A Getty Chronicle: The Malibu Years

It’s been ridiculed as Pompeii on the Pacific, scorned as a plastic paradise and dismissed as an aging billionaire’s monument to bad taste. It’s also been embraced as one of Southern California’s most beloved cultural landmarks and praised as the home of an increasingly respected art collection.

The J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu--which will close its doors at 5 p.m. today for a four-year renovation--does not invite neutral responses. That’s probably because it has never been an ordinary repository of artistic treasures. From its beginnings in 1954, in a ranch house tucked away in a verdant canyon, to its 1974 expansion on the same property in a replica of a Roman villa, to its planned transformation as a showcase and study center for antiquities, the museum has been shaped by an eccentric collector and propelled to international fame by the fruits of his fabulous fortune.

At his death in 1976 at 83, in a shock to everyone, Getty bestowed $700 million on the museum. Several family members contested the will, and it took six years and $26.4 million in legal fees to settle the estate. In recent years, J. Paul Getty II, son of the late oil magnate and a longtime resident of Britain, has perpetuated public appearances of family rancor by donating large sums of money to help British institutions buy artworks the Getty Museum had been attempting to purchase and export.

Meanwhile, the bequest’s $700-million nest egg has grown to a $4.2-billion endowment, governed by the J. Paul Getty Trust. But extraordinary wealth is only the most spectacular attribute of a distinctive museum with a peculiarly colorful history.

Think about it. What other museum has the grave of its benefactor and the remains of bear pits on its grounds? Where else would you find museum employees’ offices in the living room, princess suite and theater of a sprawling ranch house, unseen by the public? How many museums ever had a restaurant dubbed Spa Getty, once staffed by waitresses in togas?

And how about those fabled staff talent shows staged in the ranch house’s theater in the late 1970s? Among the most memorable acts was a filmed rendition of “Swan Lake,” performed on the grounds by women in pink tutus and black swim fins. Lured up the hill by a male swan’s voice, the human birds cooled their ardor by flapping around in one of the villa’s reflecting pools.

But now the museum has reached the end of an amazing era--a 23-year period when its second home, known as the villa, evolved in the public’s perception from a rich man’s folly to the home of an art world powerhouse. Today is the villa’s last day of public operation until 2001, when it is scheduled to reopen, under the direction of antiquities curator Marion True, with expanded facilities devoted to the display, conservation and interpretation of ancient art.

Not to worry. The main structure will remain much the same, only better, True said. Windows that have been covered to accommodate paintings will be opened to shed more light on ancient sculpture. The entrance, which has always been awkward because it requires visitors to trek past a garage and up a stairway or elevator, will be changed to a more graceful and historically accurate approach, through the west porch leading to the atrium.

Outside, the gardens will be augmented by new facilities, including additional parking, a new auditorium, a small amphitheater for the performance of ancient dramas and an entry pavilion. The ranch house will be revamped to house visiting scholars and antiquities curators.

In preparation for the Dec. 16 opening of the Getty’s new museum at the Getty Center in Brentwood, all the art collections except antiquities already have been moved. Greek and Roman artworks remain on the lower floor of the museum in Malibu, but most of them will go into storage during the renovation. A few of the most prized pieces will be installed in the new museum in its inaugural exhibition, “Beyond Beauty: Antiquities as Evidence,” a 10-month show exploring the beauty and significance of a broad spectrum of ancient art.

Even the temporary closure of the Malibu villa brings tears to the eyes of many who have worked there, some of whom are leaving for the Brentwood hilltop. Despite the building’s foibles, its charms and gracious setting inspire affection.

“Everything. I’ll miss every single thing about it,” said Gillian Wilson, curator of decorative arts, who nevertheless is thrilled with her vastly improved galleries at the Getty Center. One of a handful of the Getty’s staff who actually knew the museum’s namesake--and wheedled money for art purchases out of the notoriously stingy oil baron--she is a fount of anecdotes and wistful memories.

But even relative short-timers have formed strong attachments to the museum. Adrift in empty offices or stuffed between stacks of boxes awaiting shipment to Brentwood, they sketched out the history of the villa and constructed a collective memoir.

It goes like this:

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J. Paul Getty was born in Minneapolis in 1892, the only child of a wealthy attorney who entered the oil business in Oklahoma in 1903 and moved his family to Southern California in 1906. Young Getty began working in the Oklahoma oil fields during summer vacations and took his first trip to Europe after graduating from high school in 1909. As a well-to-do young man, he began collecting art during the Great Depression when bargains were plentiful. His timing was auspicious, but he never adjusted to the art market’s rise. Until the end of his life, he greeted every supplicant curator’s proposed purchase with the same two words: “very expensive,” Wilson said.

Burton Fredericksen--a longtime curator of paintings who now heads the Getty Information Institute’s Provenance Index--also has clear memories of his boss’ reluctance to spend large sums of money.

