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The six units gathered in this stunning setting are devoted to an art collection, ambitious archival facilities, high-tech conservation, broad research and educational programs, all intended to serve as a sort of cultural condenser for the humanities in Los Angeles and beyond. There is the Getty Grant Program, which has given out some $63 million since 1984 to support worldwide research in the history and conservation of art--projects ranging from computer-aided studies and reconstructions of half-effaced 8th century Mayan murals to the conservation of monastery temples in Nepal.
Its work intersects with that of the Getty Conservation Institute, which promotes and underwrites techniques for preserving the world's cultural heritage, working only in partnership with other governments and foreign institutions. Then there is the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, which at any given time will have a dozen scholars-in-residence working on their specialties, backed up by an 800,000-volume library. The plan is for scholars to work around themes, the first of which is "Perspectives on Los Angeles: Narratives, Images, History," covering a wide range of subjects from urban growth to street art and vandalism. Other institutes apply themselves to arts education and to creating a vast database of humanities texts and art images, whose L.A. Culture Net Website at present reaches 14 million people who speak 90 different languages, cross-linking the city's mosaic of cultural organizations online.
The museum will inevitably be the Getty's main focus of public attention. Its director is John Walsh, 59, formerly of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, who was hired in 1983. He is a patrician, dryly witty scholar and administrator whose specialty is 17th century Dutch painting but whose eye and expertise are remarkably broad ranging. Given an enormous acquisitions fund, Walsh has bought prudently and selectively. The art world's fear that the Getty would crash the Old Masters market like an 800-lb. gorilla has proved largely groundless. The collection's focus is fairly narrow; it was never, Walsh points out, meant to be a "Western Met," an encyclopedic museum. Its collection of painting and sculpture, entirely European, stops at the threshold of the 20th century--the most recent picture in it is James Ensor's huge, pullulating satire, The Entry of Christ into Brussels, 1888.
The collection moves with ease between fine works by major masters--Rembrandt, Pontormo, Rubens, Mantegna, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Turner--and illuminatingly good ones by less famous figures, such as Franz Xavier Winterhalter's coolly sumptuous portrait of a 19th century princess on the terrace of her villa in the Crimea, or a small, haunting study of a young girl by the Belgian Symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff. It is already a deeply serious and discriminating collection and may turn into a great one.