J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center

"The meek shall inherit the earth, but not its mineral rites."---J. Paul Getty

Charles Ray's sculpture of a boy proudly holding up a prize frog greets visitors to the Getty, and it is with the same pride that J. Paul Getty posthumously greets visitors to appreciate his amazing art collection accumulated over a remarkable lifetime.

Getty made a fortune in the oil industry, a feat many would dismiss as merely luck. After all, he was born December 15, 1892, into a wealthy family already established in that industry.

Upon graduating from college with degrees in Economics and Political Science in 1914, and having spent summers working for his father's oil company, Paul moved to Tulsa where he made his first million in two years. In 1917, he retired at age 25 to become a Los Angeles playboy, but two years later he returned to Oklahoma, where he made another $3 million during the Roaring '20s, a time he apparently enjoyed quite a bit.

By the time his father died in 1930, he had dismissed Paul as a wastrel unfit to oversee the family business, leaving him only 5% of a ten million dollar estate. Admittedly, a half million bucks in 1930 was a lot of coin, but by 1959 when J. Paul Getty moved to a Sutton Place, a 16th Century Estate in England, to live the rest of his life, he was one of the richest people who had ever lived.

He had taken advantage of the rampant pessimism of others to make shrewd investments in the 1930s and learned to speak Arabic to better negotiate oil contracts with Saudi shiekhs en route to his fortune.

While flying home when I was in the Air Force, I purchased his biography at an airport news stand a year or two after his 1976 death. Reading it, I became amused by many aspects of his life, especially his legendary thriftiness that belied his great wealth.

Because he felt like people were always taking advantage of him, he installed a pay phone at Sutton Place for his guests to use. For many years before that, he lived in posh hotels which he argued were less expensive than living in a staffed mansion. As you may recall, Mark Twain had a similar epiphany after he went bankrupt.

Infamy attached itself to his penny-pinching when he refused to pay the full ransom demanded by the kidnappers of his grandson, but in essence it serves as an example of the peril that comes with being outrageously wealthy.

Throughout his fascinating life journey that included five marriages and negotiating oil rights for 60 years on a seemingly unremarkable slice of desert in Saudi Arabia near Kuwait, Getty accumulated art, usually with the same parsimoniousness with which he approached the rest of his life.

I wonder how he would feel about the museum's purchase of Vincent Van Gogh's "Irises" in 1990. The painting, completed about three years before J. Paul Getty was born, sold in 1987 for $53.9 million to Alan Bond, who didn't have the money to close the deal. This led to the Getty buying it in 1990 for an undisclosed amount. I imagine Paul would have only wanted it at a discount. In any case, it is now valued at over $90 million, and it is the most expensive art on exhibit at the gallery.

Vincent Van Gogh undoubtedly would have been more shocked than Getty by the value of the painting he made in an insane asylum. During his lifetime, Vincent sold only one painting, and that being to his brother Theo, who we might surmise only bought it to give his crazy brother some sense of hope. A year after Vincent painted this impressionist picture of a patch of irises he found in the sanitarium garden, he killed himself.

Our guide did an excellent job explaining the museum highlights, including "Irises," in which she pointed out the purple outline of the leaves, which would never be found in nature. Art historians dispute the meaning of the vibrant painting, but I agree with those who say Van Gogh is represented, whether consciously or unconsciously, by the white iris that is the focal point due to the way the other irises lean toward it, almost as if they want to attack it. With the perspective of his popularity after death, perhaps the irises leaning could be considered a posture of interest rather than hostility.

We travel halfway around the world to appreciate remarkable palaces and exquisite art, but too often we ignore what can be easily found in our own back yard. The Getty Villa, which Julie and I visited earlier this year, and the Getty Center, are both beautiful palaces housing outstanding collections, a fitting monument to American royalty of the past century.

Like the Acropolis in Anthens, the Getty Center is perched with a commanding view of the surrounding area, including the city skylines, the beautiful coastline and even the artery pumping blood to the heart of Los Angeles, the 405 freeway. Getty bought the hillside in one direction to ensure no one would build on it. The person who sold the land for the museum to Getty kept a piece of land across the freeway, and his terraced vineyard brings another aspect of California within view.

Fourteen years after completion, the design by architect Richard Meier still feels modern or slightly futuristic, but more importantly, the design remains immentently functional as well as beautiful.

Upon arriving by tram at the museum from the nearby parking structure, we joined a free architecture tour, which briefly highlights different aspects of the structure, including how Meir used a combination of 30 inch squares and their multiples or submulitples to clad the structure in two materials designed to bring together ancient and modern, beige travertine and white aluminum. To placate neighbors whose mansions find the Getty in their direct sightline, Meir was forced to compromise his vision by painting some external aluminum beige. Because from the free the 30 inch squares would seem small, he made them 60 inch squares in that direction.

The architect included louvred panels in the gallery ceilings to allow natural light to filter through in order to see the paintings in the same light the artists saw them. The panels swivel to block direct sunlight from destroying the art. This type of thoughtful touch is included throughout the museum design.

Four galleries at the Getty Center house different periods between the Rennaissance and 1900, with primarily paintings on the second floor and three diminsional objets d'art on the bottom floor. More ancient art is housed at the Getty Villa in Malibu, and Getty disliked modern painting, so there is no permanent collection housed here or at the Villa, although on the outside modern sculpture enhances the architecture.

The fifth gallery breaks the rule against contemporary paintings with a temporary exhibit entitled Pacific Standard Time, featuring art from Los Angeles created between 1950 and 1970. There are some interesting pieces, including a huge canvas of stripes that start out dark on the bottom and become bright yellow on top which definitely caught my attention, but I'd say J. Paul Getty had good reason to disdain much of this "art" that honestly looks like poor attempts to re-create kindergarten paintings on large canvasses.

Then again art critics of an early Renoir impressionist painting now displayed at the Getty complained that the subject's dress looked like it was smeared with oil rather than conveying the impression of a beautful gown he intended.

For whatever reason, the temporary exhibit is the only section of the museum where photography is prohibited.

J. Paul Getty's generous endowment makes visiting the Getty accessible to everyone, with free admission, free highlight tours and, at least for the extent of the Pacific Standard Time run, free iPod audio guides. We really enjoyed both the architecture and art highlight tours, but we decided to bug out of the garden tour.

Parking is $15 per car, but you can forego even that modest cost by taking a city bus. We normally spend two or three hours at a museum, but the Getty enticed us to while away our day from 10 AM until 5 PM. The museum grounds include many lovely spots for meals and coffee breaks. We enjoyed a great Saturday.