The Burdens of Wealth: Paul Getty and His Museum

By Burton B. Fredericksen

An intimate history of the Getty Museum from its early relatively modest days until it unexpectedly received the endowment that made it the worlds wealthiest museum and eventually a private foundation of worldwide influence.

Following the death of Getty in 1976 it was necessary to adapt the institution to radically different circumstances and much higher expectations, virtually none of which had been anticipated. This evolution was guided by some of the most prominent managers and historians available, but was also marred by some unfortunate and widely publicized mis-steps that made the transition unusually erratic.

Institutional histories are normally written and published by the institutions themselves, with the result that its blunders or mistakes are normally glossed over. The present memoir is meant to be an objective and relatively frank appraisal of the history of this exceptional institution by an early participant in the process.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Aug 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9781480817111

Burton B. Fredericksen

Burton B. Fredericksen was curator of the Getty Museum in Malibu, California, and was closely involved with its evolution during Paul Getty’s lifetime. He would become chief curator and then director of the Getty Provenance Index, a department of the Getty Research Institute. He retired in 2001.

Book preview

Copyright © 2015 Burton B. Fredericksen.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Archway Publishing

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.archwaypublishing.com

1 [phone]

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4808-1713-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-1712-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-1711-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015905774

Archway Publishing rev. date: 8/3/2015

Contents

Preface

1. The Origins of the J. Paul Getty Museum (1953/54)

2. The Hidden Museum (1954–1963)

3. Federico Zeri and Getty (1964–1967)

4. The Difficult Task of Spending Money (1968–1969)

5. Buying Art Helter-Skelter (1970–1971)

6. Getty’s Final Years as a Collector (1972–1974)

7. The Malibu Villa Opens to the Public (1974–1976)

8. The Death of the Founder and Its Aftermath (1976)

9. Learning to Live with Wealth (1977–1979)

10. The Costs of Turning the Museum into a Trust (1980–1982)

11. The Best Director Money Can Buy (1983)

12. The Great Expansion Gets Under Way (1984)

13. Confronting the Limits of Wealth (1985–1987)

14. Breaking Records as the Clock Clicks Down (1988–1993)

15. The Price of Virtue, Architectural and Otherwise (1994–1997)

16. The View from the Brentwood Site (1998)

17. Under Philistine Rule (1999–2000)

18. The Overthrow of the President (2000–2006)

19. Righting the Ship (2007–2013)

20. Conclusion

image.jpg

©Hulton Archives, David Farrell, GettyImages

Preface

A great many people have assisted in assembling the material for this book, and a few of them were also aware they were doing so. Three close colleagues agreed to read and comment on the content and I want to thank them most sincerely for their very valuable help and assistance. However, they should not be held responsible for the views expressed herein, and in any case they will remain unnamed. In general I have tried as best I could to canvass as many colleagues within (and outside) the institution as possible in order to produce an account that is both accurate and fair. At the same time one must acknowledge that there is always more to be learned about any subject, and opinions will always differ as to how to interpret it. Nonetheless, I hope – and believe – that the tale that follows represents a majority view and not just my own.

1. The Origins of the J. Paul Getty Museum (1953/54)

T he creation of Paul Getty’s museum in Malibu in the autumn of 1953 was so abrupt and unceremonious that no one at the time could have guessed that it would one day grow into one of any importance. Its debut was both modest and deliberately inauspicious, with the result that its very existence was hardly noticed until well into its second decade. The birth could be compared to that of a child conceived out of wedlock, an offspring about whose origins the parent felt some uneasiness. But it was not the aftermath of a momentary enthusiasm or even a long and complex affair—rather a decision taken on the advice of counsel and meant to satisfy an immediate need of the father. Then, like Getty’s five children who preceded it, the museum was left to be brought up by others and so would come to lead a stunted and unstable existence for much of its early life.

Private institutions necessarily bear a resemblance to their founders, and Getty’s museum—which is now much more than a museum—is no exception. But over time it has evolved in ways that its parent would not have condoned. This evolution, still in its early stages, has been far more erratic and unpredictable than might have been imagined, and it continues to change direction in ways that make plain that it has not yet succeeded in finding its proper role.

The first sixty years of Paul Getty’s life (he was born in Minneapolis in 1892) offer no indication that he would have any intention of establishing a museum or any other kind of public institution. By temperament and philosophy he was not especially civic-minded, and prior to his sixtieth birthday his art collection was modest in both size and importance. Los Angeles, his primary home from the time he and his parents moved there in 1906, was a cultural backwater with barely any tradition of private endowment in the arts: only one art museum, the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in nearby San Marino, could serve as a respectable example. The Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science, and Art, in existence since 1910 and much expanded during the 1920s, was still a hybrid of stuffed animals and miscellaneous works of European and American art displayed in a two-story temple of concrete raised in a park near the center of the city. However, the Depression had left it incomplete and shorn of its final embellishments, a state in which it remained until well after the war and the return of prosperity.

