Getty’s new chief comes off the hill

James N. Wood, the new president of the J. Paul Getty Trust, owes his job partly to the indiscretions of his globetrotting predecessor. On Wednesday, in his first speaking engagement in L.A. since arriving to lend his 40 years of museum experience to the image-challenged Getty, he spoke repeatedly about the need to run it with a keen view toward acting locally.

The tall, slim and silver-haired Wood, 66, who came out of retirement in Rhode Island to take the Getty post, combines a classic distinguished-gentleman bearing with a relaxed manner. In a voice that still bears a trace of his Boston upbringing, he deployed self-deprecating humor while fielding questions from an audience of about 100 who had come for a lunch-and-speaker event at Westwood’s Regency Club, sponsored by the Town Hall Los Angeles series.

He prefaced his 15-minute opening talk and 40-minute Q & A session by saying that, after three months on the job in Los Angeles -- following a career as curator or administrator at museums in New York, St. Louis and Chicago, where he was director of the Art Institute of Chicago for 24 years -- he was more interested in hearing Angelenos’ questions than pretending he had answers.

Then, sorting at length through the issue of whether the Getty deserves a reputation for aloofness and elitism, and how it might maximize its usefulness for L.A. and its art scene, he talked first of the need to provide an “elite experience” for the 1.5 million or so people who come annually to the main museum and its adjunct for ancient Greek and Roman art, the Getty Villa near Malibu.

But “we have to be careful we don’t forget that ... part of it is humility,” he continued. “You’ve got to come off the mountain, talk to people, make it clear it’s not a rarified place.”

Wood -- whose predecessor, Barry Munitz, resigned in February 2006 under an ethics cloud -- was free with fragmentary ideas that, he explained after the session, he aims to explore but would enact only after plenty of thinking and consultation.

Among them was the notion of the Getty collaborating with the city’s other museums -- not necessarily in the loaning of artworks but perhaps with cash grants that could pay for more research than a museum with an idea for a show might otherwise be able to afford.

After spending decades in the typical museum’s perpetual scrounge for donations, Wood said, he was getting used to the idea that part of the Getty’s mission was to give millions away.

“It’s dawning on me that this may be pleasurable but not easier. We never have the excuse that ‘we couldn’t help you because we couldn’t afford to,’ ” he said.

Interviewed before his talk, Wood said the Getty Trust would still seek sponsors to help fund its exhibitions, as it did under Munitz, and would still seek donations of art in the areas where it collects. But rather than holding those sponsors close to its vest, he said, the Getty can afford to point them in other directions and try to instigate further giving to other L.A. museums.

The Getty’s giving should be a seed for its recipients’ growth rather than a one-stop solution to other arts groups’ funding problems, he said in the interview, adding, “The biggest danger for an institution with a mandate like the Getty’s is you become responsible for the ongoing operations of more and more things and you can’t be innovative anymore.”

As it continues to collect art, Wood told his audience in West L.A., the Getty won’t bid heedlessly at the peak of a market.

“We may expand areas we collect in,” he said, “but if we do, we should do it very carefully.” That, he said, means any broadening of a collection begun by oil magnate J. Paul Getty and focused mainly on ancient art, Old Master and early Modern paintings and drawings, illuminated manuscripts and photography should bring something new to L.A. rather than duplicate areas, such as contemporary art, that are covered well by other museums.

Wood’s audience included students from Sylmar High School, and one of their teachers, Diane Wilson, wondered why the Getty doesn’t offer something like the monthly sessions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that she’s found very useful: Teachers learn about art and get tips on how to work that knowledge into their curriculums.

“I’m so shocked we don’t have anything like that,” Wood said. “A teacher who is motivated to use a museum is one of the most valuable resources a museum has. Let me see whether we can offer a little more then.”

Wood’s first L.A. audience thus gave him at least one practical suggestion to take back to the hill and into an office he plans to decorate with art -- Munitz festooned it with a massive collection of chess sets and chess books -- and onto a desk where he’s placed a glass image of Hercules fighting the dragon-like, many-headed Hydra.

When you’re running one of the world’s most varied arts institutions, he said with a grin, the struggle of Hercules “just seems very relevant.”

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mike.boehm@latimes.com