The money’s there; where is the desire?

On July 10, the foundations of the Getty Center in Brentwood were severely shaken. Earthquake was not the cause. The falling of an auction hammer in London did the deed.

After 10 quick minutes of furious bidding, Sotheby’s chairman Henry Wyndham brought the hammer down on “The Massacre of the Innocents,” a tumultuous scene of Herod’s soldiers slaughtering babies while their mothers try desperately to save them. The painting had been newly attributed to the 17th century Flemish genius Peter Paul Rubens. An early work, dated about 1610, it was being called a signal painting that announced the emergence of the courtly Baroque era in European art -- easily the most important Old Master picture to come on the open market in a dozen years.

Wyndham asked for an opening bid of 3 million pounds, one-third of Sotheby’s published high estimate of the painting’s worth. “Six million!” shouted a voice from the room, and the bidding race was on. Eight contestants went after the Rubens. The price rose quickly in million-pound increments, and five suitors were still scrambling as the bid soared past 25 million pounds. A prominent London dealer dropped out at 32 million pounds, a Dutch and American team of dealers passed at 35 million pounds. In the end just two were left.

When Wyndham closed the bidding, the Rubens had fetched 49.5 million pounds -- $76.7 million -- the highest price ever paid at auction for an Old Master painting. The winning bid was placed by Sam Fogg, a Mayfair book dealer, but within days it emerged that he was bidding for a private collector -- 44-year-old Canadian tycoon David Thomson. He’d bought the dramatic work as a present for his father, publishing magnate Roy Herbert Thomson of England. In November the Rubens was promised as a gift to the Art Gallery of Ontario.

It won’t, in short, be coming to Los Angeles. For it also quickly emerged that the unsuccessful under-bidder was the J. Paul Getty Museum, which dropped out when the price got to around $63 million. There was no joy in Brentwood. Mighty Getty had struck out.

The museum’s failure to capture the coveted prize now hangs over its sun-drenched travertine piazza like an immovable dark cloud. A ray of sunshine poked through the post-Rubens gloom in October, when it was learned the Getty had negotiated the $50-million purchase of what is reportedly the last undisputed Raphael not in a public collection. A tiny private devotional image of the Madonna and Child, less than a foot on a side, the Raphael must still navigate treacherous British export laws before landing on the Pacific shore.

Success with the Raphael will not mitigate the failure with the Rubens, though. The Getty painting collection needs them both -- and more still.

Once upon a time, the Getty was seen as an 800-pound gorilla -- the wealthiest art museum in the world, with the financial clout to buy whatever rare masterpiece it wanted. But no more. As December’s fifth anniversary of the opening of the lavish Getty Center approaches, the Rubens episode stands as a marker in the museum’s history.

The 5-year-old has spawned other surprises since its debut, both happy and dispiriting. The most refreshing is a nearly unbroken string of first-rate temporary exhibitions. The most startling was the dismantling and reorganization of programs shortly after the opening of the center -- a glittering six-building campus, which was specifically tailored to meet those program needs at a cost of more than a billion dollars.

But the collection is a singular issue. “When the chance comes to make a great acquisition, we will,” the Getty Museum’s former director, John Walsh, flatly declared in 1983. On July 10 a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity arose -- but the Getty didn’t seize it.

Walsh, since retired, was speaking early in the run-up to building the Getty Center, after the institution’s enormous endowment had been secured (it now stands at $4.4 billion) but before an architect had even been selected for the planned Brentwood complex. In one sense he had no choice.

Although the Getty had a small but excellent collection of Greek and Roman antiquities and a large but excellent collection of French decorative arts, its European paintings were mediocre at best, its European sculptures almost nonexistent. Opening an extravagant new complex with the largest, most beautiful suite of galleries devoted to such paltry holdings would have made the museum an international laughingstock.

In another sense, however, Walsh’s declaration had little to do with the Getty in particular. It simply spoke to any art museum’s core value.

The museum’s parent, the Getty Trust, had designed its programs not just to build the collection, but for the field of art history at large. Education, conservation, research, scholarly symposia, new facilities, publications and all the rest are not unimportant. But even the best of them finally occupies a secondary rank. They merely support the encounter between a viewer and a work of art. The collection matters most.

