John Walsh pulls his green Volvo station wagon into the subterranean garage at the base of the Getty Center's massive construction site in Brentwood, switches to a four-wheel-drive vehicle and drives a guest up a steep hill. With the flair of a tour guide who has his routine down cold, he points out the sleek monorail that will speed visitors to the new J. Paul Getty Museum. Navigating through ruts when the paving runs out, he parks on a plot of crusty dirt. Donning a hard hat and orange safety vest, he leads the way up a flight of concrete stairs strewn with wire, metal and gravel.
Advertisement
Don't Hate Him Because His Museum is Filthy Rich : John Walsh Has Run the Getty Since 1983. What Has He Learned About the Art World That He Didn't Know Before? Not Much About the Art Part
For the Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday April 30, 1995 Home Edition Part A Page 3 Metro Desk 4 inches; 122 words Type of Material: Correction
Getty Museum--In today's Los Angeles Times Magazine, a caption appearing in a profile of Getty Museum Director John Walsh incorrectly states that he oversees the construction of the entire Getty Center in Brentwood. Stephen D. Rountree, director of operations and planning, oversees the construction of the Getty Center complex. Walsh is the director of the Getty Museum. The table of contents states that the museum will cost $733 million. That is the building cost of the entire center. In addition to the new museum, the center will house five other programs administered by the J. Paul Getty Trust: the Getty Conservation Institute, the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, the Getty Art History Information Program, the Getty Center for Education in the Arts and the Getty Grant Program. Harold M. Williams is the president of the J. Paul Getty Trust.
Lurching along to accommodate a chronically sore knee and grumbling about being an aging athlete, Walsh insists that walking the site wouldn't do further damage. "It thrives on pain," he says with a rueful smile. And as he approaches the entrance of the new museum, his misery melts away. "Ahhhhh," he says, sucking in his breath while surveying the spectacular view behind a confusing array of cranes, foundations, partial walls and piles of dirt. "Every time. Every single time I come here, it's hair-raising."
In a beige suit, crisp white shirt and snappy tie instead of his customary tweedy blues and grays, Walsh is looking nattier than usual. But the 57-year-old scholar of 17th-Century Dutch paintings bears no resemblance to the slick corporate type who might be expected in today's art world to lead one of the world's wealthiest museums. He's a soft-spoken Easterner who likes nothing better than divulging the mysteries of an Old Master painting to a student or soul mate, but these days, Walsh's job is explaining the Getty Museum's big picture to the entire world.
Walsh met his Los Angeles future nearly 12 years ago on this same pinnacle of prime Westside real estate, where the J. Paul Getty Trust is building the $733-million Getty Center, designed by architect Richard Meier. On that day in 1983, Getty Trust President Harold M. Williams was trying to persuade Walsh to leave his job as curator of European paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and take charge of the Getty Museum, known in those days as a filthy rich upstart with a spotty art collection and an image problem.
That day, standing on the proposed site of the Getty Center, Williams swept his arm across a commanding view of greater Los Angeles and the Pacific Ocean. As he pointed out distant landmarks and talked about the trust's plans, the magnitude of his proposal began to sink in for Walsh. "I thought, ayeeee, who else is going to offer me the chance to build a new museum, please, let alone a staff and a collection? This isn't going to come again soon," he recalls.
He was probably right, and not merely because there is only one Getty Trust. Although Walsh's Ivy League education and experience would have made him an obvious contender for a director's position a few decades earlier, he didn't fit the image for the 1980s and beyond. As art museums became increasingly public institutions that packed in crowds for blockbuster exhibitions funded by corporate sponsors who wanted a lot of bang for their bucks, ideal museum directors were thought to be crack fund-raisers whose social skills were more valuable than their art expertise. "John knows a lot about art. That's rather quaint these days," says Martin Friedman, a dean of American museum directors who became director emeritus of Minneapolis' Walker Art Center in 1990.
Williams, who heads a trust munificently endowed by an oil baron and now worth about $4.1 billion, didn't need a fund-raiser. He was looking for an old-fashioned scholarly director to shape up the museum's collection, recruit a first-rate staff, plan a new museum and--most important--win respect and gain credibility for an institution that the art world loved to denigrate, if not hate.
"He was a brilliant choice," Edmund P. Pillsbury, director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, says of Walsh's appointment. "I don't know if he's liked, but he is certainly respected. And in this field it is more important to be respected than to be liked."
Walsh says he has no regrets about uprooting himself from Boston, but the last 12 years haven't been easy. The reason, of course, is all that money. Having a vast fortune has put the Getty Trust under an unusually intense spotlight. And, as the trust's most public program, the museum has taken much of the heat. Feared by competitors for its art-buying potential, the museum has been criticized both for collecting too aggressively and too timidly. It also has been accused of buying fake antiquities and smuggled treasures. When plans began to shape up for the Getty's acropolis in Brentwood, there were public outcries about desecrating a hill (which had already been zoned for development) and critical snipes against Meier's architectural design.
FEATURED
MORE:
Advertisement
