Finally, Some Respect

The “Three Graces,” a marble sculpture of Jupiter’s daughters by 18th century Italian artist Antonio Canova, smiles in beauty and polemics from a place of honor at the National Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland. The girls--Grace, Beauty and Joy--had a close call, but after great furor and nail-biting peril, they were, as grateful British newspapers put it, “Saved for the nation!”

Read that “Saved from the Getty” by a British government determined to keep the statue at home and willing to rewrite the rules at the eleventh hour in 1994 to make sure it happened. “The Getty said [early on] they were not going to plunder British heritage, and many of the great objects sold to them in the past decade have come from Britain. I don’t know how that squares up,” said Timothy Clifford, director of Scotland’s National Galleries. “One is slightly wary of the Getty.”

Times are changing, but the Getty Museum has been a nationalist and establishment bugbear in the art-aware nations of Europe for most of its brief, free-spending life. Watch out, here comes the nouveau-riche, buy-it-all American with pretensions to match its millions. An asking price of $11.5 million for the “Three Graces”? A bagatelle for the Getty, but it took Clifford, the curator of a London museum and a lot of their friends ages to match the bid.

“There was a time, when the Getty was first set up in the ‘80s, when it seemed to be going around like a Russian factory ship, vacuuming up everything to be found. People were nervous,” says David Barrie, director of the National Art Collections Fund, a charity that struggles to keep Britain’s artistic patrimony at home.

The Getty. So easy to lampoon for its culture-grabbing West Coast glitz. So easy to envy with all that money. “I guess there was a whiff of suntan about the Getty in 1983,” acknowledges Getty Museum Director John Walsh, who came to the museum in 1983, a year after the trust received its $1.2-billion endowment. “People didn’t know where Malibu was or what the Getty was going to do with all those millions. It was all a little weird.”

Now, less than two decades after Malibu chic turned from surf to Cezanne, the Getty is an accepted--and usually respected--lion of the global art world. Its billions-heavy shadow is still sometimes controversial as the new Getty Center opens, but it is also increasingly comforting to keepers of the world’s culture.

“The Getty is a bit like dealing with Microsoft, but it’s unfortunate that the occasional buying of heritage objects obscures the important work the Getty as an institution is doing,” says Jeremy Warren, assistant director of Britain’s watchdog Museums and Galleries Commission. As patron of conservation, artistic education and information, Getty Trust money is at work in more than 100 countries, from Denmark to China.

Still, it is the museum’s acquisitions that define the Getty’s high international profile, like the preemptive $26 million this year for a landscape by 17th century French Classical artist Nicolas Poussin. Clifford and other curators couldn’t match the bid and Poussin’s “Landscape with Calm” left for California just in time for the new Getty opening.

Nevertheless, the Getty has sometimes ruled itself out of competition for objects fraught with historical significance, and a grateful army of art workers around the world sees the Getty as a key benefactor for a common cultural cause.

“The Getty is considered on the cutting edge of preservation of murals and paintings,” says How Man Wong, president of the China Exploration and Research Society, based in Hong Kong. He has seen and benefited from Getty Conservation Institute projects in Tibet and on the fringes of China’s Gobi Desert, where Buddhist monastery and grotto art has been repaired and restored.

Projects big and small have won a devoted international following. So, too, have the results of time and on-site exposure to the Malibu museum by curators from around the world over the years.

“The visitors have helped the rest of the world to know that we are making a serious collection for the benefit of the public. We are not Aladdin’s cave. We ourselves have a sense of fair play,” says Walsh. The Getty gets high marks from peers and competitors such as Neil MacGregor, director of Britain’s National Gallery. He admires the Getty’s collections of drawings, manuscripts and 18th century French decorative arts, and its Old Masters painting collection abuilding in publicity’s glare--sometimes to the National Gallery’s distress.

Think of MacGregor and Walsh as rival head coaches in the same tough league--good friends who sometimes battle fiercely. “Certainly the Getty is a competitor and sometimes we want the same things. They have carried off some treasures, but they are fair and honorable opponents,” says MacGregor, a member of the Getty Museum’s Visiting Committee, an advisory board.

Interestingly, the oil-laden Getty family is also involved with Britain’s National Gallery. In 1986, the Anglophile and British resident J. Paul Getty II, the third son of Malibu’s Getty, donated about $75 million for a National Gallery endowment fund. In all, according to one 1995 estimate, the reclusive Getty, who has an honorary knighthood, has given about $200 million to the arts in Britain over a decade. That included a decisive $1.5 million to stop the California Getty from acquiring the “Graces.”

