Interview With John Walsh

MJ: John Walsh, thank you for joining us today.

JW: Thank you.

MJ: Could you tell something about the J. Paul Getty Museum and what you

do here?

JW: Well, here we are, we're in the garden. I think the first thing that

strikes people is that it's a museum built in the form of a Roman villa.

Really, very beautiful building in the style of Roman antiquity, first

century A.D. Inside the beautiful building is quite a remarkable

collection of works of art... some of them from antiquity, most of them

from Europe in later eras, right up through the Impressionists until about

1900, and what I do is run the place.

 

MJ: "Run the place," sounds really simple but you have a lot of different

duties here, what's a typical day like?

JW: Well, a day is....consists of quite a lot of meetings and some trips

to the gallery if I'm lucky. Meetings are a little bit like how I conduct

the orchestra because my role is a little bit like a conductor. I don't

play an instrument myself, although I used to. What I do is beat time,

give people the big idea, encourage them, and keep things moving along.

That's my role. It's not all. These days we're also building a new

museum. So, I'm very much involved with that in addition to this one.

 

MJ: Tell us about the new museum. Is everything going to move from here

to the new location?

JW: Not everything. What is staying behind are the Greek and Roman

antiquities which makes sense. This is a perfect setting for them. Around

them this building will be redeveloped to serve as a center for

antiquities, not just for exhibition, but also for studies, scholarships

that is, and for conservation. What's going, will be all the works of art

from the middle ages until about 1900. The European collection that

includes paintings, drawings, illuminated manuscripts, sculpture,

furniture, decorative arts, and photographs. All of those are going to the

new museum which is being built, oh, ten minutes drive from here.

 

MJ: How many visitors do you see here in a typical year?

JW: We see about 400,000. Quite a lot. The place is full most days.

 

MJ: And do you see, .... is there a proportion mainly from overseas or

U.S. or how does that work?

JW: We have a lot of foreign visitors, but right now I'd say probably the

local contingent, meaning California is half or so and the rest are

Americans and foreign visitors.

 

MJ: What do you, as director, what do you want the people who come here to

take home with them. What do you want them to take out of this experience?

JW: In the first place we want them to have an intensely pleasant

experience, and luckily, we have that. The weather is like this whether

it's January or June. The gardens are beautiful. One gets a little bit

seduced in slowing down and looking and thinking and having a kind of

intense experience, even before you get into the gallery. When you get

into the galleries, works of art are put forward in a kind of low key way

at a very high level of quality. We hope the people connect, learn

something. People are impressed with the beauty of what they see, but also

choose to conform themselves a little. We try to be helpful with visitors,

to teach them what they may want to know about the works of art that

they're looking at. We want them to go back home and think about it, have

happy memories, and come back again as soon as they can.

 

MJ: What do you think the role of a museum is, in American society today?

What should it be?

JW: Well, I think it's to sharpen one's visual abilities. One's ability

to discriminate, one's ability to take pleasure in things you see and also

to use the works of art of the past as a kind of mirror, or a window. It's

both. It could be a mirror of yourself. It could be a window out into the

world beyond, worlds you never see personally, historical eras that are

finished, places you'll never go, both figuratively and literally,

imaginatively, you know, and literally. So it's a kind of place for

opening up and also communicating with yourself.

 

MJ: Growing up did you feel yourself influenced by museums? Did you go to

museums?

JW: No. No, I wasn't taken there, I mean maybe I'm making up for it now.

As a boy I....my parents were interested in many things, but not art and so

it wasn't until college that I started taking art seriously. I went to

Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, here a college that, fortunately, has an

art gallery right next door..in fact right next door to where I was living.

So I couldn't miss it. And gradually it became clear to me that I enjoyed

it more than literature, more than law, more than finance, the other things

I might have done and had a certain aptitude for it and so I did it

professionally.

 

MJ: Tell us something of your background.

JW: Well, I grew up here in the States in the East Coast, in New York. I

had an education at Yale and then at Columbia University I have a doctoral

degree in the history of art which in this country is a very well-developed

discipline-afield in itself. My specialty is Dutch painting of the 17th

century, but I told you already I'm an orchestra conductor so I don't play

an instrument. I do a little work in the field. I am a specialist, but

mainly, I've become a more general kind of person. Mainly my trade now is

museums....specifically public museums for the benefit of a broad sector of

visitors. That's what I do.

 

MJ: You were involved with some museums in the East Coast before you came

here? Tell us about that.

JW: Yeah, I, before this I worked with the Frick collection in New York.

A small private museum, somewhat like this, but a very great collection. I

worked with the Metropolitan Museum. Our largest museum. I worked as a

curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, an enormous collection, not

incidentally the greatest collection of Japanese art outside Japan.

