J Paul Getty

At his death in 1976, J. Paul Getty left 4 million shares of Getty Oil stock--valued at $700 million--to his museum in Malibu. The bequest had grown to $1.2 billion by 1982, when Getty's estate was settled in court, and the endowment it funded is now worth an unfathomable $4.5 billion. Then there are the stories.

The J. Paul Getty Museumis having a Vienna moment, with two historical exhibitions of work by two artists whose profiles have gone from relatively obscure to popular favorite only in recent decades. Partly that's because of their eccentricity: It hasn't always been easy to know quite how they fit into established art historical narratives. Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736-83) was an accomplished German Baroque sculptor who, when he moved from Bavaria to Austria, set aside expressive drama for the newly fashionable revival of sober classicism sweeping Europe.

It's been ridiculed as Pompeii on the Pacific, scorned as a plastic paradise and dismissed as an aging billionaire's monument to bad taste. It's also been embraced as one of Southern California's most beloved cultural landmarks and praised as the home of an increasingly respected art collection. The J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu--which will close its doors at 5 p.m. today for a four-year renovation--does not invite neutral responses.

A month after laying off more than one-third of the education staff at its museums, the J. Paul Getty Trust has named one of Southern California's top K-12 educators as the newest member of its volunteer board of trustees. Thelma Meléndez de Santa Ana, superintendent of the 56,000-student Santa Ana Unified School District, will fill the seat on the 14-member Getty board that's being vacated by investment executive Luis Nogales, who has reached the limit of three four-year terms.

NO matter if Herakles has fallen off your holiday card list. Never mind if you don't know an alabastron from a loutrophoros. Odds are you will soon find yourself at the Getty Villa on the edge of Malibu, maybe trailing a loved one, maybe squiring out-of-towners. After an eight-year closure for renovation and litigation, the villa finally reopens Saturday. But where do you start? Here's what you need to know. First, Herakles is dead, so no worries there.

I spent a weekend in the company of J. Paul Getty in July, 1972. We were fellow-guests of the Duke and Duchess of Bedford at Woburn Abbey, England. I made allowance for Getty's creeping senility (and never was senility creepier), but he was one of the most boring people I have ever met. He told no fewer than three times a story about the Duke of Sutherland's bath in Sutton Place, the English country mansion Getty had bought in 1959.

Norris Bramlett, longtime personal aide to the late oil billionaire J. Paul Getty and a key administrator of the J. Paul Getty Museum, has died. He was 80. Bramlett died Jan. 12 at his home in Fullerton of complications of renal failure, said his son, Ken Bramlett of Riverside.

The J. Paul Getty Museum--a wealthy institution that often makes news by buying artworks no one else can afford--will sell 15 paintings from its collection in November at Sotheby's London. The auction is expected to total between $13 million and $18 million in sales, including a Paul Gauguin landscape valued at $6 million to $8 million. Six Getty works will be offered in a Nov. 21-22 sale of 19th-Century art; the remaining nine will go on the block on Nov. 28 in an Impressionist auction.

Millionaire oilman J. Paul Getty in 1954 purchased a large ranch-style home on 65 acres in Malibu, in which he opened a museum to display art objects he had been collecting. As his collection grew, Getty built a new museum, designed as a reconstruction of a Roman seaside villa that was buried in an eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in AD 79.

A state appellate court has turned down a bid by J. Ronald Getty, 57, for a larger share in his oil-wealthy family's multibillion-dollar trust, agreeing with a lower court judge that he waited too long to do something about it. The eldest living son of the late J. Paul Getty had sued to "equalize" the terms of the trust drawn up in 1934 by his father and grandmother, Sarah C. Getty, which left him only $3,000 a year while three other J.

When Robert E. Hecht Jr. arrived at the loading platform of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in the fall of 1972, he was carrying a large wooden box and was escorted by an armed guard. Inside the box was perhaps the finest Greek vase to survive antiquity, a masterpiece that would soon be making headlines around the world. The Met had agreed to pay a record $1 million for the ancient work. Hecht said it had been in the private collection of a certain Lebanese gentleman.

