Inheriting a Weighty Mantle

When word came down from the pinnacle of the J. Paul Getty Trust that Deborah Gribbon, deputy director and chief curator of the Getty Museum, would be the successor to retiring director John Walsh, barely an eyebrow in the art world was raised. The mid-June timing of the news was unexpected, but Walsh--the scholarly prince and eloquent spokesman of American art museum directors--had made no secret of his desire to retreat into his own writing projects. Neither had he left any doubt about the person he had positioned to take over his job.

Walsh has worked with Gribbon since 1984, the year after he became director of the museum. She rose from assistant director for curatorial affairs to associate director in 1987, then added “chief curator” to her title in 1991. Two years ago--after the Getty Center opened and Barry Munitz succeeded Harold M. Williams as president of the trust--Gribbon was promoted to the position of deputy director and chief curator. At that point, assiduous readers of the art world’s tea leaves knew that she was Walsh’s heir apparent.

Sure enough, as the Getty’s recent announcement confirmed, Gribbon, 52, will become director of the museum--on Oct. 1, when Walsh steps down, at 62.

“I’m thrilled with the possibilities,” she said. “I’m in a very fortunate position here because I not only learned from the best, but this is a situation in which nothing is broken. John and I are different people, and I do need time to step back and think and consult before moving forward. But the fundamental values won’t change. No one coming in here--whether from outside or up from the ranks--would step into this thinking that wholesale changes need to be made.”

The prospect of “an orderly succession” is definitely a plus, Munitz said, praising Gribbon as “a very smart, skilled, elegant professional.” But that’s not to say her appointment was quite the foregone conclusion it may have seemed.

“I had lengthy and complex discussions with the board of trustees twice this spring about how I saw the job and different kinds of searches we might do,” Munitz said. “We quickly put aside a formal search process because we thought we knew the museum world well enough to not have to do that. But we tested ourselves with a range of people around the world--who they are, where they are, what they might do, how they might fit at the Getty. At the end of it, we all looked at each other and said, ‘We’ve got the best person.’ Had she been elsewhere, we would have gone after her.”

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Walsh did go after her, in 1983, when she was curator of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. They had met in Boston and occasionally worked together during the late 1970s and early ‘80s, when Walsh was curator of paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts there.

“Debbie edited a couple of articles I wrote for the scholarly journal the Gardner puts out every year,” Walsh recalled. “She was amazingly young, 28 or so at the time, but she was already the curator of a venerable museum and the best editor I’d ever had. She was also extremely acute on the things that I thought mattered a lot, the relative importance and value of individual works of art.

“When I was asked to do this job at the Getty, I had only one candidate for assistant director for curatorial affairs, and that was she,” Walsh said. “I thought, ‘I have no shot at this. I am going to ask her to go to Southern California, a person who knows as little about L.A. as I do and probably cares less?’ But she had an amazing courage and sense of adventure.”

Gribbon admits to lots of reservations, both personally and professionally, about what she calls Walsh’s “wild idea.” For one thing, she and her husband, psychiatrist Winston Alt, had just bought a house in Boston, the very day Walsh offered her the Getty job. “I really credit Winston with saying, ‘This is something you just have to think about,’ ” Gribbon said. “He had never been to Los Angeles and was at Harvard’s program in psychiatry at the time. Coincidentally, a position opened up for him at UCLA. If it hadn’t, it wouldn’t have been possible to move.”

She began to take Walsh’s offer seriously, if only as “a two-year gig,” she said. But in May 1983, “a turning point came” when Sotheby Parke Bernet auctioned 16 works from the estate of Doris D. Havemeyer, the daughter-in-law of legendary collectors Henry O. and Louisine Havemeyer. “The Getty, with the Norton Simon Museum, bought the Degas pastel ‘L’Attente,’ which remains one of my favorite things in Los Angeles. And I thought to myself, ‘I just have to be part of an organization that can do this,’ ” Gribbon said.

“Then, a couple of weeks after accepting the job, I learned that I was pregnant with Sarah, our first daughter. So I started the job as a mother. I hadn’t anticipated that, but it’s been great,” she said. (Sarah is now 15 and their second daughter, Janie, is 12.)

“At various moments I’ve given some thought to looking elsewhere and taking other opportunities. But the reality is, I really love Los Angeles. I think it has tremendous possibility, and I want to be part of that. The same is true of the Getty.”

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A native of Washington, D.C., Gribbon grew up in a house decorated with reproductions of artworks at the National Gallery of Art and frequently visited the museum with her parents. She graduated from Wellesley College as an art history major in 1970 and went on to Harvard University, receiving her doctorate in 1982, with a dissertation on French Impressionist Edouard Manet.

She planned to teach at a university but landed at the Gardner Museum, largely because she and her husband needed to find a medical school for him and a job for her in the same city. “I taught part time in Boston and loved it, but I’ve never had second thoughts about working at a museum,” she said. “I believe very strongly in the power of art and the importance of history, and in the role of museums, where it all comes together.”

So far, she has worked largely behind the scenes at the Getty. Walsh characterized her as a “tough and shrewd” but gentle administrator who “knows how to manage talented and sometimes difficult people.”

But Gribbon said the best part of her job is working closely with the collection and watching the public in the galleries.

“I’m not the museum director who graduated from business school. I know how to organize things. I hope I inspire people, and I think I’m pretty decisive and have a sense of direction. But for me it is about the work of the museum; it’s about the opportunities, the way we serve the public and the place that we have in Los Angeles.”

Much of the excitement at the museum has come from its rapid evolution, she said. “The collection has grown far beyond what anyone ever imagined. There were many people who felt you simply could not build a collection of great quality and interest at this point in time. I think that’s just manifestly wrong.”

While the pace of collecting has slowed since the Getty Center opened, “the collection must continue to grow very, very actively,” she said. “Everything we aspire to springs from the collection. And now that it has gained a distinctive character and shape, we can build on that.”

Munitz concurred. “We are going to aggressively stay in the market,” he said. But one difference between Walsh’s and Gribbon’s jobs is that she will devote a larger share of her time to “what we do with the collection,” he said.

While declining to detail her plans, Gribbon said she hopes to expand the museum’s temporary exhibition program, which has been well received by critics and the public alike. “I’d like to think that we bring exhibitions to Los Angeles that the public wouldn’t see otherwise,” she said. “I’m anxious to prove that you can do exhibitions that represent new and exciting research that is appealing to a general public, and that you can communicate the excitement and the interest of that scholarly work.”

Running through a mental agenda, Gribbon emphasized improving access to the Getty, expanding community outreach, building relationships with other cultural institutions and maintaining a presence for contemporary art. Another important area for development is the Web. “The core of what we do is the experience with works of art. I don’t ever want computers to replace that, but they can definitely enhance it,” she said.

The reopening of the Getty Villa in Malibu also looms large. Scheduled for 2002, the project has been delayed by objections from neighbors who fear increased traffic and noise, but the California Coastal Commission has approved plans, and a lawsuit, consolidating several neighbors’ complaints, is about to be heard and decided.

When the villa reopens as a museum and study center for antiquities, it will be “emblematic of the direction we want the Getty to take,” Gribbon said. “It isn’t only a museum; it is a place where people around the Getty will work in a very integrated fashion. And we will serve a multitude of audiences.”

As the Getty moves into its next phase, Gribbon knows that the institution is still seen by some as an upstart. But that’s an advantage, she said. “It gives you a moment to try something new, to not feel that you are bound by tradition that is becoming moribund. People take you seriously based on the work you do. We do good work, and I think that’s recognized.”