The rest is art history

It wasn’t just the money. The $20 million the J. Paul Getty Trust reportedly -- but never admittedly -- paid in 1984 for 18,000 photographs was an astonishing sum in a photography market that was stuck in a recession. But the price really wasn’t all that high for the fabulously rich organization that would build a $1-billion cultural complex on a Brentwood hilltop and spend $70 million on a single painting by Titian.

What dropped jaws in the art world was that the trust’s museum -- a bastion of Greek and Roman antiquities, French decorative arts and pre-20th century European painting and sculpture -- had plunged into a relatively modern medium. And that it had made the move so dramatically.

In one stroke, the museum acquired the two best private collections of photography in the United States -- those of New Yorker Sam Wagstaff and Chicagoan Andre Crane -- and combined them with seven major European holdings and smaller groups of works from other collectors, creating a cache of rare or unique images bigger than the photography collections of either the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Museum of Modern Art in New York. At the same time, the Getty hired Weston Naef, the Met’s photography curator, to head its new department and established a powerhouse of photographic scholarship and connoisseurship in Los Angeles.

Twenty years later, this improbable tale is part of art history. “Photographers of Genius at the Getty,” an anniversary exhibition of 158 images by 38 artists, offers a pointed reminder that much has changed in the field of photography since the museum made its stunning debut. The Getty’s collection of photographs has grown more than fivefold and prices have risen dramatically.

The record auction price for a photograph in 1984 was $67,100 for a 1939 work by Charles Sheeler; today, the record is $916,126 for an 1842 daguerreotype of an Athenian temple by Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, similar to one of his works in the Getty’s collection. Forty photographs of Yosemite shot about 1878 to 1881 by Carleton Watkins -- whose work is held in depth at the Getty and featured in the exhibition -- will go on the block April 28 at Sotheby’s New York, with an estimated market value of more than $1 million. A private collection of 43 modern photographs, to be sold the same day at Sotheby’s, is expected to bring at least $1.6 million.

One of the most surprising aspects of the Getty’s coup in 1984 was that the news didn’t leak to the press until five days before the Getty planned to announce it. Working with John Walsh, who directed the museum from 1983 to 2000, New York photography dealer Daniel J. Wolf orchestrated the sales without disclosing the buyer’s name or telling prospective sellers that he was simultaneously negotiating with other collectors.

“It just fell into place,” Wolf said recently at a private preview of the anniversary exhibition. “Every night I would go to bed thinking of something we needed, and the next morning I would get a call saying it was available.”

Assembling the package couldn’t have been that easy, but the time was right. The collectors were ready to sell, and the photography market was at point where the sellers could cash in handsomely and the Getty could still get a good deal.

“It was the last moment when something like that could happen,” San Francisco dealer Jeffrey Fraenkel said.

“Whatever they paid, it was a bargain,” said Arthur Ollman, director of the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego.

Among the highlights of the Getty’s instant collection were an album of experimental work by French pioneer Hippolyte Bayard; the best group of photographs outside France by Nadar, the most popular portraitist of the Parisian elite during the reign of Napoleon II; the world’s largest private holdings of works by modernists Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray; examples of every aspect of the work of August Sander, whose portraits document the social strata of pre-World War II Germany; works from the Photo-Secession and Pictorialist epochs (1900-25); and a survey of 20th century Czechoslovakian experimental photography.

None can compete

Today the museum has a collection of more than 100,000 images by 600 artists, composed of about 35,000 individual prints, 1,500 daguerreotypes and related objects, 30,000 stereographs and cartes de visite and 475 albums containing almost 40,000 photographs. All these materials are housed under the museum in a facility that accommodates offices, a study room with north-facing windows that serves 700 visitors a year, a conservation and framing laboratory, an air-conditioned storage room and a refrigerated vault, kept at 40 degrees Fahrenheit, for color photographs.

It’s an impressive setup that puts the Getty in the forefront, but it’s not alone. Two American institutions have much bigger collections: the Library of Congress, with 12 million photographs, and George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., with 400,000 photographs and negatives. Among art museums, none can compete with the Getty, but many have collected photographs for decades and have photography departments that predate the Getty’s.