“He didn’t like to compete with museums,” Fredericksen said, recalling meetings with Getty in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. “His limits were unstated, but it was hard to get him to buy anything for more than $50,000.” No one could have guessed that 20 years later the museum would be known for snapping up paintings by Renoir, Manet, Cezanne, Pontormo, Rembrandt, Fra Bartolommeo and Poussin at prices ranging from $17 million to $35 million.

Getty’s first significant purchase was a 17th century Dutch landscape by Jan van Goyen, for which he paid $1,100 in 1931 at an auction in Berlin but sold before he established his museum.

At the time, he lacked both the means and the inclination to compete with America’s biggest collectors, such as Andrew Mellon and Samuel H. Kress. But his interest in acquiring art grew into a self-confessed addiction that continued for 45 years.

Unlike many prominent collectors who concentrate on paintings, Getty was partial to decorative arts, which could be purchased for relatively small sums. Arguing that furniture should be equal in stature to painting and sculpture, he insisted that hanging a fine painting in a room with cheap furnishings was akin to wearing a 50-cent necktie with a $300 suit.

As he became better informed about the objects that attracted him, he made shrewd purchases of fine carpets and 18th century French furniture. He also cultivated his taste for antiquities, apparently inspired by a visit in 1939 to the Vatican Museum. And as his oil empire grew, so did his art holdings.

By the mid 1940s, Getty had an art collection and a house on the beach in Santa Monica, next to one of William Randolph Hearst’s properties. Getty had also visited San Simeon, where Hearst had built a castle furnished with a global array of artworks, and established a zoo on its grounds. In 1946, when a property in Malibu, far more modest than San Simeon, came on the market, Getty saw his chance to emulate Hearst and grabbed it.

He acquired 64 acres known as the Canon de Sentimiento from Los Angeles attorney Clyde Parker, for $250,000, and named it Getty Ranch. After adding a second floor to the house, he spent weekends there with his fifth wife Louise and their infant son Timmy until 1951, when Getty left California for Europe, to live closer to his business interests. Although he traveled widely and probably intended to return, at least for visits, he settled in Britain and developed a fear of flying that precluded trans-Atlantic trips.

By the time he left California he had become a serious collector. Indeed he had amassed so much art that he began to donate significant pieces to museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum in Exposition Park. But Getty got a better idea from an associate who suggested establishing his own museum at the ranch. He set up a trust for “the diffusion of artistic and general knowledge,” added a wing onto the house and opened the first version of the J. Paul Getty Museum in May 1954.

He didn’t attend the opening, but sent his regrets from the oil fields of Kuwait: “I am sorry that I am unable to join you on this occasion. I hope this museum, modest and unpretentious as it is, will nevertheless give pleasure to the many people in and around Los Angeles who are interested in the periods of art represented here.” The museum consisted of five galleries, displaying examples of French furniture, Greek and Roman sculpture, and European painting. W.R. Valentiner, the German-born former director of the Detroit Institution of Art and the Art Division of the Los Angeles County Museum, served as director for the first year or so. During the late 1950s the museum was under the curatorial leadership of art historian Paul Wescher.

Sleepy as it was, the museum attracted a coterie of graduate students from UCLA during the late 1950s and ‘60s. Among them was Fredericksen, who remembers the ranch house museum as an obscure rustic outpost and a quiet place to write and do research.

“There were 24 spaces for cars,” he said. “The museum was open two days a week between 3 and 5 in the afternoon. Later it was opened one additional day a week for one group per day. Attendance on a good week was 150 people, but it was often half that.”

When visitors appeared, always by reservation, a gardener would check their names off a list. Essentially an unoccupied home with a wing for art, the fledgling museum was surrounded by wooded terrain containing Getty’s version of a zoo, home to a few bears, buffalo, mountain goats and other animals--all of which attracted flies.

“There was a real menagerie for a while,” Fredericksen said, “and it was not easy to keep people away from it.” One man who wandered off to the bear pits tried to share his cup of yogurt and nearly lost his hand.

At the museum, all the guards were UCLA graduate students. The annual budget was $25,000, including salaries. Getty, who was living in Sutton Place, a 16th century manor house 25 miles southwest of London, made acquisitions from additional funds. Although he never visited the ranch house museum--or the villa--the staff always labored under the delusion that his arrival was imminent. The furniture was dusted, the windows were washed and the closets were stocked with linens so the living quarters would be in perfect order when he came to Malibu.

In 1968, Getty decided to expand the 14-year-old museum he had never seen. He considered several alternatives: a Spanish Colonial building to complement the ranch house and a Neoclassical structure that would suit the antiquities. Then--apparently out of the blue, at a dinner party at Sutton Place--he told a group of friends he wanted to re-create the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum, which had been buried along with Pompeii when Mt. Vesuvius erupted in AD 79.

Ground was broken in December 1970, and construction began in mid-1971. Norman Neuerburg, a scholar of ancient Roman architecture, served as a consultant. By the time the villa opened in 1974 Getty had invested $18 million in the building and provided a $40-million endowment for operating expenses.

