The Getty Villa: A Study in Beauty and Wonder

The Villa’s very beautiful indeed, but it’s also an intellectually rigorous place with art of high quality.

G reetings from Los Angeles. I haven’t been here for years. I’ve been visiting museums and, yes, went to the beach in Malibu. The COVID Trots rule supreme here, tracking and tracing like crazed, masked maenads. After the tightest lockdowns in the country, lasting more than a year, things are inching toward yet another as Los Angeles County has returned the indoor mask mandate. “There you go again,” Ronald Reagan would say with a smile and nod.

California’s harsh COVID regime accomplished nothing good, insofar as fighting the Chinese coronavirus. Its numbers are worse than most states using a lighter touch rather than channeling their inner Nurse Ratchet. Who said “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”? Einstein, I know, didn’t, though he is said to have thought so. I’ll lay claim to this gold nugget, then. Still, it’s nice to be here.

I’ll write more than a few stories since I’m seeing so much art, but I want to begin with the Getty, specifically, the Getty Villa, the museum dedicated to antiquities and once the site of Getty’s house. I spent most of Monday there, and it’s idyllic. Set on a hill in Pacific Palisades with a view of the ocean and based on the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum, it’s a soothing but bizarre dream come true. It’s perfect, right down to the sweet ocean breeze, and frosty Vermonters like me look at perfection, much less perfection in ideal weather, with skepticism. Yes, at times I felt like I was on a movie set. I suspended all disbelief, though. The Villa’s very beautiful indeed, but it’s also an intellectually rigorous place with art of high quality.

I got to the Villa at 10 a.m., when it opened, and on a perfect day, but I had it mostly to myself. It is indeed a faithful reproduction of a villa destroyed by the explosion of Vesuvius in 79 a.d. There’s much to be said about Getty (1892–1976) — gnomic and priapic, an odd pair of traits; rapacious; perversely parsimonious; and, overall, repulsive, for starters — but his legacy is what matters today. He wasn’t the world’s greatest aesthete or collector, but his eye was good and focused during his lifetime, with best results, on antiquities and French furniture. He once lived on the land where he built the Villa to house his collection, which also included paintings.

The Villa was dissed by critics when it opened to the public in 1974. Their charge was that it was yet another example of Hollywood kitsch and, moreover, as a copy, showed no originality. “Basta,” as Piso, the Villa dei Papiri’s owner would have said, with a hearty harrumph. Hoity-toity critics from New York were bound to hate it because it’s in Los Angeles, it’s derivative, and it’s colorful — oh, and the proles like it, and it’s a comfortable place for seeing art. Clapping-seal critics in California hated it because, well, they want to be New York critics.

Getty gave us the Villa, a purpose-built museum with spacious galleries in which antiquities from 3000 b.c. to 400 a.d. look great. The art’s arranged chronologically. Greek art’s on the first floor, Roman the second. The last time I visited, about ten years ago, the art was arranged by topics such as “gods and goddesses” in a story-telling way targeting the lowest common denominator and in keeping with the Villa’s proximity to Hollywood.

Now, it’s got a linear, art-historical treatment. Galleries profile styles and eras and give enough historical context to make an attentive novice feel that he or she has gotten a good primer on ancient Greek and Roman art. The art has room to invite contemplation. I read all the labels and found them informative and useful.

The Villa’s star attraction is the Statue of a Victorious Youth, or the “Getty Bronze,” a bit less than life-size, dating to 300–100 b.c. and considered in the style of Lysippos, Alexander the Great’s court sculptor. As a work of art, on its own, it’s a striking thing, and I’m not swooning over its exceptional rarity or its story. It’s one of the most graceful sculptures I’ve seen: Its balanced proportions, confident gesture toward his head to signal what would have been a victor’s wreath, and the warmth of its bronze color suggest that all it needs is the kiss of a Pygmalion to bring it to life.

We don’t know where it was displayed. We do know that Greek bronzes are most unusual, a vast number of them having been made but then melted for scrap. It’s expertly cast and offers a dynamism and subtlety achieved in only the best marble sculptures. While Pliny wrote that in Rhodes alone there were 3,000 bronze sculptures, today there are only 30. Over the past hundred years, the Riace Bronzes and the Poseidon of Cape Artemision were found underwater, having survived shipwrecks. The Getty’s bronze was found by Italian fishermen off the coast of Fano in Italy in 1964, and the Getty bought it in 1977. By coincidence, my Italian family lives in Fano, having been there deep in the mists of time.