By the time the Getty Center opened in December 1997, the quality of its holdings had improved immeasurably. A mediocre collection had become a good one, with pockets of greatness.

It didn’t help outward appearances that two of those pockets were staggering holdings of works on vellum and paper -- medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, and 19th and 20th century photographs -- which, for conservation reasons, must regularly be returned to storage. Individual paintings also stood out, including incomparable works by Fra Bartolommeo, Dosso Dossi, Manet, Renoir, Van Gogh and many more.

Another standout was the Pontormo. “Portrait of a Halberdier (Francesco Guardi?)” by 16th century Italian Mannerist Jacopo Pontormo was acquired with great fanfare in 1989. Perhaps the finest portrait of its period now in an American museum, the picture was bought at auction at Christie’s for $35.2 million -- more than $50 million in today’s currency. It was the most ever publicly paid for an Old Master, until the Rubens broke the record in July.

Therein lies a lesson. When the Pontormo went on the block in 1989, I wrote a column on the morning of the sale that simply said the Getty would buy the painting that night. I had no inside information. I wasn’t psychic, and I wasn’t going out on a limb. Who else but the Getty had the winning combination of deep desire and deep pockets?

Thirteen years later, the answer to that question is ambiguous. Many other deep pockets have opened. Meanwhile, the Getty’s desire has flagged.

When the Rubens passed the Pontormo’s adjusted-level $50-million mark, three or four buyers were still after it. The 20th century claims -- and fears -- of the Getty’s omnipotence in the marketplace no longer apply in the 21st.

Developing the museum’s collection of painting and sculpture is not paramount for the Getty Trust. Huge resources were devoted to bringing the collection up to respectable snuff for the opening but, Getty administrators told The Times in 1998, the acquisition budget was then promptly slashed in half. Since the summer of 1998, only about 20 paintings and half a dozen sculptures have been purchased.

True, they include some knockout examples by well-known Modern names such as Monet, Cezanne and Degas, as well as by such lesser-known older artists as German Renaissance painter Hans Hoffmann (his only known surviving painting), brilliant 17th century Dutch landscapist Meindert Hobbema and even a long-forgotten collaboration between Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder. But since the center’s opening, the pace of significant acquisitions has been sluggish.

Neither is the Rubens the only extraordinary work the Getty didn’t buy. Perhaps the most egregious lapse came last year, when a rare lime-wood figure of a female saint by Gothic master Tilman Riemenschneider was sold at Sotheby’s New York for $2.97 million. The buyer was a British foundation. The Getty has battled the British government over that country’s restrictive art-export laws -- notably for Antonio Canova’s pivotal Neo-classical marble “The Three Graces,” kept in Great Britain through dubious legal maneuvering. (A rare 13th century Cimabue panel was also withdrawn from Sotheby’s days before an auction, through a deal with London’s National Gallery.) So it was bizarre to see the great Riemenschneider sculpture blithely go abroad.

Nor have marquee names been the only losses. In 2000 there was the mess with Jean-Francois de Troy. The Getty owns his luxurious Rococo genre scene “Before the Ball,” which was exhibited to great acclaim with its companion piece, “After the Ball,” at the Paris Salon of 1737. When the companion came up for auction in 2000, the Getty reportedly pulled out of the bidding at 2 million pounds. It sold for 2.4 million pounds -- $3.6 million.

Before the ball, after the ball -- clearly the Getty dropped the ball. For want of a little more than half a million dollars, the richest art museum in the world came up short.

As the Rubens shows, opportunity missed can be opportunity forever lost. Yes, $76 million is a lot of money -- roughly the museum’s entire operating budget last year. But so what? Turning money into great art is an art museum’s primary function, not to mention its greatest joy.

Ironically, just as the museum was flubbing the Rubens acquisition, the Getty Research Institute was formulating the launch of “an ambitious long-term project” that includes gathering a group of scholars for intense study on a critical theme -- namely, the history of art collecting. No word yet as to whether the Getty Museum’s collection will be a subject of their inquiries.

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Christopher Knight is The Times’ art critic.