Meanwhile, Fredericksen became curator of paintings in 1971 and hired Wilson, a British-born curator of decorative arts, who was trained at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and had won a fellowship to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The following year, Jiri Frel joined the staff as curator of antiquities, finally giving the museum a specialist for each of its major collections.

The seemingly bizarre construction project was the source of art world gossip, but the ranch house museum continued to operate in relative obscurity. “Some days nobody came at all,” Wilson said. “We used to sit on the lawn and wait for the avocados to fall.”

Occasional lectures attracted scholars to the museum and created a flurry of excitement, but there was little money for essentials--let alone entertaining.

“Things ran on a shoestring. We were even discouraged from using air mail,” Fredericksen recalled.

“To make a long-distance telephone call, you had to get approval from the board of trustees, and they only met once a year,” Wilson said.

However, the curators managed to travel in search of acquisitions, and to Sutton Place to try to win Getty’s approval for their selections. But even after he had agreed to buy a piece, there were harrowing waits to see if he would initial invoices for payment.

“He signed them ‘OKJPG,’ but he wouldn’t do it in front of you,” Wilson said. Not only was he reluctant to part with his money, in his later years he needed an aide to guide his shaky hand and probably didn’t want anyone else to witness his disability, she said.

Eager to finish the new museum, but finding it difficult to keep tabs on it from a distance, Getty hired British architect Stephen Garrett in 1973 to oversee the project. Calling himself “a messenger boy, a kind of papal legate working between Getty--the pope at Sutton Place--and the worker priests out here,” Garrett had made 18 round trips across the Atlantic by the time the museum opened, carrying everything from marble samples to films of construction workers pouring concrete.

A bon vivant who spearheaded the zany staff talent shows, Garrett turned out to be the right man for the job, partly because he had a gift for persuading Getty to equip the museum with public amenities. When Getty thought a few vending machines in the basement were preferable to a cafe, Garrett made sure space was not available in the basement and put the cafe--later dubbed Spa Getty--in an accessible location. When Getty refused to provide refreshments for guests at the museum’s opening, Garrett’s wife, Jean, and several museum volunteers did the cooking--as they did a year later for the venerable Assn. of Art Museum Directors’ meeting at the museum.

Indeed, Getty was so penurious that the staff feared he actually would visit the museum as it neared completion. “It was a huge relief that he didn’t come,” Wilson said, imagining changes Getty might have ordered.

The museum opened in January 1974. It was a hugely popular success, causing traffic jams that temporarily forced the museum’s closure on weekends and resulted in a reservations system. But the building was a critical disaster. Some critics said the building was such a strong architectural statement that it overshadowed the collections; others charged that it wasn’t an accurate reproduction.

Getty’s curators had been allowed to go on a buying spree before the museum opened, to assure that the galleries wouldn’t be empty, but a penny-pinching tradition continued.

In 1983, when Barbara Whitney, the museum’s associate director of administration, arrived, she found Getty’s miserly legacy still operating. “People were completely unused to spending money,” she said. “They groveled for supplies and sent three-page memos to justify expenditures of $2,000. I thought, ‘This is great. I get to be generous.’ ”

But change was already in the wind. Getty had never told his staff that he would leave his fortune to the museum; indeed, he had indicated just the opposite. After his death in 1976 they were stunned to hear that he had left $700 million in oil stocks to the museum.

In 1982, when the J. Paul Getty Trust received proceeds of the estate, the gift had already appreciated to $1.3 billion and that was just the beginning. The museum has gone on to distinguish itself by upgrading and expanding its collection and organizing critically acclaimed exhibitions--and it is only one of the trust’s programs.

John Walsh, a highly respected curator of paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, became director of the Getty Museum in 1983, bringing an imprimatur of East Coast prestige to the renegade institution.

Seeing a rare chance to build a collection, Deborah Gribbon left the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston to become the Getty’s associate director and chief curator. And indeed the collection has been transformed. “Of the paintings installed at the new museum, all but a handful have been acquired in the last 14 years,” Gribbon said.

Walsh, too, is looking ahead to the new museum. “Although this museum is built on the villa experience, the villa was far from perfect for paintings,” he said. “It had charm and serendipity, but the new museum has what it lacked: elbow room, light, air, space.”

No institution in the world has undergone such a radical change in such a short time as the Getty, Fredericksen said. “Many people regret leaving Malibu. That’s a setting you can’t duplicate. But the old days were not that great. Now we have a collection worth coming a long distance to see. We have a library that is one of the best in the country. All the things Los Angeles and the museum lacked, we now have.”

As to what Getty might think of the new museum, no one on staff will hazard a guess. But Garrett recalls that when Getty was choosing a style of architecture for the villa, the one thing he did not want was a modern building.

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* Parking reservations at the museum are completely booked for today, but visitors dropped off by car, bus or taxi will be admitted.