A rip in the Getty picture

When Deborah Gribbon abruptly resigned last week as director of the Getty Museum, two competing versions of life at the esteemed Brentwood institution emerged. So did clear evidence of a clash of cultures at the world’s richest art organization.

One portrait shows a troubled workplace where management is capricious and autocratic, focusing more on financial dealing than on art; where the environment is “toxic,” morale is rancid; where Gribbon’s is only the latest in a series of high-level exits; and where the trustees are too remote to see a problem.

The other depicts Gribbon’s departure as surprising and regrettable but a perfectly normal occurrence when departments of a big organization compete for a finite trove of resources.

The rift is partly philosophical and partly personal -- just how much depends on who is talking. But together they underline a central conflict facing art institutions today: Should art come first and foremost, with an emphasis on buying and displaying works? Or should the vision be broader, encompassing education, philanthropy and interests beyond the walls of the galleries?

The unusually public dispute at the normally button-down Getty revolves largely around Barry Munitz. As president and chief executive of the uniquely multifaceted J. Paul Getty Trust, he oversees an organization fueled by a $4.8-billion endowment. It encompasses not only the museum but separate arms devoted to research, grant-making and art conservation around the globe.

The dapper, polished Munitz, whose background is rooted in business and academic administration, is known for cultivating relations with entertainment and business elites. He took over at the Getty seven years ago.

Gribbon, an elegant, reserved art historian who spent 20 years at the Getty, is highly respected in international circles. Last week she told The Times: “Barry and I have differences on a range of things -- they are real differences. I think it’s better to resign than let differences become a distraction.” She declined to elaborate.

Munitz said he regularly bumped heads with Gribbon, his most visible department head, but it was part of a “perfectly natural” collegial process of disputation and give-and-take that he encouraged as part of decision-making. He said he had no idea those differences would prompt her to resign. “I thought she was staying on to fight the museum’s battles, because she was very good at it.”

A different story is also circulating. John H. Biggs, chairman of the Getty’s board of trustees, said he was aware of “tensions,” so Gribbon’s departure was “not a complete surprise.”

At least one staff member, who asked not to be identified, also said “morale is very low throughout the museum” and that Gribbon became alienated as Munitz placed under his own authority some key non-curatorial staffers who previously answered to her.

“We were very high on her,” Biggs said, adding, “We are very high on Barry.... We continue to have full confidence in him and the direction he’s taking the Getty.” Last December, the board renewed Munitz’s contract for five years, despite rumblings of discontent among the ranks. The most recent available salary figure for Munitz, from 2003 tax filings, is $567,500, with $348,800 in benefits and deferred compensation.

For many past and present Getty staffers, the events of last week popped the lid off a troubled organization.

John Walsh, director of the Getty Museum from 1983 to 2000, says that what ails the Getty doesn’t have to do with money (a $245-million operating budget for the trust’s current fiscal year) and how it is distributed ($152 million is going to the museum, say Getty officials). It has to do with how Munitz is running the place.

“When you’re losing your most devoted and principled people, that’s a symptom of unhealthy conditions,” he said. “I think the trustees need to diagnose the condition and deal with it.”

That may not be easy. The 13 board members live on both coasts and are not all in frequent contact with the institution. They meet four times a year.

Blenda J. Wilson, who has been a Getty trustee for 12 years, said she had no knowledge of morale problems and it wasn’t her role to get in the middle of personnel issues. “I don’t need to know until I’m told,” she said. “I don’t work at the Getty. I’m a board member.”

Barbara G. Fleischman, who joined the board in 2000, was reluctant to address specifics about tension at the Getty. “I think morale is very good there,” she said. “All I can say is that we’re very excited about all the different areas of the trust.”

Other trustees declined to comment.

As the Getty was preparing to move to its new $1-billion hilltop home in Brentwood in 1997, the rest of the art world braced itself. Fears emerged that this cash-clogged giant, which was in the process of bolstering its collection of pre-20th century European paintings and Old Master drawings, would consume all in its path.

But in recent years, the Getty has found itself trumped on some high-profile acquisitions, such as Peter Paul Rubens’ painting “The Massacre of the Innocents,” which it lost at auction to a $77-million bid.

Munitz insists curators and the museum director aren’t being held on a tight leash; the museum staff proposes a bidding ceiling for works it wants, and Munitz says he and the board have approved “every single major request.”

Another concern is Munitz’s day-to-day accessibility. Some Getty insiders questioned his placing extensive authority in the hands of Jill Murphy, his young chief of staff. Murphy arrived at the Getty in 1998, a recent college graduate who had worked under Munitz in his post as chancellor of the California State University system.