In 1946, the art division of the Los Angeles museum (which would become the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, or LACMA, in 1961) was receiving donations of paintings and ancient sculpture from both William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies. They were Getty’s neighbors in Santa Monica, where he had lived since 1935. Perhaps inspired by their example, in 1953 he gave the institution a very valuable Persian carpet, known as the Coronation Carpet, and a Boucher tapestry, though the association may have come about primarily because of his need for deductions at a time when he found himself in higher tax brackets.

Getty’s irregular ventures into the art market invariably occurred at those times when his companies were at their most profitable. In 1937, after an extended struggle with the much larger Standard Oil of New Jersey, Getty had finally gained control of the Mission Corporation, a holding company of potential importance, and the Skelly Oil Company, a smaller firm in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Getty had gained much of his experience as an oil man. These achievements secured his status as a major player in an extremely competitive field that had traditionally been dominated by a few very large corporations. That same year he began to spend increasing amounts of time in Europe, and the following year, finding himself in good financial shape at a time when others were not, he started to buy art in a serious manner. In another sign of his rising prosperity, his realty company purchased the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan for the bargain price of $2.35 million.

In 1938, and especially 1939, the threat of war was severely depressing prices in Europe, and Getty, realizing that it was a buyer’s market, took advantage of the opportunities available to those—mostly Americans—with the means to buy. His inexperience as a collector, combined with a natural reluctance to spend large sums on anything, caused him to tread lightly at first, but his success in obtaining valuable objects for little outlay during this time set a standard that would influence his thinking for most of his life.

His conviction that bargains could always be found if one had a nose for quality was born of his experiences during his wildcatting days in Oklahoma. An instinct for finding profitable oil leases while he was still in his twenties lay at the origin of this belief, a supposition no doubt reinforced by his father’s demonstrated gift for divining the location of oil simply by observing the land. George F. Getty had grown up on a farm in Ohio and pursued a legal career in Minneapolis before a chance visit to Oklahoma in 1903 led him to begin investing in land there. Paul Getty seems to have believed that if his father had such a talent for finding oil, it must have been an inborn talent that the son shared. From there it was easy to conclude that the talent was also transferable from the search for oil to the search for works of art.

But just as Getty was finding how satisfying the acquisition of major works of art could be, the outbreak of the hostilities that led to World War II abruptly brought it to a halt. Getty had found that he relished the publicity generated by these first acquisitions, especially the outcry in the Netherlands following his purchase there of an important portrait by Rembrandt, but the headlines this caused were quickly overshadowed by much larger events, and this phase of his career was cut short, leaving him wanting more. Obliged to return to the United States and missing the cultured society of Western Europe that he had decided to emulate, Getty settled into a twelve-year-long enforced seclusion—much of it in Tulsa making airplane parts for the military effort, the rest of it in Los Angeles building his oil holdings and being a husband.

Getty seems to have had no clear destination in mind for the various works of art he now owned, but they were not so numerous that a grand plan was necessary. He had a fine collection of French eighteenth-century furniture, much too valuable to be used in his home, and a miscellaneous group of about three dozen paintings, primarily Dutch and mostly acquired at a single auction in Amsterdam. Last, and still smaller in number, was a collection of Roman sculpture and artifacts that he had purchased on visits to Rome. Aside from two paintings lent to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, one of which was the Rembrandt, and a few lesser pictures hung in his beach home in Santa Monica, everything was in storage.

In spite of its modest size, Getty’s collection was a source of great pride, especially the French furniture, and he was in the habit of showing photographs of the best items to everyone he met. In 1947 he also published, at his own expense, a small book titled Europe in the Eighteenth Century, which was illustrated almost entirely with his own pieces. But he was ambivalent about the role these objects should play in his life in the long term, and at times he was clearly torn between thinking of them as an investment rather than a permanent fixture, a crisis that many collectors eventually face. In 1942 he had approached the Duveen Brothers office in New York about dispensing with some parts of his collection—if they could be sold for a profit. It was not an opportune time to be selling, and in any case he may have been only trying to determine how much they might have risen in value.

This attempt takes on more meaning when placed in context with his equally inconclusive efforts to sell his oil holdings. In 1947/48 Getty undertook negotiations that would have divested himself of his stocks and given him the capital to pursue a different, perhaps more leisurely, life-style. As the world began to revert to its pre-war state, Getty, having reached the age of fifty-five and perhaps wanting to indulge himself to a greater degree, seems to have been reconsidering his aims in life. As with his half-hearted attempts to sell his art, however, the possibility of selling his companies advantageously also proved to be elusive, and he elected instead to continue building them, but with even greater fervor.