New York’s Museum of Modern Art began collecting photographs in 1930, set up a department in 1940 and now has a holding of 25,000 works. The Met started two years earlier, in 1928, but didn’t establish an independent department until 1992; its collection numbers about 15,000.

Some West Coast collections got an early start as well. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art acquired its first photographs in 1918, when it was part of the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art in Exposition Park; founded a department in 1985; and now has an 8,000-piece collection. San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art began collecting in 1935, established a department in 1980 and now has 12,000 photographs.

Despite its resources, the Getty can’t buy everything its curators desire.

“Our storage plays a large role in determining what we collect,” Naef said, strolling through an area where black boxes of prints fill shelves of a compact storage system. David Hockney’s “Pear Blossom Hwy., 11-18th April 1986, #2” -- a 6 1/2 by 9-foot collage of 750 color photographs -- has a place in the frigid vault, but it’s by far the largest work in the collection. “We must leave the responsibility of collecting oversize contemporary works by artists like Andreas Gursky and Sigmar Polke to museums that were established to house them,” he said.

But Naef’s primary considerations in building the collection are what’s already in it and what’s available.

“Museum curators are creatures of opportunity,” he said. “We can only buy what’s for sale. And when we established the collection, we set powerful ground rules. We don’t collect to fill storage but to delight and edify the public. We make acquisitions to complement strengths in the collection, and we fill gaps cautiously. Every acquisition has a destination; we know how we are going to use it.”

Occasion for reflection

The artists in the exhibition, from Bayard and Watkins to Lewis Hine and Diane Arbus, were ahead of their time, Naef said. “Each artist’s work is held in depth at the Getty, but they are also people who risked failure to accomplish something special. I consider them photographers of genius because they possess something greater than talent, a quality that is usually more spontaneous, less dependent on instruction, and very often the product of natural gifts tempered by the rational mind. They are thoughtful and deliberate, but their most essential trait may be a reliance on intuition.”

He selected three or more works by each artist, including daguerreotypes, cyanotypes, salt prints, glass stereographs and silver prints. And his choices aren’t necessarily their greatest hits. In the case of 19th century French photographer Gustave le Gray, three famous seascapes are accompanied by nine studio portraits of the sort that paid his bills. A trio of archetypal works by Russian modernist Alexander Rodchenko is displayed with a lampshade made of four photographs.

Assiduous Getty watchers will find recent acquisitions along with familiar pieces. Daguerreotypes of historic sites in Rome and Athens by Girault de Prangey, cyanotypes of American landscapes created from 1885 to 1891 by Henry P. Bosse and pictures of Taos, N.M., shot in 1931 by Dorothea Lange have joined the collection in the last two years.

Photographs are always on view at the Getty, which has presented 65 exhibitions and published 35 books, including definitive volumes on Walker Evans and Julia Margaret Cameron. But the anniversary show is an occasion for reflection on the impact of the Getty’s involvement with photography.

“The Getty totally turned the market around,” said Los Angeles dealer and collector Stephen White. “It had been in the doldrums because of a recession. But news about the Getty buying all those collections restored faith in the market. Since then, they have done a tremendous amount to focus interest in the field and stimulate other museums to collect photography.”

San Diego’s Ollman characterized the Getty factor as “a tidal shift in the photographic world.”

“One of the big goals when I began working as an artist and curator in the ‘60s and ‘70s,” he said, “was to break the hegemony of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and decentralize the photography scene. We needed other voices. After the Getty weighed in, it had a voice that was equal to MoMA’s.”

And the Big Guy in Los Angeles has spurred the growth of many photography collections in the West, from Tucson to Seattle and Portland, Ore., Ollman said.

“It was a very exciting wave to be part of,” he said. “And it still is. When I came here 20 years ago, I occasionally got the question ‘But is it art?’ I haven’t heard that question in maybe a decade.”

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‘Photographers of Genius at the Getty’

Where: J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, Los Angeles

When: Tuesdays to Thursdays and Sundays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Ends: July 25

Price: Free

Contact: (310) 440-7300