Modernist Delivers the Unimaginable

Even under optimal conditions, looking at art is pleasurable but exhausting. That’s why, in October 1984, when Richard Meier was chosen as the architect for the new Getty Center, I gasped.

Here was an architect firmly established among the most prominent designers of the American avant-garde, known for a brand of purist architecture that uses as its point of departure the great prewar buildings of the Swiss master, Le Corbusier. Meier had also just completed two museum buildings--Atlanta’s High Museum of Art (1980-83) and the Museum for Decorative Arts in Frankfurt, Germany (1979-84)--and both were generating much critical acclaim in architecture circles.

However significant these two buildings might be in an architectural sense, though, they share a noticeable flaw. Both are dreadful places to look at art. Their galleries, rigorous and demanding to a fault, are awful.

The crystalline designs, icy and unarticulated, draw your eye through complex sequences of curved and linear space, following layered axes that often lead outdoors, through windows crisply punched in bright, white walls. Beautiful, certainly, but disastrous when you want instead to have your eye drawn toward works of art, object of your ardor.

How, I marveled, could a search committee composed of distinguished design professionals have visited these terrible exhibition rooms, so blatantly dismissive of art, and collectively decided, “Aha! This is the architect we need to design our new museum”? In the grand, even grandiose scheme of things proposed for the new Getty Center along a glorious ridge high above Brentwood, something crucial seemed already to have been lost.

So, now that the museum is about to open, it is with considerable relief--and not inconsiderable amazement--that the unimaginable has happened. Visit the center and you will see: The galleries at the new Getty Museum are among the most beautiful rooms for the display of art that have been built anywhere in the world. You just don’t get closer to perfection than this.

The Getty’s stunning achievement is all the more impressive when you realize that hundreds of art museums have been built internationally since the great 19th century boom in civic construction began. The past 25 or 30 years have been an especially industrious period, yet the landscape is littered with museum buildings that are intrusive to the presentation of art, or else more blandly serviceable than splendid.

Museum design is complicated because two distinct constituencies must be assiduously represented. One is the inanimate collection of art objects that will be on view; the other is the animated audience that will do the viewing. To borrow the famous ambition voiced by artist Robert Rauschenberg: Great museum design ventures into the gap between art and life. It needs to maximize the potential for visual intercourse between them.

Perhaps the most daring decision for the Getty’s design was to illuminate the galleries for paintings without resorting to the use of electric light. Sunlight and candle power were what artists had to work with from the 14th century through the 19th century, which is the span of the European paintings collection. The galleries were meant to conform to lighting conditions in which these pictures were made.

Meier designed the museum’s five two-story pavilions so that the upper levels, which could accommodate skylights, would hold paintings. European sculpture, together with extremely light-sensitive works on paper or vellum (illuminated manuscripts, drawings, photographs) and fragile decorative arts are on the first floor, where artificial lighting can be completely controlled.

The upstairs rooms have enormously tall coved ceilings, painted off-white and crowned with skylight lanterns that feature computerized louvers. The louvers regulate the amount of bright California sunshine allowed into the interior, while the ceiling height leaves plenty of room for light to bounce around and be evenly diffused, without casting shadows. The miraculous result, down at picture-and-people height, is a gorgeous clarity of illuminated space. Thin air seems visually tangible.

The paintings eat it up. Their pigments sparkle in the rich, full spectrum of shifting daylight, in ways that static, inevitably tinted electric light never manages. The Getty’s pictures are shown to extraordinary advantage, simply by letting the sun shine in.

The paintings galleries are also equipped with an auxiliary lighting system, necessary under certain weather conditions and at night. The computer system that controls the skylight louvers is reportedly not without some technical glitches, but when everything is working properly, the effect is blissful.

In a way, these light-washed rooms represent a stylistic return to the royal picture galleries of the 18th century, which are ancestors of the modern museum. Beaux-arts tradition is fitted out with high technology.