Getty’s expanding involvement in the oil business did not detract from the pleasure he took in owning works of art, but to enjoy them fully he needed to remove them from storage. This must have been his primary motive in 1945 for purchasing a much larger estate straddling the boundary between Los Angeles and Malibu, just a mile or two north of his Santa Monica beach home. He had purchased this 65-acre estate, consisting of a two-story wood-frame residence in a small canyon with a narrow view of the sea, just months before the war’s end and with the clear intent of moving there with his newest wife, Louise, known as Teddy. The Malibu building was not only larger and more attractive than his beach home; it was also more sheltered and better able to accommodate his art collections, including any further objects he might decide to buy as opportunities arose. Alterations to the Malibu home had begun in 1946, but the birth of their son, Timothy—who was premature and in fragile health—had resulted in still further changes to the design as well as a series of postponements.

The renovations to the Malibu home were completed in 1948, and by the next year Getty had moved his collections into galleries that had been added to one end of the existing residence: the French furniture—his greatest source of pride, embellished in its display by the addition of tapestries and a few paintings—filled two large rooms, one at ground level devoted to the time of Louis XV, and the other on the upper floor devoted to Louis XVI and the Empire. He was assisted in this by Mitchell Samuels, owner of French & Company in New York, a firm specializing in the decorative arts with which Getty had done business for a long time. A few pieces of Roman sculpture and glass were placed in a narrow hallway and a small room tucked away in a corner. (The floor was later embellished with an authentic second-century Roman mosaic that he had had cut down to fit the dimensions of the room.) Last of all, the paintings were hung in various parts of the house, including a room with a stage at one end that had been intended for the use of Teddy, who had been a successful supper club singer known as Theodora Lynch.

After the collections of art had been installed, however, neither Getty nor his family moved in, electing instead to remain in Santa Monica. During these years Getty was often absent, tending to business interests in either Oklahoma or on the East Coast, and, beginning already in 1946, in Europe. His wife Teddy and their son sometimes visited the Malibu house to give parties or spend a long weekend, particularly when Getty was in town, but Teddy preferred their house on the beach. As a result the Malibu ranch, as it was generally called, never became a proper home, although Getty clearly had meant for it to be. The grounds now included a private zoo—perhaps inspired by Hearst’s zoo at San Simeon, which Getty had visited—and this, as well as the theater, are proof of his intentions. Getty did occasionally stay there by himself, and members of the extended family visited for brief periods, assisted by a ranch foreman and his wife who lived on the property; but the rooms housing the art collections—which in correspondence were often referred to as a museum—were seen by very few people, and the general public had no access to it.

During the years immediately following the war, Getty had little opportunity to buy works of art, in part because the art market needed some time to put itself back together. But during 1948 he was visiting museums again, and in his diary he was unfavorably comparing the collections of furniture, tapestries, and carpets in the Frick Collection and the Metropolitan Museum to his own, an opinion that reveals a tenuous grip on objectivity. The following year he returned to Europe and bought more French furniture and a Roman head, all of which were meant to flesh out the new galleries, but simultaneously in his diary he was telling himself that these would be among his last purchases.

Getty worried endlessly about being profligate, and the purchase of expensive objects, especially works of art, was often followed by admonitions to himself to stop doing it. On the first day of 1950 he resolved, according to his diary, to buy only those things that were needed to complete the decoration of his furniture galleries. This was the first of many resolutions he made to curtail spending, a ritual that he went through at irregular intervals all his life. Aside from showing how much anxiety it caused him to spend large sums of money, these diary entries also indicate that he was thinking of his Malibu property as a limited enterprise that would soon be complete. In October he described the project as nearly finished, calling it a drain on his funds that needed to end. He preferred, he said, to spend his money on himself and his friends.

In spite of the earnestness with which he went about fitting out his Malibu home, Getty continued to spend little time there. And every year he embarked on his traditional pilgrimage to Europe where, in addition to exploring its museums, he resumed his visits to the commercial galleries, often finding things to tempt him. On the first day of 1951, he declared in his diary that, with the exception of a few necessary things for the ranch, he did not intend to buy any more art at all. But resolutions like this were often broken within a few months.