Curt Williams, who was the Getty’s director of operations before leaving last year for a vice president’s post managing construction at USC, said access to the boss grew more difficult than it had been under its previous leader. “Barry was less engaged in the direct operation and access was more limited. People’s expertise was valued less.”

Stephen Dobbs, first a senior program officer at the Getty’s education institute, then a consultant there until 1998, when it was eliminated, says there was a disturbing lack of communication as Munitz made those changes.

To Dobbs, Munitz’s methods smacked of a corporate approach rather than one undergirded by the collegiality and give-and-take of the nonprofit world. Munitz, he said, neither reached out to the people who had been involved in building the program, nor solicited their ideas about how to downsize it. “He just pulled the rug out,” Dobbs said from San Francisco, where he is executive director of several family foundations.

“My job was not to please everybody by bearing gifts,” Munitz said. He denies having been absent, unavailable to staff, or unwilling to hear them argue a case. “I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a soul here [to whom] I’ve been inaccessible. A bunch of people here, if I called them or visited them any more often, they would throw me out.”

Two key museum staffers, Mark Leonard, the chief paintings conservator, and Scott Schaefer, curator of paintings, dispute that morale is in a trough.

“My experience is that almost anything is possible here,” Leonard said. “Thinking outside the box is encouraged.”

Munitz is accustomed to running large organizations, serving as chancellor of the Cal State system from 1991 to 1997 before coming to the Getty. He was embroiled in a scandal as one of the directors of a failed savings and loan in Texas. That led to a lawsuit by federal regulators that Munitz and four others settled in 1999 without admitting to or denying the allegations.

He says complaints that his credentials lie in business and academic administration, not art, miss the point. His portfolio, he says, is oversight of the entire trust operation, of which the museum is one component, albeit one that draws 1.3 million visitors annually.

“I’m not in charge of the museum. I’m not supposed to be a museum [and] art expert. My job is to pull it all together.”

For some, Munitz’s management style has been as much of a problem as his decisions.

He came aboard at the Getty in January 1998, just as the new Brentwood complex was opening. He took charge of the institution that evolved from oil baron J. Paul Getty’s private collection of Greek and Roman antiquities, French decorative arts and European paintings -- initially installed at the house on his ranch on the edge of Malibu and later at a lavish, Roman-style villa built on the grounds.

Getty died in 1976, leaving $700 million to the museum. After six years of legal wrangling, the Getty Trust got its fortune, which had appreciated to $1.2 billion. Harold M. Williams, the first president of the trust, developed a program that added institutes for art education, conservation, research and information technology to the museum.

But Munitz’s first actions involved compressing the Trust’s seven departments (including the museum) into four. Munitz says that making the operation more efficient and getting the various institutes to work well together instead of standing aloof from one another was exactly what the board hired him to do. Even some of his critics say that streamlining institutes for education and information out of existence (with consequent job losses) was a valid move.

Another Munitz action that would seem routine for just about any other arts administrator became controversial because of the Getty’s unique setup: He decided he would go out to raise money. It was a businesslike notion but largely unthinkable for an organization that reaps enviable riches just by tapping its multibillion-dollar investment fund.

Other museum leaders, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s director, Andrea Rich, have seen it as a bid to fatten the biggest fish in the cultural pond at a time when smaller ones are already squeezed in a difficult economy.

Munitz’s efforts have largely stalled, but he hopes big-ticket donors will take advantage of “naming opportunities” at the Getty Villa in Malibu, scheduled to open next year after a $275-million renovation that will make it the repository for the museum’s classical antiquities.

To Munitz, morale at the Getty may be having a cough, or a runny nose perhaps, but nothing that requires a major work-up by the trustees.

“The basic morale problems are few and far between,” he said, and typically have to do with one department getting resources while others are told to wait or do without.

And to his critics, who object to his habit of dropping Hollywood names in conversations and complain of the circles he runs in, he replies that, first, it’s none of their business who his friends are. And bringing the likes of filmmaker William Friedkin into the Getty orbit brings payoffs for art endeavors: Friedkin is making a documentary about the museum’s work to conserve paintings by 18th century French artist Jean-Baptiste Oudry that is expected to augment an Oudry exhibition in 2007.

While Munitz is irked that outsiders such as Hugh Davies, director of San Diego’s Museum of Contemporary Art, point the finger at him for creating a “toxic atmosphere,” he says the controversy has had at least one salutary effect: Enough is being said and debated about the Getty’s unusual, multipronged setup that maybe the public will start to understand that it is more than a museum. “It’s very unusual, and there’s no question that makes it unclear” to the people, Munitz said.

Maybe the structure of what sits atop the hill is growing clearer. But at the moment, there’s still a blurred, fractured vision as to how happy and healthy institutional life is within the Getty’s travertine walls.

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Times staff writer Robin Fields contributed to this report.