Thankfully, the galleries are not Meier’s usual abstract white cubes. Most walls are of rich, tinted plaster or upholstered fabric. They also feature sleek and unfussy baseboards, moldings and articulated doorways--architecture’s ornamental “furniture.” The rooms need this adornment for a simple, often-ignored reason: 14th through 19th century pictures have frames, the ornamental furniture of paintings. Framed pictures always look forlorn in unarticulated architectural settings.

Floors are mostly hardwood or stone, but comfortable cushioned seating is abundant: You can linger while you look. Indeed, the dreaded enemy known as “museum fatigue” has plainly been battled at every turn.

The Getty’s collections may not be vast, but a smart decision made early on divided the museum into separate small pavilions, each connected by indoor and outdoor walkways and patios. Forget the distraction of gallery windows; the passages between pavilions, with their breathtaking mountain-to-ocean views, offer interludes of visual and mental refreshment. As a bonus, you also always know your exact location in the building.

Galleries are tailored to the art: domestic-sized spaces for 17th century Dutch pictures, say, but a grander hall for more publicly oriented Baroque canvases, such as those from Italy. No rooms are vast--12 or 15 paintings are encountered at a time--while the lovely ground floor spaces are more intimately scaled to the one-on-one pleasures of manuscripts, drawings, photographs and small sculpture.

Wonderfully presented works of art, often of exceptional allure, encountered in manageable chunks--that’s the new Getty. It makes for a museum experience of rare generosity.

How did such an agreeable outcome happen, given a process fraught with difficulty and a record of daunting failures? Credit the client. Regardless of a designer’s talent, architectural commissions can flounder at the client level. But not here; the hero of this story is John Walsh. He is one museum director who knew exactly the experience he wanted his new building to provide. Working with skillful designers, he got it.

Not without considerable effort, mind you. The Getty Museum’s design is a subtle, unexpected blend of Modern and beaux-arts, the latter a style that Modern architects worked hard to topple. In Meier, Walsh was handed a master Modernist. So he brought in French architect and interior designer Thierry Despont, a specialist in the beaux-arts style. Meier and Despont duked it out.

Stand in the pristine white steel and glass cylinder that is the Getty’s entry hall, and you’re in the purest Meier space in the museum. Then go to the exact opposite end of the building, in the farthest pavilion on the ground floor, to the galleries for 17th and 18th century French decorative arts, one of the jewels of the Getty collection--with their Grand Manner columns and pigeon-blood damask walls, they’re purest Despont.

Now, imagine these antithetical extremes merging, and you have some idea of the miracle that took place in all the galleries in between. You also have an explanation for the tales of titanic design battles raging between Meier and Despont, which enlivened art world gossip for so many years.

Maybe, though, the merger is finally not so unthinkable. Meier’s dramatic and lovely rotunda makes an obvious nod to Frank Lloyd Wright’s great circular corkscrew at the center of New York’s Guggenheim Museum--another architectural landmark that is also an awful place to look at art. But the gesture goes back even further in time--and in sensibility--to the Ur-museum of Western civilization: Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Neoclassical masterpiece, the Altes Museum in Berlin (1828-30), which is anchored around an imposing central rotunda.

Perhaps that is a quiet sign that the Getty’s marvelous rapprochement between the beaux-arts and the Modern was possible from the start. Given the grand result, it was worth the bloody brawl.

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Visiting the New Getty Center

Location: The Getty Center is located at 1200 Getty Center Drive in Brentwood.

Hours: Saturdays and Sundays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Thursdays and Fridays, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Closed Mondays and major holidays.

Cost: Admission to the museum is free; parking is $5.

Transportation: Parking reservations are required and can be made by calling (310) 440-7300 or, for the hearing impaired, (310) 440-7305. Information is in English and Spanish. Visitors without a reservation can come via bus, taxi or bicycle, but parking in nearby neighborhoods is severely restricted. MTA bus No. 561 and the Santa Monica Blue Bus No. 14 stop at the front entrance on Sepulveda Boulevard. Bicycle racks and a taxi stop with direct phone lines to cab companies are located in the parking garage.