Whatever plans he may have had were then set aside that year when Getty elected to return to Europe, this time never to return. His reasons for this were both personal and professional. He had gained control of a major oil firm, Tide Water Associated Oil Company, and two years earlier another of his companies, Pacific Western Oil Corporation, had acquired a half interest in the Saudi Arabian portion of the so-called Neutral Zone. This was an area of desert between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and the mineral rights were shared by those two countries. The lease that allowed Getty to become a player in the high-stakes search for oil there was the most costly of his career and a source of some genuine anxiety before it eventually paid off. In the meantime, a base in Europe gave him better access to developments in the Zone at the same time that it provided him with an excuse to remain abroad with the ability to roam wherever he chose.

Getty’s departure from California ended the longest period he had ever spent with any of his five wives, and given his record it is likely that he saw this as the appropriate moment to free himself for good from familial duties. The failure to move into the Malibu home may also indicate that he saw it as a personal refuge should he and Teddy ever divorce. She and seven-year-old Timmy did accompany him on the trip to Europe, but they soon returned home to Santa Monica. There they waited his return, perhaps sensing it would never happen. In 1957 they did divorce, and Teddy (unequivocally his last wife) was given the Santa Monica home, leaving Getty with the Malibu refuge, should he need one.

This return to Europe began with a six-year ramble through many of the same cities and watering holes he had visited since his youth. Getty was optimistic and fully aware that he was about to enjoy another major surge in wealth. His company’s venture in the Middle East was proving highly profitable, and his extraordinary resources would soon put him on the cover of Time Magazine, where he would be publicly identified as the richest American alive. It was the moment when his life’s work began to yield its most enjoyable fruit, and he clearly preferred to spend the time in Western Europe rather than in the relatively uncultivated parts of the United States in which he had always lived and whose natural resources had brought him such benefits.

Getty was firmly committed to taking full advantage of his new prominence and to do it in a part of the world where his tastes would be closer to those of the moneyed classes he emulated and where he had always felt very much in his element. Since his days as an indifferent student at Oxford in 1913/14, he had become accustomed to extended periods of travel, and the cultural resources of Western Europe were inexhaustible, even at a time when the states in Eastern Europe were no longer accessible. Though often using the Ritz Hotel in London or the Georges V in Paris for temporary lodging, he was, at least during this time, essentially a man without a fixed address—save the one on the beach in Santa Monica that he had left behind and would never again see.

Getty was often accompanied by a female companion—one of whom was Ethel Bunny LeVane, a dealer from Manchester who wrote a fawning memoir about him and his collecting that he paid for and helped publish in 1955. But this should not lead to the assumption that Getty’s daily life was an endless series of parties and frolicking. Though he usually dined at least once or twice a day with the appropriately prominent or wealthy, he also worked long hours, staying in touch with associates in various parts of the United States and Europe, usually by cable or telephone. He was responsible for the direction of large and growing corporations, and he was able to manage his affairs while on the move and without a large staff to support him. On some days he had nothing to report in his diary other than work.

Most of all, living in Europe provided Getty with access to its museums, whose collections served as a standard to which he could compare his own acquisitions, and to its art market, whose attractions he had great difficulty resisting. His purchases were preceded by extensive reading, especially in the field of French decorative arts and, to a lesser degree, ancient Greek and Roman art. Unquestionably, he never stopped thinking of art as an investment, and his personal business traits would invariably affect his choices when buying, but the pleasure he gained by looking at and owning it cannot be denied.

While abroad, however, Getty was still thinking of putting the final touches on his galleries in Malibu, and in spite of his resolutions about not buying, and the fact that space in the new house was nearly exhausted, he still found objects to acquire that did not veer from his original plan. Almost as soon as he arrived in London in June of 1951, he was presented with opportunities he could not resist. Having previously declared that the only things still lacking in his galleries at home were a few final ornaments, such as a chandelier or some paneling, he now decided that the only thing still needed was some additional Greek or Roman sculpture. This change came about when he recognized that the social revolution in Great Britain following the war, in particular the increasingly heavy death duties imposed on the British aristocracy upon the death of the senior member of the family, was forcing the British to sell some very valuable possessions, many of which had been their family property for a century or two. These could be obtained for preposterously small amounts of money, and this time Getty was quicker to take advantage.

Within months of his arrival, he bought through a London dealer the most important piece of classical sculpture he was ever to obtain, the so-called Lansdowne Herakles, named after the Earl of Lansdowne, in whose family’s home it had enjoyed a prominent place since the eighteenth century. It was a life-size full-length marble statue excavated near the villa of the emperor Hadrian outside Rome, and it was relatively well preserved, aside from a few additions to replace missing parts (and the loss of the penis, said to have been removed at the request of Lady Lansdowne and kept in a drawer along with other similarly unwelcome appendages). This famous statue was on sale for a mere £10,000; Getty offered £6,000, roughly $30,000 at the time, and his offer was accepted.