But nothing personal. When Clifford incautiously suggested that there might be a family feud, the enraged Getty temporarily withdrew his offer.

Like all American collectors, the Getty must operate in European nations where much of the Western world’s art was created across long centuries and where art treasures are jealously guarded. In countries such as Italy and France, artworks are highly protected by government decree and are rarely allowed to leave. Britain, by contrast, has one of the world’s largest art markets and some of the most liberal art export policies.

Thus, as it cruised the world amassing its collections, the Getty has become a prominent habitue of London art circles. “For some people, the very name Getty is like a red rag to a bull,” said Roger Hollest, head of auction house Phillips of Bond Street. “In Britain the Getty is perceived with a lot of suspicion--a big predator which has limitless money and is able to buy what it wants,” he says. “Owners, on the other hand, are only too pleased to sell to the highest bidder.”

Says Alan Borg, director of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum: “Anyone who has a large pocket is going to come in for a lot of criticism.”

After a last-gasp effort, the V&A; bought the “Three Graces” jointly with Clifford’s Scottish National Galleries after the British government intervened and gave national charities and benefactors more time to match the Getty price. Not quite cricket, and not many British art specialists quibble with Walsh’s description of it as “moving the goal posts while the game was underway.” But, says Borg, “there is no rancor. If I had been in John Walsh’s position, I would have behaved in the same way as he did. I’m sure that if he had been in my position, he would have done everything he could to keep the ‘Graces.’ ”

In the art world today, when a major piece appears for sale, museum curators and private collectors take it for granted that the Getty will be in the action. “In the past there has been a perception that the Getty’s ability to throw dollars after pictures was distorting the market, especially since not everything they bought was absolutely authentic,” says Nicholas Mann, director of the Warburg Institute, a postgraduate research center within the University of London.

Indeed, still smarting at the loss of the “Graces,” the Getty paid a gloves-are-off $22 million last year for “The Rest on the Flight Into Egypt With St. John the Baptist,” a Holy Family image by the Italian Renaissance painter Fra Bartolommeo. “Prices like that make the British go belly up,” says Brian Sewell, art critic of the London newspaper Evening Standard.

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There is an inescapable fact of life in the international art community: The Getty is the richest museum. That, and the reality that its wealthiest competitors are also private American institutions, weighs heavily on the Old World.

In Europe, the largest museums and galleries tend to be national institutions administered with public funds, unable to match the Getty’s resources. When England’s National Gallery, for example, bought a painting by French Neoimpressionist Georges Seurat for $21 million, it arranged to pay over three years.

“The Getty can spend that three or four times a year if it wants to,” says Warren, of the British museums’ watchdog commission.

Or more. Last year, the Getty spent $110 million to develop museum and research institute collections, according to its financial statement. In one four-year period, the Getty paid about $75 million, which British institutions could not match, for artworks, including some by Rembrandt, Turner and Giulio Romano, Warren says.

In Scotland, director Clifford’s total purchasing budget for five galleries is just over $1 million per year, making it third highest among United Kingdom museums, he says. Add donations and contributions from heritage funds and the national lottery, he says, and he may have $5 million to $8 million in a good year.

“Sometimes we are on a collision course because I want the best for Scotland and they want the best for L.A.,” says Clifford. “But I am David and they are Goliath. Do remember who won.” Two beats. “Unfortunately, Goliath seems to be rather successful,” he says with a grin.

Griping about the Getty among money-tight European institutions is familiar, but not everybody thinks it is always justified. “Art is international. It belongs to nobody. It is ridiculous and false to say the Getty steals art from other countries,” says Pierre Barge, director of the Yves St. Laurent group and former director of the Bastille Opera. “French museums would have funds to buy any major artwork if they didn’t spend their money buying minor works. And with inheritance laws, they could inherit works if they weren’t so stupid.”

What is also true, though, is that the Getty is the paramount international symbol of an institution that plays alone in a dimension it has created for itself.

“The insouciance about money is astonishing to a European,” says the director of a major European institute whose recent tour of the new museum left him nonplused “at the luxury of the internal fittings, the fortunes being thrown at the walls of the museum.”

Boundless resources and an urge to quickly amass collections brought the Getty enemies. As a major collector of Greek and Roman antiquities, the early Getty acquired a reputation for “sailing rather close to the wind,” as a British curator says delicately--by buying pieces of dubious provenance. The Getty no longer buys unpublished artifacts, Walsh says, but a bad taste lingers in some quarters, as in Italy, where in the late 1980s the Getty was named in judicial investigations as buyer of a Greek statue thought by some Italian officials to have been illegally excavated from Sicily. The investigations never uncovered a crime, and the work, a 5th century BC Aphrodite, is a prized object in the museum’s collection.

