At the Getty institute, it’s buy, borrow and think

ONE of the intellectual hubs of the art world, almost hidden in plain sight, resides in a gleaming white circular building on the Getty Center’s Brentwood hillside.

It’s a library to die for with 920,000 volumes on the history of art, architecture and archeology and 2 million study photographs.

It’s a cabinet of wonders with special collections of rare books, prints, maps, dealers’ archives, artists’ sketchbooks, optical devices and, oh, yes, more than 5,000 videotapes spanning the evolution of video art since the 1960s.

It’s an ivory tower where scholars from around the world converge and ponder big ideas: Change! Religion and Ritual! Duration! Markets and Value! Memory! The Metropolis as Crucible! The Avant-Garde!

As well, it’s a think tank where brainstorms turn into exhibitions, books, conferences, workshops and projects with artists, not to mention a database paradise for art historians, librarians and museum professionals in search of every last fact and detail about the visual arts.

And to Thomas W. Gaehtgens, the Getty Research Institute is an offer he finally couldn’t refuse. A scholar of 18th and 19th century French and German art who directs the German Center for the History of Art in Paris and teaches at the Free University of Berlin, Gaehtgens recently accepted an invitation to take charge of the institute in Los Angeles. He will assume the prestigious position Nov. 1, succeeding Thomas Crow, who will leave at the end of this month to chair the department of modern art history at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.

“This idea came out of the blue,” Gaehtgens says, reached by telephone at his home in Berlin. At 67, he has compiled an enormous résumé as a scholar, writer, teacher, administrator, consultant and award winner. A few months ago, he was preparing to step down from the German Center in Paris, which he founded 10 years ago, and looking forward to focusing on his own work.

Then he got a call from James Wood, the former president of the Art Institute of Chicago who gave up his retirement in New England to take charge of the Getty Trust late last year and restore calm and integrity to an organization that had been shaken to its core by scandals concerning its antiquities collections and the lavish spending of its president, Barry Munitz, who was forced out in early 2006.

“When he asked if I would think about going to the Getty,” Gaehtgens says, “my first answer was, ‘I am much too old.’ He laughed and told me that he was kayaking when they pulled him out of retirement. I thought, ‘No, I cannot leave Paris and Berlin. I am much too involved in this world.”

But the question led to long conversations and e-mail exchanges. “I knew that I had done my job in Paris,” he says. “As we talked, I began to think it might be a good moment to go to Los Angeles.” The Getty Center community -- composed of a museum, conservation institute, philanthropic foundation and research institute -- has “a unique possibility of advancing our understanding of art through exploration, investigation, interpretation and propagation,” says Gaehtgens, who got to know the Getty as a visiting scholar in 1985-86. “So I said after all, why not participate in this mission? It’s a marvelous challenge.”

An edge on competitors

Gaehtgens steps into an organization that was hatched in 1982, after oilman J. Paul Getty’s estate was settled. The following year, the institute -- then called the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities -- moved into a Santa Monica bank building with a curatorial collection of about 30,000 books and 100,000 study photographs amassed by the original Getty Museum in Pacific Palisades and thousands of new acquisitions.

Getty left his fortune to the museum for “the diffusion of artistic and general knowledge,” and the mission of the research institute is only a bit more specific: “to bring together all the resources and activities required to advance understanding of the visual arts taken in their widest possible significance.” There’s no telling how much money it would take to completely fulfill that impossibly expansive aspiration, but as a beneficiary of a bequest that has grown from $1.2 billion to $5.8 billion in the last 25 years, the research institute has an edge on most of its competitors.

Still, even with a budget of about $30 million, it can’t buy every desirable item that comes along. Operating in a large facility with a staff of 200 limits shopping possibilities.

“Everybody talks about the money,” Gaehtgens says. “My idea about that is very easy. Money is responsibility. Money is only responsibility.”

Like his predecessors, he’ll have plenty of that -- and plenty of opportunities to shape the programs and acquisitions that, especially with the visibility the Getty brings, drive the evolving back story that puts art in context. The first director, Swiss architect Kurt W. Forster, came aboard in 1984, launched a residential and visiting scholars program and oversaw a spending spree that expanded the collection dramatically. Buying voraciously, the institute snapped up 90,000 volumes in 1984, 125,000 in 1985 and a record 160,000 in 1986. And that was only the beginning. Today, the institute has one of the world’s largest general art libraries and a vast holding of special collections that are the heart of a multifaceted organization.

Over the years, the institute has evolved into an ever more complex organization that has broadened its collections, engaged in community outreach, collaborated with local institutions and provided services for the public as well as credentialed scholars. Many of the materials in the library are available to students and the public.

The Association of Research Institutes in Art History has 22 member organizations, but nothing exactly like the Getty. The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., for example, are connected to museums and have programs for visiting scholars, but their libraries are relatively small and traditional. The Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal and the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library in Delaware, which concentrates on American history and decorative arts, are somewhat comparable to the L.A. institution, but they have a much narrower focus. The Getty’s scholars program, which tackles a new subject each year, is the only one that operates under a thematic umbrella.