This success, along with others that soon followed, served to confirm the strategy Getty had come to apply when buying objects from private sellers: he found that he could often obtain a piece by offering half the asking price, a gambit that worked very well during times when there were so few buyers. Eventually the dealers began to double their prices in anticipation that Getty would offer only half, but for a few years he enjoyed an unbroken series of successes, the benefits of a buyer’s market.

As he had been prior to the war, Getty was in the habit of obtaining advice from specialists, most often German scholars, when buying ancient sculpture. This was especially true during 1952, the year in which he bought the bulk of his collection. Not content with Roman pieces, he also found opportunities to buy Greek examples, primarily through the London firm of Spink & Son. Especially notable were three pieces of early Greek statuary that had previously been part of the famous collection of the Earl of Elgin, the man who had brought the Parthenon marbles to London at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The most valuable was an archaic marble torso of a woman wearing a peplos, a very rare piece from the late fifth century BC; the other two were funerary reliefs from the fourth century. These were soon joined by other major Roman objects, and in one brief splurge—and without great expenditure—Getty had created a small but notable collection of ancient sculpture that rivaled anything of its kind in the western United States. He had found himself in the right place at the right time.

Whenever Getty became embroiled in a campaign of this sort, testimonials appeared in his diary confirming his devotion to the art of the period he was currently buying. Although he would often make declarations to the effect that a rug or carpet or a piece of furniture can be as beautiful, possess as much artistic merit, and reflect as much creative genius as a painting or a statue, during 1951/52 he sounded a different note, writing in his diary in May 1952, after a visit to Delphi, that if he owned the famous charioteer of Delphi he would not trade it for any work of art in the world.

This enthusiasm for classical antiquities never left him, but his best purchases in this field were already behind him. In 1953 he bought the so-called Cottenham relief, a Greek grave stele from the fifth century BC depicting a youth leading a horse by the reins. It had been dug up earlier in the century at a site near Cottenham in England—an unlikely place to find Greek sculpture. For many years it was considered the most important object of Greek art in the collection, but some thirty years later opinion turned against its authenticity, and since that time it has remained off exhibition. Getty did not live to learn of that disappointment.

The buying spree of the early 1950s also included the most valuable piece of furniture he would ever acquire, a nearly unique double-sided desk made ca.1750 by Bernard van Risenburgh, which had belonged to the dukes of Argyll since 1760. Getty had missed a chance to buy it directly from the duke in Scotland, and he could not go to see it in New York where it was at the time, but—trusting the dealer—he agreed to pay $30,000 for it, a higher figure than he was accustomed to pay for furniture.

In spite of this surge of purchases, Getty still envisioned his collection as a private one that he had no intention of opening to the public. The new Greek pieces, as well as the larger Roman marbles, were sent to Malibu and squeezed into the hallway allotted for antiquities. This group of marbles was still modest by the standards of East Coast or European museums, but for California it was nearly unique. Nevertheless, hardly anyone outside the family ever saw them, not even the man who owned them.

All of this began to change in 1953 following Getty’s sixtieth birthday. He was in Paris at the time, and in his diary he remarked that in spite of feeling healthy, he was sad to be leaving his fifties and that sixty seemed much older. His diary was used primarily to record his movements or activities (or the cost of things, including meals) rather than extended ruminations on matters that worried or excited him, so this admittedly brief mention at least tells us that he was not ignoring the significance of the occasion. (He had in fact already undergone two facelifts and was dyeing his graying hair blond or, later, a light red.) But in spite of having reached an unwelcome plateau in life, he had reason to hope that his best years might still be ahead of him, and in most ways they were.

Getty had come to realize, indeed he had known all along, that the third part of his collection, the paintings, was not up to the standard of the sculpture and furniture he now owned. Knowing that the reputation of collectors was normally set by the paintings they owned, he was faced with the necessity of buying better ones. He also knew that larger sums of money would be needed for this, and since the post-war slump was coming to an end, there would be much more competition and fewer bargains. It was a different playing field from the one in which he had thrived up to that point.

In truth, Getty did not enjoy buying paintings, and at times he even denied being a paintings collector. His diary and later writings imply that he bought them only because he believed that his reputation would ultimately depend more upon his paintings than on his French eighteenth-century furniture, a field with relatively fewer admirers. His attraction to French decorative arts was genuine and would hold his attention throughout his life, but to some extent this was because it was comparatively inexpensive; major pieces cost only a fraction of the amount needed to buy an important painting, and he did not enjoy competing with other affluent collectors, not to mention public museums. He wanted to discover value where others were not looking. This was much harder to do when buying paintings.

