Free works cost the Getty

As an art collector, the late J. Paul Getty was notorious as a man who loved a bargain. This is the guy who legend says installed a pay phone in his baronial mansion and, when his children came to visit, charged them for lunch.

Some of the bargain fever may have had to do with a familiar problem associated with enormous wealth. Dealers regularly overcharge rich clients, and nobody wants to be taken. Whatever the case, Getty’s parsimony in the face of Old Master painting and sculpture explains why his collection was so mediocre. Privileging the art of the deal over the quality of art left the penny-wise, pound-foolish museum that now bears his name to scramble and scratch for increasingly scarce masterworks.

Earlier this month the Getty Trust acquired a collection of Modern outdoor sculpture. Eyebrows were raised all over town. Partly that was because the collection was a gift expected to go elsewhere, and partly because 20th century sculpture represents a brand-new field for the trust.

A third reason, though, is cause for deeper concern: At least half the sculpture collection is second-rate -- or worse. But it was free, and there’s no bigger bargain than that. Old man Getty lives.

If you weren’t aware of the iffy nature of the gift, the explanation is simple. The Getty press release and the news reports that followed skimmed the cream, including the great Alberto Giacometti “Standing Woman I” (1960), an 8-foot giantess whose attenuated body is tethered to the ground by enormous feet. It also includes Aristide Maillol’s classically recumbent nude, “L’Air” (1938), which hovers on its hip, and Barbara Hepworth’s famous and billowy 1960 bronze, “Figure for Landscape,” whose hollow interior seems as tangible as its skeletal form.

Barely mentioned was the sour milk. The collection may include work by a dozen first-rate artists, but it also features another dozen who are substantially inferior.

For its first big foray into Modern art the Getty will put on public display major sculptures by Alexander Calder, Joel Shapiro and Ellsworth Kelly. But it will also trumpet the minor Americans Saul Baizerman, George Rickey and Jack Zajac; the minor Italian stylists Giacomo Manzu and Marino Marini; and the minor British abstractionists Robert Adams, Dame Elisabeth Frink and William Turnbull.

Ugh. With the exception of Rickey, whose kinetic constructions in geometric stainless steel are merely innocuous, the others can mostly be described as artists who made safe, conservative responses to dramatic, much earlier innovations in figurative abstraction.

Frink’s neo-primitive bronze horse, the bullet-shaped Catholic cardinal by Manzu, Baizerman’s hammered copper torso -- second-rate is too generous a ranking. You won’t find them in the beloved sculpture garden at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, or at the new Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. Soon, though, you’ll get to wince at them down by the tram station at the Getty Center.

Twenty years ago, when the Getty made the leap into photography, it also hired a distinguished curator. Automatically the surprise move into a brand-new field gained credibility and scholarly heft.

The motley array of Modern sculpture came with no curatorial expertise. Inaugurating an unprecedented field with such a dubious crew is surprising -- and not a little disturbing.

One published report pegged the collection’s value at $75 million, a figure that is certainly inflated. The prized Giacometti is itself valued at about $14 million, which puts the collection’s many mediocre sculptures into some perspective. A source intimately acquainted with the collection said that $50 million might even be too high -- and that’s the price the Getty was willing to pay for one tiny Raphael painting.

In considering donors’ gifts, more than one art museum has been known to hold its nose when confronted with the equivalent of a Manzu, while hoping for a Giacometti. Acquisition funds are notoriously scarce, so they accept the dross to get the gold.

But since when did the world’s richest art museum find itself in begging mode?

As a multibillion-dollar trust, the Getty wouldn’t seem to need to accept a donor’s mediocrities in order to grab a handful of masterpieces. It could buy a Giacometti, if Modern sculpture were suddenly so important. The field has hardly been picked clean.

The sad fact is that despite its unparalleled wealth, the Getty has pulled way back in spending on artworks since the Brentwood center opened seven years ago.

In inflation-adjusted dollars the acquisition budget averaged just more than $98 million each year from 1983 through 1997. Since then, the annual average has been just under $65 million.

That raw number is large, but so is the drop -- a decline of 34%. The plunge has freed up lots of cash that the Getty can give away, making it a bigger player in the world of philanthropy. Someone else’s gain is the collection’s loss -- and the museum visitor’s too.

The sculpture collection was formed by the late Hollywood producer Ray Stark and his late wife Fran, and the legal trust they established made the Getty gift. That was a surprise because negotiations had been underway for several years with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where Ray Stark had been a trustee and where his daughter, Wendy, currently sits on the board.

LACMA, however, rightly balked at some unreasonable restrictions imposed by the Stark Trust (Wendy Stark is not involved with the trust). One was a provision forbidding future de-accession or sale of any sculptures from the collection. Another was a requirement for the permanent display of all of it. For every Giacometti there would be a Frink, always and forever -- and at public expense.

Professional practices advocated by the American Assn. of Museums and the Assn. of Art Museum Directors justly caution against such schemes. Simply put, LACMA was being asked to turn over the control of content to a private outside donor.

There’s only one credible exception to the general rule against that. The balance tips in favor of the museum holding its nose when a gift includes something so artistically important as to make losing a great public asset intolerable.

You could make the case, even in the face of all that mediocrity, that cash-poor LACMA should have agreed to the odious demands. In fact, it had. A sculpture garden design had been prepared, giving prominence to the likes of Giacometti while metaphorically hiding Frink et al. in the bushes.

But the deal fell apart last summer when LACMA asked for additional time to allow Renzo Piano, the architect hired to rethink the museum’s campus, to review the design. The Stark Trust said no. The trust had set an 18-month deadline and insisted, “Time’s up.”

Given the same demands, however, you cannot make the case that the cash-rich Getty should have agreed. Of all places, it doesn’t need to accept Baizerman to get Hepworth. For LACMA the glass was half-full, but for the Getty it was half-empty.

Did the Getty agree to the same demands? Revelation of such terms is in the public interest, and it does not impinge on reasonable expectations of donor confidentiality. The only excuse for secrecy is that revelation might embolden future donors to make even more unreasonable demands.

But imperiously, the Getty refuses to say. (Efforts to reach a Stark spokesman were not successful.) Take that refusal for what you will.

What is known is this: The Stark Trust approached the Getty Trust in October with the offer, minus eight sculptures that had been included in the LACMA deal. (Among the missing works is one of the collection’s best -- a pneumatic nude by Gaston Lachaise that seems to float atop its tall pedestal.) That month Getty Museum Director Deborah Gribbon had stunned the art world by abruptly resigning, citing broad but unspecified philosophical differences with Barry Munitz, president and chief executive of the J. Paul Getty Trust.

Old man Getty was an unwise bargain hunter, which he proved (yet again) was no way to build a great collection.

Munitz and the Getty board are now following his hopeless lead. The results are predictably gloomy, which makes the bargain costly.