How One Oil Tycoon Turned an Art Obsession into a Museum

 

 

Sixty years ago, America's richest museum was a gleam in the eye of an art-obessed oil tycoon.
 

John Paul Getty was an odd man. Not as eccentric, perhaps, as fellow billionaire oil baron and contemporary Howard Hughes… but almost. Notoriously miserly (he famously installed a pay phone in his Sutton Place estate outside London and charged his son interest on a loan to pay the kidnappers of his namesake grandson), the five-times-married founder of Getty Oil was, unlike Hughes, militantly anti-philanthropic. But he did love one thing more than money: art.

 

It all started immodestly enough 60 years ago, in 1954, when J.P. built a gallery alongside his 64-acre ranch in Pacific Palisades to house his growing collection of art and antiquities. Quickly outgrowing the space, he commissioned a meticulously accurate re-creation of Italy’s Villa dei Papiri, which had been destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius almost two millennia previously. Finally, 40 years ago, in 1974, the first Getty museum opened.

 

When Anglomaniac Getty died at 83 in 1976, never having visited the museum, he left a whopping $661 million (approximately $2.7 billion today) to the J. Paul Getty Trust (which operates the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, and the Getty Conservation Institute), making it the world’s wealthiest art “conglomerate,” and the original crown jewel in LA’s burgeoning art kingdom.

 

Today, the Getty Villa sits amid the hills overlooking the Pacific as a world apart. A fitting testament to its founder—austere yet sublime, a monument to beauty and excess—the original Getty, gleaming after its nine-year, $275 million renovation, holds its own with its more garish, celebrated sister museum crowning a hillock above the 405 in Brentwood.

 

Oilman Getty once remarked, “The meek shall inherit the earth… but not the mineral rights.” Intoxicated by a manic passion for art, however, California’s miserly Medici manqué bequeathed the hoi polloi a museum glittering with the finest jewels of the ancient world. With free admission, even the meek are welcome.