Luckily, there, I had a chance to make a connection between the United

States and Japan. I did exhibitions for Japanese Museums of the museums

material at Boston very much loved by Japanese including Monet, and Millet

and other French masters...in any case, I also taught in university. I

have a kind of interest in university teaching and scholarship and so I

was the professor of the history of art at Columbia University, and then

part-time at Harvard.

 

MJ: Is there a difference between museums on the East Coast and the West

Coast?

JW: Well, in a funny way, not much. West Coast museums are obviously much

younger and they don't have anything like the kind of size and

comprehensiveness, but the pattern is somewhat similar. In the East, there

is a series of very important large general museums including Boston, New

York and Philadelphia and so forth. Here we have only really two fairly

large general art museums. One here in Los Angeles, the County Museum, the

other in San Francisco, the San Francisco Museum. Much smaller. In the

West Coast I think there's more diversification, more smaller, specialized

museums. Here in Los Angeles, for example, in order to visit all the

museums here, one has to spend quite a lot of time going around the city.

You go, for example, to look at British art at the Huntington Art Gallery.

You go to look at European paintings at the Norton Simon Museum. Both of

those are in Pasadena about forty-five minutes drive away from here. Still

within the greater city. To look at Asian art, you go to the Los Angeles

County Museum, but you also go to the Pacific Asia Museum. If you want

American Indian Art you go to the Southwest Museum, or the Los Angeles

County Museum and so forth. It's like, an archipelago, it's like, islands.

And not yet connected by any bridges or anything, but with a car you can

travel between them. Our contribution is a relatively small museum,

sharply focused on the best of European art between the late middle ages

and the 20th century. That's what we do. We don't do everything. We just

do, in that area of European art, a few specialties that we think we can do

very well by building deep and really important collections.

 

MJ: What effect does the weather have on design. This is a very airy

feeling here, because of the weather. Is that a difference between the

East and West Coast?

JW: Yeah, yeah, our buildings are designed to take advantage of the fact

that it's easy to walk out of doors at all seasons. The new museum, a

short distance from here, is built on these same principles that we want

visitors, whenever they feel the urge, to leave the galleries and go out

and sit and listen to a fountain or breathe deep or look at the landscape,

meditate in the gardens, have a cup of coffee, have something to eat and

then go back. They do that here, and they're going to do that in the new

museum. It's a kind of total experience involving bodily relaxation,

refreshment in several senses of the word and a kind of stimulation as

well.

 

MJ: Can you talk about some of your favorite pieces in the museum?

JW: Sure. Well, downstairs in the antiquities galleries, we have, surely

the most important Greek statue in this country. I go back every few days

to make sure it's still there, although it's too large to move. It's a

cult figure, it's a temple figure, over life-sized of the goddess

Aphrodite, pictured, or I shouldn't say pictured but sculpted with her

drapery plastered against her as though there were some kind of divine wind

blowing against her....

 

MJ: Can you tell us about some of your favorite pieces in the museum?

JW: Sure, let me describe a couple. Near my office in a gallery devoted

to Greek sculptures, is a huge extraordinary statue, surely the finest

Greek statue in this country. It represents the goddess Aphrodite. It must

have been the central cult object, the goddess, in a temple to Aphrodite

somewhere in the Greek colonies. Not very long after the most famous of

all the Greek architectural and sculptural work the Parthenon the work at

the Acropolis in Athens. This was made, though in the colonies. It shows

the goddess standing there as though offering a sacrifice, but with some

kind of strange divine wind blowing her drapery against her body and it's a

big sort of sensuous body. It is a fabulously preserved, almost complete

object of the kind that doesn't exist anywhere else, not only in America,

but anywhere in the world. I mean, we are amazingly lucky to be able, once

in a while, to take a chance to buy such a thing. Actually, at the Getty

because of the size of our endowment, it's possible to do this sort of

thing fairly often. And the excitement of being here has to do with adding

really wonderful things that the public can see everyday. We, upstairs...

early in my time at the Getty, bought a Dutch painting which is

particularly close to me, in fact it's a book...it's a painting I'm writing

a little book about at the moment, by the painter Jan Steen, which is...

shows the interior of the artist's studio with a master giving

instructions, teaching... to pupils how to draw and the studio is full of

all the apparatuses of an artists studio, beautifully detailed and lighted

with a kind of soft light from the window that makes it all, absolutely

real and yet, the picture is an allegory, it's a kind of celebration of art

and the teaching of art that I find very wonderful. Just down the hall a

fairly recent acquisition, is a picture by Monet. We've been buying

Dutch, buying not only Dutch pictures and Italian pictures, but also

French Impressionist and post-Impressionist pictures. This is one of the

celebrated pictures of wheat stacks grain stacks out in the middle of a

plowed field in winter covered with snow and reflecting the light in such

an amazing way. You know that the snow is white. It must have been white

and yet nowhere in the picture is there a real white. It's all blue and

pink and all reflected colors. Dazzling and rich and lovingly painted. So

little by little we add masterpieces.