With a scope as large as the history of art and a mandate to amass “anything rare that’s suitable,” as chief librarian and associate director Susan M. Allen describes the special collections, the institute has snapped up the archives of key figures such as art dealer Joseph Duveen, who catered to late 19th and early 20th century America’s nouveaux riches and helped build the collections of J.P. Morgan, Henry E. Huntington and John D. Rockefeller. The papers of critic Clement Greenberg, who had the last word on American Abstract Expressionism, reside at the Getty. So do the archives of Italian collector Count Panza di Biumo and contemporary artists Robert Irwin and Allan Kaprow.

Impossible to summarize neatly, the collections encompass John Cage and Diego Rivera sketchbooks, René Magritte letters, André Breton manuscripts and correspondence between Frank Lloyd Wright and Rudolf Schindler, along with Russian Constructivist pamphlets, World’s Fair documents and the complete works of 18th century Venetian architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi. And one thing leads to another. In 1986, the institute bought German lawyer and writer Wilhelm Arntz’s collection of catalogs, periodicals, monographs and ephemera on 20th century German art and complemented it with another cache: all the titles from the early 20th century German publishing house Malik Verlag. Such in-depth troves make the library a mecca for scholars -- “a place where you can get everything,” Gaehtgens says.

The institute’s directors have a daunting array of duties, but their interests leave a definite mark on the collections. Materials pertaining to modern and contemporary art expanded considerably during the recent tenure of Crow, a leading authority in the field. The institute landed Julius Shulman’s archive of architecture photographs in 2004-05, launching a major holding of California modernism and paving the way to a gift of architect Peter Koenig’s archive. In 2005, when the institute announced its acquisition of a vast collection of video amassed by the Long Beach Museum of Art, Crow called it an unparalleled public holding.

Although the scholars program is heavily populated by academics who do research on historical topics and interact with their peers, artists Bill Viola, Robbert Flick and Allan Sekula have done stints as scholars, leading to exhibitions of their work at the Getty. Viola’s show was a landmark affair that filled the museum’s temporary exhibition space with video installations, including a Getty commission. And the last few years have brought an ambitious effort to document Los Angeles’ postwar art history. In one ongoing program, “On the Record,” oral histories and public panels are intended to create a permanent record of local history. In a recent pilot project for “On the Record,” the institute helped assemblagist George Herms organize his archive while shooting 150 hours of videotape.

“We want to take Los Angeles as far as we can,” says Andrew Perchuk, head of contemporary programs and research. “Los Angeles is such a great contemporary art center. We can’t ignore that.”

Another imperative that can’t be ignored, Gaehtgens says, is the globalization of art history. Often called an “internationalist,” he’ll fit right in at the library, where librarian Susan Allen is conscientiously building the collection to “cover the entire world, not just the Western world,” as she puts it.

Among recent acquisitions are rare Chinese materials -- including a 19th century Korean copy of a huge, two-part map of the world with Chinese text and natural history illustrations, designed a century earlier by a Belgian Jesuit missionary in China. Under study in the institute’s conservation laboratory in preparation for an exhibition, “China on Paper,” opening Nov. 6 in the institute’s small gallery, the sheets -- each depicting a hemisphere and measuring about 6 by 7 1/2 feet -- blend European and Chinese cartography in a new view of the world.

‘A perfect fit’

GAEHTGENS’ arrival is certain to spark transformations in the world he’ll oversee in Los Angeles, but at this juncture, he offers few clues about his plans and priorities. “I am not a character to go to Los Angeles and the Getty Research Institute and want to change everything,” he says. “No, I have no idea what I am going to do there. I am first going and learning and meeting all the wonderful people who work there. Let’s see what’s going to happen and what ideas we can develop together.”

The job won’t be easy, but his peers expect him to have no trouble finding his way.

“This is a perfect fit,” says Andreas Blühm, a former student of Gaehtgens who directs the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne. “Thomas is one of the extremely rare examples of a serious, erudite scholar who has unbelievable organizational skills. He is cosmopolitan, knows everybody and can juggle 20 projects at the same time, of which 19 actually materialize.”

George Baker, an assistant professor of art history at UCLA who specializes in modern and contemporary art, says that “Gaehtgens’ appointment brings an international and cosmopolitan dimension to the leadership of the GRI that seems right for an increasingly global city such as Los Angeles.” Praising Crow’s role in opening the institute to “the increasingly vital world of contemporary art in Los Angeles,” Baker hopes Gaehtgens will build upon his predecessor’s legacy by cultivating connections with the contemporary art scene in Berlin and other cities.

That might appeal to Gaehtgens, who recently visited Documenta, a huge international contemporary art exhibition in Kassel, Germany.

“I saw all these videos,” he says. “It was absolutely fabulous. We were lying on the floor and watching and I said to my wife, ‘Listen, there are thousands of them at the Getty.’ ”

suzanne.muchnic@latimes.com