he says. Fixated on a sociological approach to art and afflicted with rampant egalitarianism, current teaching breeds a fear of saying that one object is better than another, he says.

“Connoisseurship is based on a hierarchy of values. Unfortunately that calls up images of Kenneth Clark sitting in a castle saying, ‘That is a rather good bronze,’ but whether you are in a castle or a dreary office like this, the process is the same. If you can’t say this is better than that, someone else should have the job,” Goldner says.

Getty curators must have the approval of museum director John Walsh and the board of trustees before completing any purchase, but Goldner is given a great deal of latitude. That degree of trust is essential to maintaining the enthusiasm and compulsion needed to do a superior job, he says. “If one out of every three decisions you make is overturned, there would be no point in staying up nights worrying about them.”

Goldner does worry, but he claims to be liberated from an unreasonable fear of error. Most collectors and curators have a fear of mistakes so they buy defensively and conservatively, Goldner says, but that is not his style. Neither is committee decision-making. “I don’t believe in telephonic connoisseurship--ringing up five purported Rubens experts when you want to buy a Rubens. If you ask enough people if you should buy a work of art, you will eventually find someone who will tell you not to buy it,” he says.

“Among the drawings and paintings we have bought since I have been here, there are bound to be mistakes. It would be unrealistic to think otherwise. I can’t be governed by that. I’d rather make my own mistakes than adopt someone else’s. If my ratio of mistakes is too high, then someone else should be the Getty’s curator of drawings and paintings,” he says.

He also feels free to follow his own taste. “You can’t buy looking over your shoulder and wondering what the average person in California or the average UCLA professor will like. It’s hard enough to figure it out just for yourself,” he says.

Doing his job entails keeping a close watch on auctions around the world, maintaining frequent contact with a few dozen dealers and developing good relations with all possible sources of artworks. It’s important to be decisive, to negotiate strongly but fairly and to be consistent if you want dealers to call you first about a piece that has come on the market. “A lot of people can write a $5-million or $10-million check. You have to build up confidence,” Goldner says.

He finds it more fun to collect Old Master drawings than paintings, because they cost less and present a wider range of choices. For one thing, drawings don’t have to be beautiful to be worth adding to the collection. Not always executed as independent works of art, they are sometimes instructive studies. For example, the Getty bought Albrecht Durer’s drawing of a signet ring because it shows an interesting aspect of the artist’s work, not because of its aesthetic merit, he says.

“Pictures, on the other hand, are always made to be beautiful. Those that are not beautiful in their own terms fail. I would never want to buy a painting that isn’t beautiful for the Getty,” Goldner says.

Which brings up his vision of the other Getty collection he heads. When Goldner became the museum’s curator of paintings, he figured he had two choices: to follow the model of the Louvre in Paris or the Frick Collection in New York. The Louvre presents a full, historical survey of French art--along with art from other nations--while the Frick is a rather eclectic but extraordinarily high-quality private collection.

The Louvre model was impractical. “We are not a city or county museum, let alone a national museum,” Goldner says. “The best we can hope to do is to buy pictures of compelling visual appeal. We’re not going to end up with as great a collection as the Frick, but we can aspire to that quality, or to the quality of the Norton Simon Museum. We have a chance of getting closer to success by following those models than by following the Louvre.

“Everybody loves the Frick because of an insistence on quality,” he says. Goldner also believes that visitors appreciate being allowed to discover art on their own terms rather than according to an imposed system. “Have you ever heard anyone complain that the Frick doesn’t have an Italian Baroque altarpiece or a Cezanne?” he asks. “I’d rather assemble pictures that delight people than follow the art-history slide-lecture vision of a museum.”

Claiming to be one of the few Getty people who isn’t embarrassed about having so much money, Goldner isn’t offended about much of the criticism that has been leveled at the well-endowed museum. The Getty should be held to a higher standard than less wealthy institutions, he says. “What people resent is having money and not using it well.”

Goldner chafes against limited perceptions of what the museum can accomplish. “UCLA can’t be Oxford, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t aspire to excellence. I can’t be Robert Redford, but I still fix my hair in the morning,” he says. “It’s still possible to build a good painting collection. There’s intense competition, so it’s expensive, but it could be done.”

And in Goldner’s view, pulling out the stops in the acquisitions budget is essential to the J. Paul Getty Trust’s image. “Paintings are the linchpin of the museum, and the museum is the linchpin of the Getty. Until the paintings collection is up to the standard that people want, there will always be hesitation about what we have achieved,” he says.

Buildings, technology, libraries, conservation, publications and educational programs are all secondary to the art. “Have you ever heard of someone who got interested in art by reading a brochure or looking at a video disc?” Goldner asks.

“The greatest public service you can do is to bring great works of art to people. Why do you think people in New York are more interested in art than people in Los Angeles? It isn’t because they are better educated. It’s because the museums are better. The great contribution we can make is to make a great collection.”