 

MJ: Are there any future acquisitions that you have your eye on, that you

would like to see come here?

JW: Yes, but I'm not going to tell you what they are. You have to come

back here.

 

MJ: Can you talk a bit about the J. Paul Getty Trust. I know that's a

larger organization... and what that involves?

JW: Yes. It's a bit of history. Paul Getty started this museum in 1954,

it was just forty years ago, behind the present museum, this building was

built in 1974, very recent history we're talking about. Two years later, he

died and left all his money to the Getty Museum. Five years later the

trustees decided that they could do more for the world than run a museum

only. The Museum was going to very important to the future, but that there

were some other things that could be done by the Getty Trust outside the

Museum. Using that money in a way to benefit everyone everywhere, so we've

made very large investments in scholarship, the scholarly study of not only

the history of art but fields related to the history of art. We have a

whole center for research in the history of art and humanities. We have a

library and a staff and a very important group of visiting scholars who

come each year. We created a Getty Conservation Institute, which works

throughout the world to develop better materials and techniques for caring

for works of art and architecture, research, the communication of

information about conservation, raising of consciousness about the

importance of conserving what matters to us in our history and so forth.

It has it's own staff of directors, its own headquarters. We're interested

in education of children in schools, teaching them about art, not just

about literature, not just about numbers but about works of art and about

the functions that art can have in their lives and has had in our history.

That's a very impressive program now functioning throughout the United

States. It's called the Getty Center for the Education in the Arts. I

haven't named everything. There are a number of other operations of the

Getty Trust besides the museum and not under the museum. We're all

colleagues. At the moment we're all separated physically because we had to

put the other operations in their own quarters, but what happens in the new

place is that next door to the new museum on the new site these

organizations have their headquarters. We all get to see each other

regularly. We get to talk about projects, do things more closely in

cooperation with each other, which is going to bring good things, I think

for the future.

 

MJ: Can you tell us something about Mr. Getty himself, how he came to

acquire all this and what his goals were?

JW: Well he was an oil man whose family had an oil company and... which

he himself built into a really big international corporation, the Getty Oil

Company, which not only controlled production, the exploration of

production of oil from the ground, but also it's conversion into petroleum

product and its sale through its own outlets, gas stations all over, so

that it was an integrated oil company of great importance. He lived here

in Los Angeles. He bought this property outside Los Angeles up the coast a

little ways to be another house to live in and moved his art collections

here so that he could be open to the public. It was very small. His first

museum, between 1954 and 1974 was really tiny. The collections were highly

specialized, it was just antiquities, just French furniture and decorative

art, some paintings, nothing very important, but promising. The big

surprise came two years later in 1976 when he died. Then he, it turns out,

had had some kind of vision for the museum, he left it 700 million dollars

and suddenly what was a pretty small provincial, charming museum in the

outskirts of Los Angeles, became the richest art institution in the world,

and had a chance that no museum ever had before to become something very

very important. It was late. I mean, our problem is that most really

great works of art are already in museums. The number of major works

still in private hands is small and prices are very high, obviously, so we

have to be patient and build gradually , gradually, gradually, but it's

happening.

 

MJ: And you only purchase from private collections?

JW: Yeah, museums sell occasionally but not usually anything very

important so the source is private collectors.

 

MJ How close is this to what his vision was? Did he lay out a vision before

he passed away?

JW This museum is pretty exactly his vision. No one else would have had

such an idea. A committee wouldn't have come up with the idea of building

a museum in the form of a Roman villa. This was one man's idea. He loved

the idea that museums could evoke associations with cultures of the past.

He hated contemporary architecture. He didn't...he said "I don't want a

concrete and glass bunker. " He said "I want a museum that speaks to

people." And so at the time in 1974 when this was opened to the public this

looked pretty eccentric. One didn't build imitation villas as a serious

museum. Now of course architecture has changed, now architects, even avant

garde architects are intensely interested in the historical past and so

this building is now taken with a sense of understanding rather than

looking ridiculous. Getty himself did not I'm sure, envision both how much

money he would be leaving and what power it would

have.......................... and the power of that money has allowed the

Getty Trust to do some things that I'm sure Paul Getty himself would not

have thought to do. They're all though understandable though within the

larger scope of what museums can do. He left his money to a museum. It is a

trust that has no strings attached except that we view our operations in

order for the wider diffusion of knowledge. So that covers what the Getty

Trust is doing now and the scope of what the Getty does is broader than

Paul Getty envisioned but we think it's very much in the spirit of what he

might have had in mind.

 

MJ: When did you join?

JW: I came in 1983. Just when the income began to be usable.

