May 2001

GETTY MUSEUM - by Bud Collins

LOS ANGELES -- Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird...it’s a plane...it’s Supermuseum!

The old Superman intro flies again as I gaze upward at the concrete cloud that my friend, Aurelio, assures me is the young Getty Center,. practically a rookie in the culture mix, merely a little over 3 years of age. She’s been here before, and places it high on her must-not-miss list , saying, ``J. Paul Getty may have been super eccentric but his money gave us a super structure. A better legacy than gas stations’.’

The namesake, who died in 1976, left $ 700 million in Getty Oil stock for a new museum, a nest egg that has stretched like the bottom line for Boston’s Big Dig to an endowment of $ 6 billion. You can buy a lot of museum with that kind of money in the hope chest, and a magnificent lot to put it on, which is just what happened.

Seemingly floating above Los Angeles, the Getty is perched on a couple of ridges of the gentle Santa Monica Mountains, a pleasure dome that would make Kublai Khan and William Randolph Hearst drool with penthouse envy. The pleasure is the public’s, however. Not the private amusement of a potentate or robber baron, although either type would be welcomed (zero admission fee, only a parking fee), and might even swing permission to arrive by helicopter at the pad set aside for emergencies, offering such as speedy access by firefighters.

The rest of us climb the slopes by tram from the parking garage, just off the San Diego Freeway, in a sort of five-minutes worth of Tony Bennett`’s ``little cable cars’’ San Franciscan mood. (You can also walk up in 15 minutes, making it an entirely free excursion.) But the destination is totally different, non-urban. With LA thankfully distant, the visitor, deposited above the smog, freely wanders broad plazas , terraces and stunning gardens, exhulting at being on top of the town, and exploring a peaceful citadel of art with its towers, parapets and courtyards.

Called "Moby Museum" by the astute art critic Robert Hughes, the great white (and tan) Getty can indeed resemble a leviathan on waves of landscape. But if the whacko Capt. Ahab showed up with harpoon he’d be frustrated by the way it bent and bounced off the rugged stone skin of beige Italian travertine.

This is the distinctive and versatile limestone that came to LA by the boatloads. Quarried in Bagni di Tivoli, not far from Rome, it’s the material used by the bygone Romans in the construction of the Colosseum, St. Peter’s Cathedral and other landmarks. Because the aged stone is between 8,000 and 80,000-years-old, some of the 290,000 blocks show off imbedded fossils: leaves, shells, branches, fish. They are works of natural art themselves. As outer walls, the travertine is handsomely complemented by painted aluminum panels, some of them undulating beguilingly. Old and new get along fine. Is the medieval village meeting an aluminum siding salesman? Contrast and connection, the architect, Richard Meier, calls it. He uses plenty of glass, too.

Though the inspired Meier, triumphant in a 13 year, $ 4 billion undertaking, has heard his 110 acre baby called all kinds of things, such as a modernist hill town -- how about an American Machu Picchu without llamas? -- here’s his own description: ``Think of it as a college campus with different departments, some more visible than others. Not a museum but an institution in which art predominates.’’

It is a complex of a half-dozen separate buildings, principally the museum with north, south, east and west pavilions, as well as an auditorium, restaurants and a research-study center, all embraced by abundant greenery, bougainvillea, fountains and pools. The restful gurgle of traveling water heard everywhere. Ten thousand freshly-planted trees -- live oak, California sycamore, crepe myrtle, eucalyptus, palms, Mexican cypress-- will be a noble forest one day.

Artists as surely as architect Meier, or any of the creative masters whose works decorate the galleries, are Laurie Olin the landscape architect, and Robert Irwin, designer of the five-acre central garden. Irwin’s horticultural magnum opus, that he calls "a sculpture in the form of a garden aspiriing to be art,’’ wanders downhill from the buildings to a waterfall cascading into a reflecting pond within a tiara of sycamores. At center is a maze of 400 red and pink azaleas, and on either side walkways through brilliant floral displays that change with the seasons. Botanical baron Irwin declares the credo of his plantings:

"Ever present, never twice the same, ever changing, never less than whole.”

John Walsh, hired away from Bost on’s Museum of Fine Arts in 1983, became the Getty’s first director, and the enthusiasm of being a leading figure in the colossal accomplishment is lodged in his voice and countenance. He has given way trecently to Deborah Gribbon, but remains close, involved in staging the 2002 exhibition of American video artist Bill Viola, and writing a book on the Center itself.

"When I first stood up here...I was speechless.‘’ Walsh recalls. "It was rugged country with only a rough dirt road to get to the top. But the setting! I suppose I felt like Balboa on that mountain when he first saw the Pacific, which, incidentally, is visible from here, too.

It was very difficult and slow to build up here. No electricity. No water. We had to build a half-million gallon reservoir.

"I feel we have a fine collection in the museum, but far from what we will have,‘’ says he, the former curator of paintings at the MFA. "But we’re also very interested in art scholarship and conservation. Remember, this place is an adolescent.. Acquisitions will continue. ‘’ But he cites the site "excitement’’ as incomparable. "Just to be here -- that’s giving the public an extgraordinary experience. I think that curiosity has brought in a lot of people who’ve never visited a museum. That’s good.’’

As a young man, a junior curator at the Met in New York, Walsh did meet J. Paul Getty, "He was a lugubrious figure, austere in a black suit., with an expression something like a bassett hound. But he did have an unsmiling sort of sense of humor, some warmth. But very lonely.’’

The lonely man’s mite has brought a lot of people together daily for a nice time wherever they look.

It’s something of a trek to take in the entire acreage, but it can be done pleasantly and informatively with excellent guides such as Nancy Real (a Watertown, Mass., native), explaining the architecture, then Betty Orr on vegetation. Nancy says not to worry about the travertine legs of the museum that appear shaky. "They look old and weary, but they’re reinforced with steel and can withstand any earthquake.’’ Betty points out a purple trumpet tree and poverty weed, a very un-Getty-ish plant. The long walk also provokes hunger.

Time out for a good lunch, with Walsh and his charming wife, Jill, after which Aurelio says, "Now to really see things.’’
I thought we did.

"I mean inside the museum. The art.’’

I thought the Center as a whole was the (italic) prime work of art.

"In a way it is, but let’s look at some galleries anyway.’’

While outdoors the current masters of buildings and grounds, Meier, Olin and Irwin, showed their stuff, the old masters hadn’t lost their touch on canvas. Monet’s haystacks, Van Gogh’s irises, Munch’s starry night were a great dessert. And a new one for me, James Ensor’s carnival atmospsheric "Christ Entering Brussels,’’ was garishly riveting. Christ is riding into town on his Palm Sunday mule behind a brass band -- "a pullulating satire,’’ critic Hughes calls it, calling on a wonderful adjective., which I think means abundant.

It has been a pullulating day at Supermuseum.

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