Getty board turns to Bryson as its leader

The board members of the J. Paul Getty Trust, moving to quickly fill the gap left by the resignation of their beleaguered leader, John Biggs, have named vice chairwoman Louise Bryson to take over his role.

As chairwoman of the trust, Bryson, 62, will lead efforts to rebuild the organization after a year of scandalous revelations that prompted the resignations of several top executives and board members. The state attorney general has also been probing the tax-exempt organization’s financial practices under president Barry Munitz (who resigned in February) and Biggs, who left early this month.

“We’ve had some lapses in oversight, and as a member of the board I would acknowledge that,” Bryson said Tuesday. A member of the Getty board since 1998, she was elected chairwoman during a Saturday morning trustee conference call.

The trust’s eight other remaining board members, she said, “are active, they’re participating, they’re involved.”

Bryson said she had four principal goals: finding a new top executive; finalizing settlements over possibly looted antiquities; removing the shadow cast by the attorney general’s ongoing investigation; and refocusing attention inside and outside the Getty on the museum’s work and the trust’s programs for research, conservation and grant-making.

“People have heard so much about the issues and problems,” she said, “but the problems have not stopped the wonderful work that goes on here.”

Bryson, a Stanford MBA who lives in San Marino, is president of distribution at Lifetime Entertainment Services and general manager of the Lifetime Movie Network. She also serves on the board of Pomona College and on advisory groups for Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and USC’s Annenberg School for Communication. A decade ago, she led the board of Los Angeles public television station KCET in a search that brought top executive Al Jerome to the station.

“I don’t take something on unless I think I can do it,” she said.

In many of her tasks at the Getty, Bryson will be collaborating with attorney Ron Olson, a friend of more than 20 years whom she recommended in September as leader of the Getty’s internal investigation of past financial practices and antiquities acquisitions. Eventually, Bryson said, she hopes to build the Getty board back up to between 12 and 15 members.

Bryson and Getty spokesman Ron Hartwig said that Bryson would be reviewing executive spending quarterly in addition to the audit committee’s quarterly review of all organizational finances.