 

MJ: What influence do you think you had on this museum? What were your

goals when you came, what do you think you've achieved?

JW: Well, first of all, we had to build up the staff. We had to get the

best people. I put them in the jobs that were going to be critical for the

future. There's been a huge growth and replacement of people. That was

the first thing I had to do. It's a wonderful staff. I've never seen a

better one. We had to begin....we had to define what we were going to do

and what we weren't going to do, what we were going to collect and what we

weren't going to collect. We decided to be relatively narrow and deep

rather than broad and superficial. We had to set standards for ourselves

as high as possible. We had to establish ourselves internationally, had to

be understood better because we were nothing but a threat when I came. We

looked like we had far more money than common sense or good manners. That

was the fear. So gradually, gradually we had to become better known. We had

to be part of the Getty Trust as it grew which means having a hand in the

growth and progress of the other Getty organizations as a partner and a

friend.

 

MJ: In the years since you've been here how do you think you've left your

imprint on the museum? What were your goals?

JW: Well, my main goal was first to build a staff that could do the work,

rise to this huge opportunity, so we had to change the staff, we had to

bring better kinds of people, we had to bring more people, we had to

define what we were going to do and not do, in other words sharpen the

focus of the collection. We had to be a partner of the other Getty

organizations as they grew up from infancy. We had to be better known

throughout the world so we weren't merely seen as a threat with money but

no manners and no restraints. We had to be a part of the process of finding

an architect, finding a program for the new museum, and then seeing that

whole process through from the very beginning to almost the end where we

are now. We had to decide what this museum was going to become in the

future after part of the collection was gone to the new place. So, work on

the villa in its future incarnation as a center for antiquities, and set a

good example for the field in education for example, the generosity and

ingenuity of our services to the public follow that, I mean, it's a very

wide scope. It's a long menu of things we had to do.

 

MJ: How do you think other museums and other people involved in your work

look at this museum, and look at your work?

JW: Well, I think they look at us with intense interest. They imagine what

they would be able to do with that kind of money. I'm sure many of them

think they could do a better job, and perhaps some of them could.

They're... Everybody's interested in what you can do when you have

relatively few constraints and so we have the potential for setting an

example that other people can imitate. We use ourselves as a bit of

laboratory for museum ideas and technologies. That sometimes helps other

museums. We try to be good partners and I think we're known to be helpful

to other museums. We bring works of art from other museums here for

example for conservation treatments. We have fellowships and study grants

for guest scholars who come here for a period of time in order to get away

their jobs back at their museums in order to get something written for two

or three months or thereabouts. We have a lot of other relationships with

other museums. I think we're seen as good citizens. And I think

everybody is intensely curious to see what happens in a brand new museum

that you've built from the ground up.

 

MJ: You are so very close to the ocean. We can see the ocean from here.

Is there any thought of danger to the work being so close?

JW: I don't think so. I think the ocean is going to stay where it is.

The tides go up and down, but we're a good 60 or 70 feet above, or 20

meters above the level of the ocean. And I don't think we're getting any

closer to it. Once in a while things shake, but we think the rate of

progress towards the ocean is very very small. I'm only joking. I mean,

this is quite a safe place in earthquakes. We've engineered this place so

it is safer than most buildings in the world in case of an earthquake. And

I'm pretty confident not only about this building, but the new one we're

building.

MJ: John tell us about some of your goals you have for the museum in the

future.

JW: Well, the future for us consists of the next two years in the first

instance. We have an enormous job, and it's the most exciting thing I can

imagine.We're going to be getting ready, and then moving to the new museum

and operating it. And beginning the work here at the villa, to make it

function. The new museum will have three times the number of visitors that

we have here. So, it's a much bigger operation, a large jump in scale.

It's a big opportunity too. We have terrific educational opportunities for

visitors that we don't have here because we are rather restricted by the

size of the place. We're building a place that will be a joy to visit,

and much more visible than we've ever been before. This is a delightful

place we're in, but it's a narrow canyon in a residential neighborhood in

Malibu where, frankly, most

people in Los Angeles don't visit very often. Up there we're on a

hilltop. We can be seen by millions of people every day. We'll be a

constant reminder to people that we're there, and I hope people will feel

welcome. What I want , in other words, the big goal here, is that all the

people of Los Angeles feel welcome. All the people of this huge region. And

that we'll continue to attract visitors from the rest of the United States,

and foreign visitors. We've had great success, you know, particularly, on

the edge of the Pacific Rim, as we are, looking out across, right across

the ocean to Japan. We've been especially lucky in having many Japanese

visitors, and we hope they'll continue to come. We'll welcome them, we'll

give them a brochure in Japanese. And be sure that they have a wonderful

time.

 

MJ: Thanks for joining us today.

JW: Thank you for having me.