Getty Trust’s Odd Corporate Tastes

Since February, the J. Paul Getty Trust has spent many hundreds of thousands of dollars buying prints and drawings by contemporary American and European artists to decorate offices and vestibules in the new Getty Center, whose construction is now nearing completion on a sunny Brentwood hilltop.

To bring art of recent vintage into the daily working environment of the city’s most significant cultural institution seems, at first blush, like a sound idea. The result, though, is less than salutary.

An art collection reflects an institution’s cultural aspirations; it also demonstrates where certain of its commitments lie. For two big reasons, this collection sends disappointing signals.

First, although the Getty Trust is an organization whose stock-in-trade is creative ingenuity in the richly complex world of visual art, its new collection is dull and unimaginative. A stereotypical corporate collection, it’s what you might expect to see at a high-powered law firm in Cleveland, or perhaps a progressive accounting firm in Dallas. This button-down assembly is not what you hope for from what putatively ranks as a preeminent cultural institution.

Second, although assembling a contemporary collection represents one of few meaningful opportunities for the Getty Trust to actively patronize Los Angeles art galleries, only a small fraction of the acquisitions were made here. Certainly the trust has undertaken many other notable projects that acknowledge its responsibilities as a corporate citizen of the community in which it resides. But L.A.’s numerous galleries, which have been critical to securing the international stature that the city’s artistic life now enjoys, have been all but ignored in this big-ticket contemporary project.

For the sake of clarity, one thing should be emphasized before we go on: This collection of works on paper is not a holding of the Getty Museum, which is only one of the seven programs administered by the Getty Trust; except for photographs, the museum does not collect 20th century art.

Instead, the trust assembled its own collection independently, for display in the sleek new offices designed by architect Richard Meier for its scholarly institutes; these are variously devoted to art education, conservation, electronic information services and grants.

Nor is the collection entirely new. Its origin dates to 1984, when the Getty Trust bought a variety of works on paper by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and other, mostly blue-chip and decorative artists to ornament its original offices in Century City; selected works have been added over the years.

However, the largest concentration of purchases has been made within the past four months or so. During that time, the trust acquired more than 100 prints and drawings, nearly doubling the collection’s size.

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What was purchased, though, is not the stuff of a progressive cultural entrepreneur, who plainly values fresh ideas and relishes taking artistic risks for intellectual profit. These acquisitions may not be part of the Getty Museum, but that does not mean that forward-looking museum standards shouldn’t have been brought to bear on them.

Instead, cookie-cutter corporate standards were. The collection follows; it does not lead.

The collection was assembled by Beatrix Medinger of New York’s VIART Corp., a well-known firm that provides corporate art consulting services internationally. While the Getty Trust won’t disclose the budget, independent sources familiar with the market for contemporary prints and drawings estimate the new acquisitions’ retail value in the range of $1 million (discounts usually apply for such purchases, however).

Many of the recent acquisitions are additions to holdings by artists already represented in the trust’s collection. For example, 13 works by Jennifer Bartlett, most dated 1995, have now joined three existing prints; another Roy Lichtenstein print was added to the five others previously acquired; 10 more Frank Stella etchings and lithographs were added to the six in the collection.

Works by Lita Albuquerque, Christo, Jim Dine, David Hockney, Ellsworth Kelly, Sol Lewitt, Robert Mangold, Claes Oldenburg, Pat Steir and several others fall into the same category.

Among the newly purchased works by artists not previously represented in the trust collection are those by Domenicho Bianchi, Adolph Gottlieb, Damien Hirst, Donald Judd, Anish Kapoor, Julian Lethbridge and about a dozen more. In all, the collection includes works on paper by more than 80 postwar artists.

How do individual works stack up? Well, I suppose you could go through the list making notes.

Bartlett is true to form here, which is to say lightweight. If you have to have Stella prints, the newly acquired “Eccentric Polygons” (1974) are the ones to have (the trust now owns eight of the suite’s 11 lithographs).

Dorothea Rockburne is capable of endless reinvigoration of a seemingly narrow range of formal moves, as evidenced by her big, punchy, geometric watercolor. Kiki Smith’s ink-on-paper “Wolves,” which were shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art last year as part of a failed collaboration with architect Wolf Prix, are mediocre at best.

And so on. There are decided masterworks, many minor works and mostly in-between works.

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Yet, finally there’s no point in cataloging personal taste in regard to individual objects. For the run-of-the-mill concept of this cautious collection is virtually interchangeable with what might be done by a good-size bank, or some widget manufacturer with aspirations.

What might the Getty Trust have done instead, with perhaps a million dollars and a desire to make a difference? Use your imagination.

How about a collection composed of work by the several dozen most interesting artists based in L.A. between 1953, the year oil tycoon J. Paul Getty established a small museum at his home in Malibu, and 1982, when Getty’s personal estate passed to the trust, thus setting into motion the extravaganza now coming to completion in Brentwood? Those 30 years coincide exactly with the maturing of Los Angeles as a formidable center for new art, and no comparable historical collection exists anywhere in the world.

You don’t like the localism of such a plan? Well, since L.A.’s art is of international stature, I’d argue that it’s perfectly suited for the locally based Getty Trust, with its international reach. But other possibilities with other artistically oriented rationales abound, both national and international in scope.

The point is that none were tried. Instead, the usual corporate collection suspects were merely rounded up--even though, as a corporate entity, the Getty Trust is anything but routine.

The dissonant, surely inaccurate impression made by these contemporary prints and drawings is that the Getty Trust is intellectually indifferent to the vigorous art life actually being lived way down there in the flatlands, far below the lofty precincts of its hilltop aerie. In the end, that’s not a happy imprint to leave.