Getty Research Institute

In 2005, the Getty Research Institute purchased the vast archives of Los Angeles photographer Julius Shulman, noted for his documentation of California's classic Modernist architecture. Now the institute has acquired the archive of one of those celebrated architects, Pierre Koenig (1925-2004), whose sleek glass-and-steel structures are featured in some of Shulman's most famous photos.

For the last decade, the Getty Research Institute has maintained a huge portion of the archive of art dealer Joseph Duveen, who built an empire from the 1880s to the 1930s by buying Old Master works from impoverished Europeans and selling them to rich Americans such as Henry E. Huntington and Henry Clay Frick. Now -- thanks to a long-term loan from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass. -- the Getty is the one-stop research center for Duveen scholars.

Thomas W. Gaehtgens, an internationally recognized scholar who is director of the German Center for the History of Art in Paris, will be the new leader of the Getty Research Institute, sources close to the Getty say. His appointment, expected to be announced today, will end a 10-month search for a successor to Thomas Crow, who left the prestigious position to chair the department of modern art history at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts.

ONE of the intellectual hubs of the art world, almost hidden in plain sight, resides in a gleaming white circular building on the Getty Center's Brentwood hillside. It's a library to die for with 920,000 volumes on the history of art, architecture and archeology and 2 million study photographs.

In 1989, the Getty Research Institute got a proposal that seemed to come out of left field. A rare book dealer was offering a suite of 20 engravings from 18th century China, even though the institute hadn't yet expressed much interest in Asia. And the prints themselves were oddities. Reflecting a bizarre mix of cultures, the intricately detailed engravings depict European-style pavilions in Beijing, designed and built for a Chinese emperor by Jesuit missionaries.

NOW THAT A NEW era is beginning at the Getty Trust, art critics and museum officials across the country have begun to sing a predicable tune: Spend more money on buying art! The problem with the Getty, they chant, is that it didn't win enough auction battles. The result is that a painting that might have hung in Los Angeles now hangs in another museum. Horrors!

The Los Angeles Police Historical Society and Museum needed help. The organization, dedicated to preserving department history and fostering community relations, had boxes and boxes of photographs in storage but no organization system -- much less a coherent idea of what was in the boxes.

The J. Paul Getty Trust, on the hunt for a new president since February, now has another high-level opening to fill. Thomas Crow, director of the Getty Research Institute, told colleagues Tuesday that he's heading east to become a professor of modern art history at New York University's influential Institute of Fine Arts. "I had always thought I would carry on at the Getty as long as I was able," Crow said, adding that "I probably wouldn't have seriously considered any other academic offer."

Russian artist Vasily Kamensky's poem about the clash between rural culture and urban growth conjures an absurd image of farm animals dancing the tango. Originating from this image is the title of the Russian poetry exhibit "Tango With Cows: Book Art of the Russian Avant Garde, 1910-1917" at the Getty Research Institute. On display are 36 books of poetry and a variety of interactive materials that explore the little-known period in Russian history that predates the Russian Revolution of 1917.