The world's richest museum started life as a copy of a Roman villa
In 1974 Jean Paul Getty opened his museum inside a replica of Herculaneum's Villa of the Papyri, built on his Malibu estate. Eight years later it inherited US$1.2 billion and became the wealthiest museum on Earth, a buying power that later dragged it into a long fight over looted antiquities.
The Getty now runs on two campuses. The Getty Center sits on a cliff in Brentwood, Los Angeles, looking across the Sepulveda Pass, and holds European painting, drawing, sculpture, decorative arts and illuminated manuscripts from before the 20th century, plus photography from its earliest days to now. The older Getty Villa, perched above the Pacific in Pacific Palisades, keeps the art of ancient Greece, Rome and Etruria. Both belong to the J. Paul Getty Trust, often called the richest art institution anywhere.
Money let the collection grow fast. When an economic slump hit West Germany in 1983, the museum bought 144 illuminated medieval manuscripts from the cash-strapped Ludwig Collection in Aachen. By 1996 the New York Times critic John Russell ranked the holdings among the finest of their type ever gathered. The museum moved to Brentwood in 1997, and the Malibu building, renamed the Getty Villa, reopened after renovation in 2006.
The antiquities department carried a darker story. Through the 1970s and 1980s curator Jiří Frel ran a tax scheme that brought in objects of doubtful origin and several widely judged fakes, the Getty kouros among them; he was demoted in 1984 and quit in 1986. Marion True, whom Frel had hired, was indicted in Italy in 2005 alongside dealer Robert E. Hecht on charges linked to trafficking stolen artefacts, with key evidence traced to a 1995 raid on a Geneva warehouse. She left that year, and Italy let the charges lapse in October 2010. True insisted she was carrying the blame for practices the board had known about and approved. A funerary wreath roughly 2,500 years old and a kore statue from the 6th century BC have since gone back to Greece and are shown in Thessaloniki.
A lighter chapter came during the COVID-19 shutdown. The Getty Museum Challenge asked people to restage famous artworks with household objects and drew thousands of entries, while analysts also praised the museum for slipping its paintings into the video game Animal Crossing.
Source: J. Paul Getty Museum
