An ocean and a continent away, high above one of Los Angeles’s most expensive neighborhoods, Richard Meier’s severely curvilinear Getty Museum embeds itself in the hillside like a giant coffeemaker become cultural fortress. Specifically, a megadose of old-master art in a city best known for tinsel, Disney and fads. The new Guggenheim and the glorified Getty are the latest, and among the grandest, examples of the hope that art, globally served and magnificently packaged, can rejuvenate not only tourism but the human spirit.
Thomas Krens, the tall, jet-setting director of all the Guggenheim museums (including those in New York, Venice and Berlin), says of the new museum in Bilbao, ““Yes, it’s a risk, but I’ve never thought of it as a crazy risk.’’ Economically, he’s on pretty firm ground: the Basque government–in the midst of renovating its capital with a new airport and subway–paid for the building ($100 million), for loans of the greater Guggenheim’s art and expertise ($20 million) and for art bought specifically for the Gehry building ($50 million). Bilbao also wanted an architectural centerpiece. It got one, in spades. Constructed with an infinity of unique, computer-shaped pieces of glass and steel, Gehry’s organic edifice likely represents the dawn of 21st-century architecture.
Politically, there are still a few tensions. A local policeman was shot and killed a few days before the grand opening Oct. 18, when he approached separatist terrorists trying to plant bombs in the Koons puppy. But it’s not the rare violent event that will affect the fortunes of the museum. Despite an enthusiastic reception from the locals and the international press, the museum’s projection of 400,000 visitors a year seems optimistic, given the city’s location. But that is now the Basques’ problem. ““We’ve done our part,’’ said a cheerfully fatigued Krens on the eve of the opening.
The Getty in Los Angeles has no government sponsorship and absolutely no money worries. The late oil magnate J. Paul Getty left $700 million worth of his company’s stock to the eccentric little museum of antiquities, European paintings and furniture he’d begun in 1953. The museum morphed into a replicated Roman villa in the 1970s, and then into a more complex trust in 1983 (adding on institutes for research, conservation and art education). It also parlayed its bequest into an endowment that now stands at a whopping $4.5 billion. (So the Getty won’t require admission fees from the 1.3 million annual visitors it expects starting Dec. 16.) With the grandiose new home for an art collection that has grown from a quaint kernel into a beautiful behemoth, the Getty has transformed the high-culture side of Los Angeles into a singular force. It would be nice if ordinary citizens learned to like the Getty as much as visiting connoisseurs probably will.
Getty Museum director John Walsh–another tall guy whose flashes of David Letterman belie his Columbia education in art history–has had the jackpot job of all museum directors: being able to spend $100 million a year to buy art for the collection. He and his curators shopped mostly conventionally, through reputable dealers and at auction, but they kept a low profile as much as possible. ““We’ve tried not to make too big a deal out of purchases,’’ he says. ““What we have up here is very good, and we just hope that word of mouth gets out.''
It should. The Getty is chock-full of masterworks, from Andrea Mantegna’s 1495 ““Adoration of the Magi’’ (bought at auction at Christie’s for about $14 million in 1985), to Rembrandt’s first landscape, ““The Abduction of Europa’’ (1632), to the big, primitively expressionist painting of ““Christ’s Entry Into Brussels in 1889’’ (1888) by the Belgian artist James Ensor. It also has four dizzyingly sumptuous French period rooms, painstakingly re-created by New York designer Thierry Despont. In fact, the heady experience of looking at great old art in a classically modern building, overlooking a city that lives on the new, may leave viewers eager for a break. They can then step outside for a cappuccino and one of the glorious views that sweep from the Pacific to the downtown skyscrapers.
In Bilbao–where contemporary art resides in a futuristic building in the heart of a very old city–the esthetics are more problematic. Gehry’s building–a clear attempt to go Frank Lloyd Wright’s New York Guggenheim one better–is the star. His very sculptural museum often overwhelms the art in it, especially in the great hangarlike, 433-foot-long gallery that deputy director Lisa Dennison describes as ““bigger than some small towns in Colorado.’’ But it’s not Gehry’s fault. There’s something hollow about much art since the ’60s that echoes the bombastic showoffiness of the late-19th-century French academic painters, who were ultimately done in by the quiet revolution of impressionism. James Rosenquist’s empty 1997 takeoff on his 1965 hyper-billboard painting ““F-111’’ is a good example. Conceptualist Lawrence Weiner’s simplistically ironic REDUCED (painted directly on the wall in silver capital letters about 20 feet high) is another. A lot of contemporary art appears to be part of the entertainment industry, intended for the same short concentration spans as action movies. (The Guggenheim’s excellent early modern Matisses, Kandinskys and MirOs have been banished upstairs, like grannies to their bedrooms when a party starts.)
Still, the Guggenheim Bilbao offers some hope of what the art of the next century can achieve if it reaches as high and far as this building. The Getty Center–with its conservation laboratories pre-serving the past and its museum showing the best of it–stands against the pervasive dumbing down of our culture. Sometimes alien invasions are just what the world needs.