Italian art critic Vittorio Sgarbi, for one, admires the Getty “for promoting studies, for restoration and for the quality of what they buy. But as to the origin of a piece--they consider it the problem of the seller and not the buyer. This shows a great lack of scruples.”

Franco Zeffirelli, Italian film director and senator, disagrees: “What is all this ungenerous fuss about the Getty? They have certainly not organized raids, thefts or other criminal ways to acquire new artifacts. On the contrary, they have often taken away from irresponsible owners works that now are properly cared for, encouraging people to discover unknown buried treasures in countries where government ignorance and indifference has been leaving them to rot underground.”

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If the museum dominates international perceptions of the Getty, the quieter work of allied institutes for conservation, information and scholarship have built a network of fans on every continent.

“They are playing an extremely beneficial role in conservation in parts of the world where no one would have put any money. It’s not high-profile, saving-Venice kinds of things, but filling basic needs by supporting young scholars and working in places like Mesoamerica,” says Mann of the Warburg Institute.

In Mexico, for example, conservation has historically been the preserve of government. Nowadays, though, Getty grants are increasingly welcome. The Getty has supported the study of Mayan murals in Chiapas, the classification and reproduction of painter David Alfaro Siqueiros’ archives, the restoration of the giant altarpiece in a 16th century convent near Oaxaca and the conservation of pre-Columbian rock paintings in Baja California.

“For a national heritage as rich as Mexico’s, government funding is rarely sufficient,” says Gerardo Estrada, director of Mexico’s National Institute of Fine Arts.

The grant program has supported nearly 1,700 projects in 135 countries to the tune of almost $70 million, says director Deborah Marrow. Its grants are helping restore 13th century mosaics in Rome’s Santa Maria Maggiore basilica and preserve the Temple of the Tooth shrine in Sri Lanka.

Denmark’s State Art Museum got Getty money to conserve paintings, and the Getty is aiding in the development of collections at the National Museum of Archaeology in Malta. Museum personnel from sub-Saharan Africa are being trained with Getty support, and the Getty has funded more than 100 scholars in Eastern and Central Europe to conduct art historical research outside their own countries.

Seen from below, the Getty can be a powerful but daunting friend.

“One thing that turned me off was the immense amount of paperwork we had to do for a $20,000 grant. They have the extra people to run a bureaucracy, but small non-governmental organizations in developing countries can find their demands out of reach,” says Wong, who won an international award for restoration of “exquisite” Buddhist murals in Tibetan monasteries.

As part of its international reach, the Getty’s Conservation Institute has restored the royal tomb of Nefertari in Egypt’s Valley of the Queens and contributed to preserve the historic city center of Quito, Ecuador. Getty money has battled the ravages of time on the mosaic facade of a Prague cathedral, on bas-reliefs in a Benin palace and in a Mayan ceremonial center in Belize.

A program developed by the Getty Information Institute is directing an international campaign called Object ID to aid the recovery of stolen art. Essential information to document any art object is listed in 10 categories and has become an almost global standard for museums, governments, police and art historians, says Robin Thorne, a British specialist who helped develop the system.

“The Getty programs are enormously admired and have made a huge difference around the world, particularly in the gathering of information and making it available,” says MacGregor of the National Gallery. Yet they have made few international ripples. Says British art critic Sewell: “They cast almost no public shadow.” As ever, it is the Getty Museum on which the Getty Trust’s international image turns, just as it did when it was a billionaire’s private jewel for antiquities of great beauty and sometimes unpedigreed provenance.

But it now has a solid reputation, something that money can’t buy.

So far, says MacGregor, “The Getty has had a difficult hand to play and has played it very deftly.”

“I say good luck to them,” says Barrie, whose charity has been fighting since 1903 to keep art treasures in Britain. “Building up a major art collection at the latter end of the 20th century is very difficult: Prices are so high, works are so rare. They’ve done very well. But we’re heading toward the time, another 25 to 30 years, when even the Getty will have difficulty,” he cautions.

For now at least, Los Angeles’ acquisitive young dynamo is king of the hill in every sense. Says Borg of London’s Victoria and Albert: “At a time when so many museums and galleries are struggling, it is wonderful to see one that isn’t.”