Hey, what is this doing in here?

Step off the second-floor elevator of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s North Pavilion and your eye travels down a long hallway to focus on the back wall of the Gallery of Northern European Paintings, circa 1400 to 1600. What you see is no 15th or 16th century artwork but instead the bright colors and stark geometric lines of “Composition of Red, Blue, Yellow,” a 1939 oil painting by Dutch Modernist Piet Mondrian.

What is a 20th century Mondrian doing at the Getty, whose collection, with the exception of photography, focuses on art created before 1900?

The Mondrian, borrowed from the Museum of Contemporary Art, is visiting the Getty as the latest incarnation of “Interjections,” an art exchange program between the two museums in which a work from the lending institution is paired with a complementary piece in the host museum.

In turn, the Getty has lent MOCA “A Walk at Dusk,” an early 17th century painting by German Romantic Caspar David Friedrich. The somber winter moonlight scene features the lone figure of a man standing at a tomb.

The joint exhibition, which continues through Jan. 9 at MOCA and Feb. 12 at the Getty, is about the visual dialogue created when works by artists from different centuries are placed together, say curators from both museums.

At the Getty, the Mondrian hangs near “The Annunciation,” painted about 1450-55 by Netherlandish painter Dieric Bouts. And at MOCA, the mournful Friedrich is paired with a startlingly tiny (7 1/2 by 9 1/2 -inch) 2004 oil by contemporary Scottish painter Christopher Orr, born in 1967. Like the Bouts, Orr’s painting, “Of Both Worlds” (2004), also shows one figure, in this case a young man with a backpack leaning over the edge of a cliff toward a roiling sea.

“When I was a professor, I used to do an assignment for the final exam: Pick two artists who are separated by at least 100 years and describe an interaction between them,” says Charlotte Eyerman, an assistant curator of paintings at the Getty who helped develop the “Interjections” program with paintings curator Scott Schaefer.

“We want people to say: ‘Whoa, wow, what is this doing here? This is an experiment, a radical experiment, and not everybody is going to like it, and that’s OK. It is going to make people stop and ask questions and look -- and that is what it’s all about.”

The current exchange is the second in the “Interjections” series, which began earlier this year with MOCA’s “Number 1, 1949,” a drip painting by Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock, hung at the Getty alongside two landscapes, “Sunrise: Marine” (1873) and “The Portal of Rouen Cathedral in Morning Light” (1894), by Impressionist Claude Monet. In return for the Pollock, the Getty lent “Starry Night,” an 1893 work by Edvard Munch, to hang next to Mark Rothko’s abstract painting “No. 61 (Rust and Blue) [Brown Blue, Brown on Blue],” 1953, in a room at MOCA with several other Rothkos.

“We are not suggesting the Mondrian responded to Bouts directly,” Eyerman says of the current pairing. “But it’s interesting to think of Mondrian as a hinge between the old and the new worlds. Mondrian was a Dutchman, and Bouts is also Netherlandish. One of the things that made this Interjection compelling was that they came out of the same region 500 years apart.

“The Bouts is a religious picture that has a very clear narrative; the Mondrian is not about a particular story. But the formal characters in the Bouts become more pronounced against the Mondrian. Renaissance painting is about balance, harmony, geometry. There is a large red rectangle behind the Virgin, a similarity in the patterns and the use of red, blue, yellow, white. You see those deployed in both pictures but in radically different ways.”

Paul Schimmel, chief curator for MOCA, says the first installment of “Interjections” was probably a bit more startling at the Getty. “I think, when you come to a contemporary art museum, you are more open to these kinds of experimentations.” And, he adds, the Getty’s display of the Pollock and the Mondrian against colored walls, burgundy and brown, respectively, represents a radical departure from the “white cube” aesthetic of most contemporary art museums, including MOCA.

At MOCA, Schimmel says, the current pairing is “not jarring at all, it doesn’t jump off the wall. The Friedrich is displayed with our new acquisitions. Many are European figurative paintings. In scale and intensity, the Friedrich is different from everything in the room with the exception of the Orr painting. You say: ‘Oh yeah, that makes sense.’ ”

The Orr, he says, “is a modestly scaled painting. It is exquisitely crafted using traditional technique. You have this sort of solitary figure, looking out over this large expanse of space -- that was clearly something that interested Friedrich. This is clearly a younger artist doing a homage. It was interesting, in this day and age, that a young artist would be making such a specific reference to what was certainly not a contemporary mode of representation.

“Now, if we were to pair a large, figurative sculpture from the Getty’s Greek collection with a Giacometti, that might be more of a surprise.”

“Interjections” is tentatively scheduled to continue for three more years, but works for future exchanges have not been chosen, Eyerman says.

“We want to try it in different galleries. Next time we would ask for a large-scale, probably abstract work to go into our Baroque gallery. They will ask for a major 19th century picture, and we will probably ask for a major 1950s picture.”

Meanwhile, Eyerman is satisfied by the reaction of a group of students who paused in front of the Mondrian and the Bouts.

As the rapt students checked out the paintings, their teacher pointed out the relationship of color and geometry between the two. “I see it! That’s cool,” one student remarked.

“I live for that,” Eyerman says later. “Of anything that I’ve contributed to the Getty Museum, I’m proudest of this.”

*

‘Interjections’

Where: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood

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

Ends: Feb. 12

Price: Free

Contact: (310) 440-7300; www.getty.edu

Also

Where: Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays and Fridays; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays; 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sundays. Closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays

Ends: Jan. 9

Price: $8

Contact: (213) 626-6222