At the Getty, architecture upstages art
May 8, 2004 | 12:00am
One of the boons of traveling is gaining access to great museums where original art masterpieces are displayed. The breathtaking pleasure of finally coming face to face with your favorite Michelangelo, Rubens, Gaugin or van Gogh (whose paintings you’ve only seen in textbooks and publications before) is utterly priceless.
If you are ever in California, take time out to visit the Getty Center, one of the world’s most extraordinary institutions dedicated to the visual arts and humanities. Perched on a 110-acre site at the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains, it overlooks panoramic views of Los Angeles and the blue Pacific Ocean. The Getty Center is a carefully designed complex – a monumental feat of architectural design and civil engineering, stone carving, exquisite interior lighting, and refreshingly imaginative landscaping.
The "new Getty" took $1 billion to construct. Located at 1200 Getty Center Drive in Los Angeles, it is situated right near the intersection of the San Diego Freeway (Interstate 405) and the Santa Monica Freeway (Interstate 10). Parking costs $5 (it’s better to call for a reservation) but admission to the museum is always free, thanks to the J. Paul Getty Trust.
Getty made so much money that he couldn’t count it, and one of the ways he spread it around was to build in 1974 the original J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Villa on a hillside in Malibu. The elegant Roman-style palace, inspired by the first century AD Villa dei Papiri near Herculaneum, housed his personal collections of Greek and Roman antiquities, 18th century French furniture and European paintings. When he died, he endowed $1.2 billion to the J. Paul Getty Trust, an amount that has grown over the years to more than $5 billion, and funds the museum today.
The tram has pollution-free electric motors, has the ability to negotiate the curved guide way path that follows the hillside’s natural contour, is virtually noiseless, and runs automatically without an on-board operator.
There is also an auditorium, a bookstore, a research library, a central garden, a restaurant, outdoor cafés, open air patios, view decks, reflecting pools, and event spaces. With its stilt puppets, perambulatory musicians and espresso bars, it integrates some fun concepts borrowed from Disneyland and modern shopping malls.
If you come to the Getty Center expecting to find a museum with works of art, you’d be delighted to find out that it is more of a work of art with a museum inside. The collection has been laid out rather sparsely and intimately in separate pavilions, that walking to and from each exhibition area makes experiencing the architecture an inescapable, pleasurable experience.
The center’s color scheme is primarily lavender and white, very much like the colors of the museum‚s prized painting, Van Gogh’s "Irises." The stone used in the buildings is travertine from the same quarries as the stones in the coliseum in Rome. Travertine has a light cream color that gives the buildings a sense of floating, dream-like quality.
The Getty collection is displayed in five separate pavilions named by their location and organized chronologically. Inside the pavilions are the distinguished collections of European paintings, decorative arts, old master drawings, classical sculpture, Renaissance and illuminated Medieval manuscripts, and 19th and 20th century American and European photographs.
Each gallery has computer-controlled ceiling louvers that allow natural light to illuminate the paintings. Enhanced by a cool lighting system, the paintings reveal themselves in almost the same natural light they were painted in.
Every corner, deck, balcony, walkway or staircase of the five two-story pavilions has a unique visual design and every space is virtually a vantage viewpoint with an enchanting vista. The pavilions are connected together by walkways with landscaped gardens which themselves are works of art that change with the seasons. The water splashes and gurgles over precisely placed rocks to produce refreshing sounds as it rushes down rolling rivulets.
For this writer, the other outstanding masterpieces in the Getty collection include:
"Portrait of a Halberdier" by Jacopo Pontormo, Italian pioneer of the Mannerist style in Florence, painted sometime between 1528-1530. This handsome, well-dressed foot soldier is reputed to be the young nobleman Francesco Guardi.
"The Farewell of Telemachus and Eucharis" by Jacques-Louis David, French, 1818. Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, bids goodbye to the beautiful nymph Eucharis whom he fell in love with. His duty as a son required him to end their romance and depart to search for his missing father.
"Shipping in a Calm at Flushing" by Jan van de Cappelle, Dutch, 1649. Grand ships float on mirror-like waters in the busy port of Flushing in the 1600s. Dramatic clouds and atmospheric light make this painting a masterpiece in luminous realism.
"Albert Cahen d’Anvers" by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, French, 1881. This commanding Impressionist portrait of the self-assured composer Albert Cahen d’Anvers nonchalantly smoking a cigarette was a big departure from the typical, somber portraits of that era.
"The Entombment" by Peter-Paul Rubens, Flemish, about 1612. This dramatic painting shows Christ lying lifeless after he was taken down from the cross prior to the entombment. The figures of John the Evangelist, Mary Magdalene, the Virgin Mary and Mary, the mother of James and Joseph, show different facial expressions.
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