The Italian government first claimed in 1989 that the bronze was found in Italian waters and thus belonged to the Italian state. The Getty believed it was found in international waters, which makes the acquisition legal, even though it was netted by Italians working on an Italian ship. Italian courts initially agreed, but recently, they have changed their tune. The government blocked the Torlonia Marbles exhibition from going to the Getty. No Italian public museum will lend objects to the Getty. When the Italians and the Met fought over the Euphronios Krater, which was indeed taken from Italy illegally, the government said that if Philippe de Montebello, the Met’s director, ever came to Italy, he would be arrested. This was among the reasons the Met sent the thing back.

I don’t think the Italians have a leg to stand on, or, thinking of the Getty Bronze and prizing anatomical precision, a pair of feet. This is the classic “he said, she said, they said, and every invented pronoun said” moment. We don’t know, and can’t determine after nearly 60 years, whether the fishing boat was in Italian or international waters. Everyone’s dead, the ship’s been scuppered, and there was no GPS in 1964. The bronze was found accidentally and not in any planned dig or dunk. A committee of the Italian senate made news last week by reasserting its claim to the Getty Bronze in the context of new legislation mandating better training for magistrates in local heritage and archaeology. Since it was a local magistrate who resurrected Italy’s claim years after the Italian courts dismissed it, we can infer from this new legislation that this magistrate might have been among the poorly trained, no?

The magistrates, well trained or not, have a conflict of interest. The Italians have been calling the Getty Bronze the “Atleta di Fano” since the dispute with the museum to underscore its ownership claim. Legally, if the Italians ever manage to win, the bronze will go to the tiny museum in Fano, where it would be its star tourist attraction.

After seeing the Torlonia Collection in Rome a couple of months ago, I can’t say that the art at the Villa is beyond the scope of human emotion, but the Getty, for all its fame and $7 billion endowment, is a boutique museum. The Villa and the museum part of the Getty Center in Brentwood in Los Angeles aren’t big. The Getty’s drawings and photography collections are both deep, broad, and endlessly rich. Its collection of paintings is small but strong, as is its French furniture before 1793. The antiquities collection is the best west of the Mississippi, and the ambiance for looking is, in my opinion, the best in the country.

All of that said, the Lansdowne Herakles from around 125 a.d. is one of the best things Getty himself bought. It was excavated at Hadrian’s Villa in 1794 and was inspired by a Greek original produced by the circle of Polykleitos who, with Phidias, were pioneers in the Classical Greek figure style in the mid 400s b.c. Polykleitos developed a mathematical system defining ideal human proportions. Lysippos, an acolyte, tweaked that system for the Hellenistic age. The Getty sculpture is mostly intact.

A Panathenaic amphora from around 480 b.c. would have been the equivalent of an Olympic gold medal today, in this case awarded for four-horse chariot racing, the equivalent of today’s Olympic triathlon. My favorite pot was decorated by the Berlin Painter, the most austere of the Classical pot giants. One side depicts a single hoplite, or Greek infantryman, lunging forward, with a shield and pushed-back helmet. On the other side, another combatant, presumably his opponent, flees. He’s got a beard, a patterned costume, and a soft cap, all fetching as a look, but together suggesting he’s not Greek.

An Etruscan water vase attributed to the Eagle Painter from around 510 b.c. is in the impressive Etruscan gallery. It shows Herakles and Iolaos, his nephew, wrestling with Hydra. A riled crab nips at Herakles’s heel but to no effect. Herakles isn’t a model for Superman for nothing. Etruscan style is loose, even jaunty, with figures, whether human or floral, moving fluidly. Stylized palmettes, stars, and hearts give it a look that’s both Eastern and folksy. The Etruscans, like America’s Natives, lived in Italy for centuries before the Romans conquered them.

The Villa has a small gallery dedicated to encaustic wax portraits placed at the head of mummified bodies in Roman Egypt from, say, 50 b.c. to 125 a.d. The Getty owns Isidora, so splendid and famous that it inspired the name of the Isidora Painter, the Bronzino of portraiture from this epoch. Isidora clearly was rich. Her portrait features passages of gilding and is a full spread, including her jeweled neck and hairstyle, which dates to the time of Trajan, about 100 a.d. Her lips are colored by four different shades of red wax to get what must have been her favorite color. Her earrings, a large pearl from which dangles a gold bar, itself supporting gold vertical strands terminated in small pearls, are high end indeed.