Though he was not averse to asking the help of specialists when buying furniture or ancient sculpture, Getty had rarely done so when buying paintings, relying instead on his own instincts. He could see that the risks of continuing in this manner were potentially much greater, and so as winter was coming to a close, he went to Florence, which he knew to have been the cradle of the Renaissance, with the naive intent to start buying some serious Italian pictures.

In March 1953, Getty visited Bernard Berenson at his Villa i Tatti outside Florence. Berenson was the most famous and influential scholar Getty had ever met, and he made a very strong impression on his visitor. Getty would later describe the meeting as an event and a privilege I shall always remember. I have never been more impressed in my life. For years thereafter Getty recalled having sat at Berenson’s knee absorbing his every word. Europe had acknowledged Berenson’s intellect as well as his contribution to scholarship, and so he was living proof that fellow Americans could be cultured and respected as men of good taste. Berenson was the first qualified person from whom Getty asked advice about paintings, and in so doing, he hoped to enhance his own stature as an international collector. He did not know of Berenson’s involvement with the art trade and the degree to which Berenson’s income depended upon helping American and British firms sell their stock—usually paintings they had acquired on Berenson’s counsel in the first place. Berenson’s impressive villa and standard of living resulted from persuading unsuspecting American collectors to acquire the pictures that had in some cases passed through his own hands, a revelation that did not become public until much later.

But Getty had developed a dismaying habit of asking advice after making his purchases rather than before. During the six days he stayed with Berenson, Getty showed him photographs of two Italian paintings he had just purchased from the Florentine dealers Luigi and Mario Bellini. Getty had decided he needed some early Italian examples to round out his collection, and his initial purchases to this end were two pictures from the early sixteenth century, a portrait by Cariani (also known as Giovanni Busi) and a panel painting by Girolamo della Pacchia. Getty had a certain fondness for the vendors, the Bellini brothers, and the fact that they were Florentines selling out of a gallery on the Arno may have given him the illusion he was buying at the source. But the Bellinis, like many Italian dealers before and since, often purchased their stock in London or elsewhere in the north, re-importing them into Italy for resale, and the provenance they supplied to clients was often fabricated. Much worse, the condition of the paintings Getty bought from them was often exceptionally poor.

Berenson was unusually harsh in his judgment, calling the Cariani a third-rate picture and the Pacchia even tenth-rate. This wounded Getty, but his respect for the elderly scholar led him to accept his remarks without complaint. In spite of this disappointment, however, Getty continued to buy pictures from the same gallery, again without asking advice but apparently in the belief he was acquiring better pieces because he was paying somewhat higher prices. One of these, a panel from a cassone—a Tuscan wedding chest—depicting The Siege of Troy was attributed to the school of Paolo Uccello, the great Florentine Renaissance artist, and it cost a surprising $40,000, at least four times what the painting was worth at the time. In fact, the painting had nothing to do with Uccello, as any scholar could have told him. The other paintings bought in Florence were equally poor choices.

This fact was driven home when the paintings were sent to the county museum in Los Angeles, where they were to be kept in storage and perhaps later placed on exhibition until Getty decided what to do with them. The staff of the museum was required to assign insurance values on the paintings, and they proposed figures that amounted to less than twenty percent of the amount Getty had paid. This came as a great shock to Getty, and in a letter to Berenson dated September 23, 1953, Getty described his embarrassment, concluding that from now on he would not buy another Italian painting unless it was one of the 100 greatest masterpieces, resolving to ask Berenson’s advice before making a decision rather than after.

But this resolution had little effect. A few prospective acquisitions were indeed sent along to Berenson for his opinion, but they were often so minor that Berenson had little to say about them. And when Berenson did give his approval, it was not invariably correct. A portrait of a woman that Getty bought from the Bellini gallery with Berenson’s help led to essentially the same result. The name of the artist was never resolved, and when the painting was cleaned many years later, it was found to be in ruinous condition. In fact, none of the paintings purchased by Getty during this period proved to be of more than minimal importance, and very few of them remain in the museum’s collection. Left to his own devices, Getty seemed almost incapable of buying a truly important Italian painting, and a full decade would pass before he finally succeeded.

But the rift with the curators at the Los Angeles museum over the value of the paintings Getty had lent them would eventually lead to the creation of Getty’s own museum. As the end of the year drew near, Getty’s associates began the process of determining which pieces he would give the county museum in order to cover the relatively large tax bill that they knew would be coming. As was allowed by the tax laws, the amounts he claimed as deductions were the appreciated values of the objects he gave rather than their cost price. Getty disliked paying taxes, and because of his unusually high bracket, he was taxed at a higher rate than most, causing him to complain about being victimized by a socialistic and wasteful government. If he wanted to avoid giving the government his hard-earned money, he would have to give the museum some of his most valuable possessions, and so he elected to give them Rembrandt’s Portrait of Maarten Looten, the painting he had acquired in Amsterdam in 1938, and the Ardabil carpet, one of the most famous Persian carpets in the Western world, which he had bought that same year in New York. Both of these had appreciated considerably in value and would provide the best tax deductions.