In August, when James Cuno steps into the office with the magnificent eastward-looking panoramic view of L.A. that James Wood had occupied as president of the J. Paul Getty Trust, he'll also step into pretty much the same pay package, according to Getty spokesman Ron Hartwig. Had he lived, Wood, who was found dead of natural causes last June in his Brentwood home, was due to earn $728,000 a year in base pay for fiscal 2011-12, plus a $240,000 annual housing stipend; additionally, he would have received $500,000 in deferred payments this year that had been agreed to when he started in 2007.

Donor intent is the philanthropic doctrine that says the explicit intentions of a donor should be honored in the expenditure of his bequest. At the Getty Trust, donor intent has been thrown under the bus. The late J. Paul Getty never envisioned what the Getty Trust has become. The Getty Trust's board of trustees announced Monday that James Cuno has been appointed president and chief executive of what is now routinely called the nation's wealthiest art institution. He starts work Aug.1.

Play somewhere else Re "Looking for that common ground," Feb. 21 Everyone has the right to visit our public lands, but no one has the right to abuse them. This includes Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who last weekend traveled to Algodones Dunes to try his hand at driving a dune buggy designed to roar over sand dunes at breakneck speeds. The Algodones Dunes area used to be home to a variety of rare species. It is also considered to be one of the most dangerous off-road areas in the nation, with numerous deaths and injuries that result from out-of-control driving.

In the fall of 1973, a package arrived in a Rome newsroom. Delayed by an Italian postal strike, its contents had begun to spoil. Inside were a lock of red hair and a piece of rotting flesh. It bore a telltale freckle. The flesh was an ear belonging to the grandson of J. Paul Getty. One of the richest men in the world, Getty had publicly refused to negotiate with the men who had kidnapped the younger Getty in Rome three months before. Now the oilman agreed to pay $2.2 million, the most he claimed could be deducted from his taxes as a theft loss.

Robert Mapplethorpe, one of the most influential and controversial photographers of the 20th century, made his name in New York. Now, with a surprising joint acquisition by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, his life's work is heading to Los Angeles. The two museums have together acquired some 2,000 of Mapplethorpe's most famous photographs. Included is the estate's last remaining "XYZ Portfolio," a set of images featuring his highly sculptural flowers and his powerfully sculpted male nudes.

James N. Wood, the new president of the J. Paul Getty Trust, owes his job partly to the indiscretions of his globetrotting predecessor. On Wednesday, in his first speaking engagement in L.A. since arriving to lend his 40 years of museum experience to the image-challenged Getty, he spoke repeatedly about the need to run it with a keen view toward acting locally.

IT was 1973, and eccentric billionaire Jean Paul Getty was planning an ambitious folly for his property in the Palisades: a precise replica of Villa dei Papiri, a grand home destroyed in Herculaneum in AD 79, that would house his collection of Greek and Roman antiquities. He hired the architectural firm of Langdon Wilson to create the villa, and noted landscape architects Emmet Wemple and Denis Kurutz to design the 64 acres around it.

J. Paul Getty III, a scion of the Getty oil dynasty whose tragedies ? mutilation by kidnappers in the early 1970s and an incapacitating, drug-induced stroke in the 1980s ? brought into high relief the dysfunctional relations that beset his famously wealthy family, has died in Buckinghamshire, England. He was 54. Getty, who had homes in the Los Angeles area for some years after his ordeals, died Saturday after a long illness, according to a statement from his actor-son, Balthazar.

The concept of history in the Middle Ages was not what it is today, as visitors to the J. Paul Getty Museum's new exhibition of manuscripts will see. In an eye-popping image from "Romance of Alexander," a book made in the 1290s, an unknown artist illustrated a yarn about Alexander the Great making an underwater expedition. Enthroned in a glass diving bell, below a whale that gobbles up much of the pictorial space, the regal explorer calmly observes a colony of nude people, earthly beasts and fruit trees living at the bottom of the sea. "The artist really had fun with this," says Getty curator Elizabeth Morrison, who organized the exhibition with Anne D. Hedeman, an art history professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana- Champaign.