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Walsh and Meier had their disagreements about its display--Walsh liked sober, richly colored walls as a background for the art and insisted on "period room" effects for the furniture, whereas Meier wanted neither. The period decor, which was handled by the New York City architect-decorator Thierry Despont, is a flop. But Meier served the art very well, with a series of generously proportioned, plain, high-ceilinged and top-lighted galleries that don't clamor for attention and do create a feeling of undistracted serenity. They recall the enfilade effects of older museums, but Meier has cunningly provided the links between them with unexpected openings, panoramic glimpses of the radiant townscape through glass walls, views of the museum's own light-struck exterior. It is a walker's museum, full of variegated spaces, points of rest, vistas, curves and a continual respiration between inside and outside.
The Getty began in the mind and pocket of the man whose name it bears: J. Paul Getty, the oil billionaire who in 1974 had installed his collection of Roman and Greek antiquities, French furniture and medium-level European paintings in a preposterous $17 million replica of the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum, overlooking the Pacific at Malibu. Those who sneered at this as the Disneyism of a crackpot Scrooge McDuck were staggered when, after Getty died in 1976, it turned out that he left his museum almost $700 million--the largest endowment ever given to a cultural institution, in or out of the U.S.
The money was all in Getty Oil stock, and its sheer bulk was obviously going to force the trustees of the J. Paul Getty Trust to revise their ideas of a cultural mission. The man mainly responsible for this reshaping was Harold Williams, former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission in the Carter Administration and dean of UCLA's Graduate School of Management. In 1981 the Getty Trust hired Williams to manage the money and figure out what the new institution should do.
The first item on his agenda was to diversify the trust's money. "It wasn't prudent," says Williams, "for an institution to have such a large portion of its endowment subject to the vicissitudes of a single stock." After some years of litigation, he and the board managed to clear the way to sell, in 1984, its Getty Oil stock to Texaco for $10 billion. In the end, this gave Williams $2.3 billion to play with in creating the Getty Center. With shrewd management, this endowment has since grown to $4.3 billion--four times that of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Because the Getty Trust is obliged to spend 4.25% of its endowment on its own programs every year, it has as much as $225 million to spend on itself annually--which means roughly $40 million a year for buying art, a budget to make any other museum green with envy.