There are small galleries for Roman glass, for Neolithic clay figurines, and for Cycladic stone figures. The Cycladic figures, from around 3000 b.c., look very modern because they inspired Picasso, Arp, Brancusi, Hepworth, and many others. These two galleries are mostly small items, but they’ve got space to make themselves known.

The Villa and the Getty Center are indoor/outdoor places, but the Villa much more so. The outdoors, flora and fauna, bubbling fountains, and reflecting pools are never more than a few steps away. This is part of the appeal, sensually, but everything about the Getty is meant to suggest the best of the Greek and Roman ambiance, intellectual and aesthetic.

Timothy Potts, the director of the Getty museum division, is an art historian and archaeologist specializing in Near Eastern art, and his exhibition on the art of Mesopotamia is on view now. I enjoyed it and will write about it once I’ve read the catalogue. An art historian whose expertise is, say, Spanish or German art might look at antiquities with befuddlement. So much marble, with so many missing arms, legs, and noses, and so many shards.

In Potts, the Villa has an understanding, experienced advocate. His background is as unusual as mine. I spent years in the grubby world of Connecticut politics. In the early 1990s, Potts worked for Lehman Brothers. We both saw the light, though Potts was an archaeologist before he went to Lehman.

The Getty is the richest museum in the world, possibly in human history. Getty himself grew rich in his early 20s through Oklahoma oil. Over the years, his oil stakes multiplied. California was a big oil producer, drawing Getty westward, but he was most prescient in knowing the oil potential of Saudi Arabia. He made the right deals in the late 1940s, so when oil was discovered there in 1953, he entered the billionaire’s club. When he died, he was possibly the richest man in the world.

Getty left almost all of his estate to a trust charged with establishing a museum. That the Getty Trust was so favored was a shock, given the enormous amount of money involved and the competition, which included Getty’s sons, a cadre of lady friends, and basically everyone he’d ever met. His fascination with ancient Rome was intense and lifelong, so his antiquity collecting and his choice of the Herculaneum style for the Villa aren’t surprising.

Getty supervised the Villa’s design and construction from London, where he moved in the 1960s, and Sutton Place, an English country house he’d bought from the Duke of Sutherland in 1959. He never saw the completed Villa. The building housed a chunk of his paintings, mostly Old Masters, French furniture, and Greek and Roman art from 1974 to 1997, when the Getty Center in Brentwood opened.

After Getty’s death, the Trust’s immense wealth financed a massive though overall deliberate expansion of the collection and the development of an entirely new campus on top of a hill overlooking Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and the Pacific. Its endowment, according to its 2020 federal tax return, is about $11 billion, and this is after drawing about $250 million a year to finance the Trust’s programs, which include not only the art component but also a research center, a library, and a grant program. The Center in Brentwood is said to have cost about $750 million, but I’ve heard that the tab was over a billion.

It’s true that the Getty can, theoretically, buy any work of art it wants except those for which it’s competing against an oil sheik, but the Getty’s been careful and circumspect and, anyway, the sheiks and the Getty tend to covet different things. In the realm of antiquities, many of the truly great things in the Getty collection, such as the Getty Bronze, the Etruscan pot, and Isidora, came after Getty’s death.

The Villa site was expanded in the mid 2000s. A new garage replaced a small, inadequate parking lot. There’s an outdoor theater that mimics old Roman theaters, a restaurant, and a shop. It’s lots of concrete, but nice. Hey, the Romans invented concrete. Over the years, cascades of flowers have covered what first seemed like a Brutalist intervention. In 2018, the Villa itself was renovated. Since it was closed from March 2020 to May 2021 because of the COVID mass hysteria and power-drunk public-health Brownshirts, it still looks new and fresh.

The Villa and its antiquities, so evocatively arranged, take those of us with imagination back to times when disaster and brutality were life’s staples. As California’s masters edge toward yet another reckless, pointless lockdown, a visit to the Villa would deliver a tonic of perspective were the minds and souls of decision-makers less lustful after power.

In the coming weeks, I’ll write three or four more stories about the Getty. The current kerfuffle over the Getty Bronze isn’t its only restitution flap. On Tuesday, I spent most of the day at the Getty Center and had a great time. I don’t think people know about how much the Getty does for culture in Los Angeles County and how much especially for disadvantaged or art-starved young people in Southern California. It does an enormous amount. I think the Getty’s hard to beat as a good citizen.