In order to obtain appraisals for the gifts, Getty’s accountant, Norris Bramlett, who oversaw Getty’s personal affairs, and David Hecht, Getty’s lawyer, approached Duveen Brothers, the firm from which Getty had purchased the Ardabil carpet fifteen years earlier. Getty had bought the carpet from Joseph Duveen himself, but in the meantime Duveen had passed away, and the firm’s director was now Edward Fowles, an American with a less gregarious personality. An internal memo to Fowles, dated December 1, 1953, reveals that Getty’s representatives felt that the Ardabil carpet and the Rembrandt should now be worth about $400,000. Duveen’s was being asked to appraise them at this amount.

But Fowles declined to provide evaluations at these figures, pointing out that the firm had sold the Ardabil to Getty for $68,000 (in an aside Fowles also stated that Getty had told everyone that he had paid $120,000) and they could not go any higher than $100,000. As for the Rembrandt, their limit was $70,000—Getty had paid $63,000—because it was one of the artist’s early paintings and his late, much freer pictures, were the ones then in fashion.

Getty’s lawyer wanted higher figures, and his demands included the implied threat of withholding future business, but he did not succeed in convincing Fowles to write a higher appraisal. Hecht decided to go elsewhere, eventually obtaining the figures he sought from Mitchell Samuels of French & Company, with which Getty had done business in the past. This cooperation from Samuels would help cement a long and beneficial relationship between Samuels and Getty that would prove profitable for both. (Duveen Brothers would be out of business within a few years.) Altogether Getty donated $700,000 in objects to the Los Angeles museum on this occasion, and one might reasonably presume that he intended to continue doing so in the years to come.

But the memo to Fowles from an associate also mentions that Getty’s office was in the process of setting up a public museum of their own, and the writer of the note seems to have been under the impression that the evaluations they were being asked to provide were needed for the first gifts to the new museum, not the Los Angeles museum. A memo of mid-November written by Norris Bramlett mentions that Getty was already at that time considering the possibility of establishing his own charitable foundation, and apparently by the end of the month a firm decision had been taken. Bramlett would later say that the idea of creating a Getty museum was his own, and, though Getty had initially doubted its feasibility, lawyers duly confirmed that there were no legal obstacles to it. So Getty gave his enthusiastic endorsement, and the J. Paul Getty Museum came into being. Needless to say, without the incentives provided by American tax laws, it would never have existed.

The decision to establish Getty’s own museum may owe some of its momentum to the reception Getty’s Italian purchases received when they reached California. The staff at the Los Angeles museum was refusing to accept the valuations placed on them, even suggesting that the receipts were accommodation receipts supplied by the vendors to document prices higher than those actually paid. (It cannot be excluded that this was in fact true, though it seems unlikely.) The problem was soon resolved, but it seems that Getty and his associates, finding that the valuations for his donations involved a contentious and not always successful process, concluded that it would be much easier if the institution receiving the donations were under their own control.

The only unanswered question is why Getty was in the process of donating his two most valuable possessions to the Los Angeles museum at a time when a decision had already been taken to create a Getty Museum, an institution fully able to accept gifts from its founder in lieu of taxes. Perhaps the carpet and the portrait had already been formally offered to the other museum and it was now thought to be too late to withdraw them.

It is also unknown whether Getty had any intention at this point of eventually giving a significant part of his fortune to his new museum. It would be five more years before he was to make his final will and testament, and there are no indications that the residence in Malibu, now justifiably called a museum, would ever be much larger. The relative inaccessibility of the site just at the city’s boundary—the property’s entrance was in Malibu while the building itself was in Los Angeles—did not encourage one to imagine it as anything more than a permanently minor and fairly private establishment.

In any case it was in December 1953 that the J. Paul Getty Museum became a reality, at least on paper. Its indenture described the new trust as a museum, gallery of art and library whose function was the diffusion of artistic and general knowledge. So far as is known, no further document was ever produced during Getty’s lifetime to indicate in any greater detail how he would like the museum to evolve, nor was any provision made to limit how the funds given it should be spent. This might be seen as extreme liberality, and ultimately it did indeed benefit the museum by giving it a high degree of flexibility, but it is doubtful that Getty’s motive was to give future trustees free rein. He normally refused to acknowledge that he was mortal, and he never discussed anything that implied that he would not be permanently in charge. It was, therefore, probably not a matter of his having carefully considered the museum’s future requirements but simply his desire to ignore the future beyond his own lifetime.

Section four of the indenture stipulates that the trustees are instructed to maintain the grounds as a park and that the home, including its furnishings, are to be kept as they were during the lifetime of the Founder so that succeeding generations of the public may see the private estate as it was in the time of the Founder. This suggests that Getty may have had a fixed display in mind and perhaps wanted to give visitors a glimpse of how he had lived, although the building had never truly been his residence. This idea was later abandoned, although he did briefly play with such a concept when designing a larger building fifteen years later.

The indenture also stipulated that Getty was making an initial gift to the museum of four works of art and seven hundred shares of common stock in Pacific Western Oil Corporation, valued at four dollars per share. The works of art were four of the Dutch paintings purchased before the war, and the total value of the gift that brought the museum into being probably did not exceed $35,000. However, Getty did also express his intention to make additional gifts to the museum and to leave it the bulk of the Malibu property over the course of time. This is proof that he at that time saw the property ultimately as a public institution, and while he or his family might occasionally use it as a private residence during his lifetime, they would be the last ones to do so. The indenture also permitted the museum to charge an admission fee if it were deemed necessary, but none ever was.

It is curious that the indenture describes the museum as having a library. At it’s inception it cannot have had more than a few dozen books, and a decade later it had only a few hundred. Minimal funds were allocated for the purchase of books before 1970, and even then it required considerable effort by the staff to acquire any at all. During Getty’s lifetime, a library was generally treated as a luxury that the museum could do without.

The board of trustees chosen by Getty in December 1953 consisted primarily of business associates and his children, all men who could be trusted to carry out his wishes. They were his three oldest sons, George (twenty-nine years old), Ronald (twenty-four years old), and Paul Jr. (twenty-one years old); his lawyer, David Hecht; and himself. Getty signed the indenture before a notary in Paris; Hecht signed in New York; and George Getty, then active in Getty Oil, in Tulsa. Only one of the original trustees did not fit the description of the board as a whole: he was William Valentiner, just appointed the new museum’s first director and, indeed, its first employee.

2. The Hidden Museum (1954–1963)

S ince Getty was in England at the time, we cannot be sure that it was his idea to employ Valentiner as the new director, but at the very least he approved of it and must have thought it appropriate. With this act, Getty had obtained the most prominent museum official on the West Coast and should be given credit for starting off in an eminently professional manner—but it was not an expensive strategy. Valentiner’s salary was just $8,500 per annum (even then a miserably low figure), but one of his colleagues confirms that he declined a salary of $25,000, saying it was too much for that position. He must have seen it as something less than a full-time job; perhaps he knew he would not be staying long.

William (formerly Wilhelm) Valentiner was a well-known German scholar with a long professional reputation that had begun at the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin. In the early years of the century he had been a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, after which, in 1924, he was appointed director of the Detroit Institute of Arts. Upon reaching retirement age in 1946, he had been persuaded to become the co-director consultant at the Los Angeles County art museum with particular responsibility for the exhibitions and acquisition of art. With that appointment, he became one of the first art museum professionals with an international reputation to take a position in Los Angeles.

Valentiner was knowledgeable in many fields, but he was a specialist in European sculpture and Dutch painting, about which he had published a number of books. Despite a certain shyness, he was widely admired for his considerable charm, and he knew many of the most important collectors and artists in the United States. During his eight years at the Los Angeles museum, he transformed the art division into one of some respectability.

Since 1952, Valentiner had also been helping Getty with the display of his collections in Malibu, and it was he and an associate, Paul Wescher, also a German, who decided where to place new additions to the collection as they arrived. Since Valentiner was also responsible for soliciting and accepting gifts for the Los Angeles museum, he no doubt played a role in choosing which items Getty should donate to it.

The Los Angeles museum was going through a period of instability, and for a time in 1951 Valentiner had even served as acting director while the trustees looked for a replacement. A permanent director, Jean Delacour, a prominent ornithologist of French origin, was appointed in 1952, and so the seventy-three-year-old Valentiner was ready to move on. To what extent he may have encouraged Getty to go his own way and divorce himself from the county museum is unknown. Whether or not Valentiner was the cause this time, Getty’s defection was an early example of the difficulty the Los Angeles museum had in attracting and retaining the loyalty of local collectors.

Ultimately, Valentiner did not have much influence on Getty or his museum, and his brief directorship was relatively uneventful. This may be due in part to Valentiner’s advanced age as well as to