A project this vast and this visible prompts some grousing, too. Locals wonder if the Getty will be an accessible cultural Acropolis or a fortress of elitism. (Actually, the museum will be free, but, this being L.A., you’ll have to pay to park and you’ll have to reserve a spot in advance.) People shake their heads over the astonishing sums of money lavished on the project. When the eccentric tycoon J. Paul Getty died in 1976, he left a block of Getty Oil stock, now worth more than $4 billion, to his small museum in Malibu. Under U.S. tax law, the Getty Trust has to disperse $170 million a year, three years out of four, to maintain its nonprofit status. So in the early 1980s, the trustees began to dream up the idea for the center. They decided the Getty’s collection of antiquities would remain at Malibu, but a new museum, with an expanding collection of European painting, sculpture, decorative arts and photography, would be built. They planned an institute for scholars in the visual arts and humanities, along with a grant program and other institutes for education, conservation and digital information. They bought a 742-acre mountaintop site and began the hunt for an architect.
Richard Meier had just turned 50 in 1984 when he beat out a roster of 32 international architects to win what’s been called the commission of a lifetime. He recalls in ““Building the Getty,’’ a project diary to be published next month, that when he heard he’d won the huge job, he ““felt a fleeting moment of triumph’’ and had a glass of wine to celebrate. The moment didn’t last long, because Meier soon discovered how many people would influence the design–among them, the trustees, of course, the museum’s curators and the center’s worried neighbors in Brentwood.
But now that the Getty is finished, his sense of triumph ought to return. What Meier has managed to create is more than an assemblage of elegant modernist buildings and pretty gardens; he’s conjured up a powerful sense of place, an oasis of civility in the midst of L.A.’s anonymous sprawl. Starting with the tram–a Disneyland ride that whooshes you up to High Culture land in five minutes–the Getty is an experience that both connects you to the surrounding city and provides a refuge from it.
Meier is standing on a sweeping terrace off the Getty Museum, the centerpiece of the U-shaped complex. There are few places in L.A. from which you can see such a spectacular panorama, from the San Gabriel Mountains to the east, to the high-rises of downtown L.A., to the Pacific sparkling off to the south. “Seeing Los Angeles is a big part of the Getty,” says the architect, and he’s made sure the visitor will glimpse vistas all over the complex, from the central plaza to the many terraces and outdoor stairways, the huge glass windows, the walkways and gardens. Meier is a classic modernist, known for gleaming white buildings based on a grid. At the Getty, his forms are enlivened with curves, recesses and overhangs, as well as courtyards and slivers of green.
For the museum, he used stone, a rough-cut travertine, as well as his trademark enameled panels on the exteriors, not in his usual white (deemed too bright in the L.A. sun) but in a soft beige. The effect of these materials outside and in is richer than anything Meier has done before.
Inside, the stunning galleries are a bit old-fashioned. They are beautifully proportioned (some have 25-foot ceilings) and many are skylit, bathing the art in indirect natural light. The Rembrandts, for example, which look so dark in most museums, look golden here. John Walsh, the museum’s director, insisted on these classic galleries, which are interrupted here and there by access to a terrace or a corridor of glass with a lovely view. Walsh and his curators have added to the eclectic collection of masterpieces, buying up top examples of Pontormo, van Gogh, CEzanne. The museum brought in Thierry Despont, who designed the interiors of Bill Gates’s new house in Seattle, to consult on the galleries. Meier, the diehard minimalist, struggles to be diplomatic about some of them, like one for tapestries that Despont did in a bordello-red damask wall covering.
For the last dozen years, the New York-based Meier has spent two weeks of every month in L.A., living in a small ranch house on the site. The Getty will soon bulldoze that place; the office that Meier set up in L.A. has shrunk from 100 employees to 30. He’s caught in a classic irony–the moment a project is inaugurated, the architect is elbowed out–but it’s especially bittersweet after so many years. As he showed a visitor around on a late-summer day, he nodded hellos to construction foremen and fretted over what was no longer in his control: the signs on walls, the stuff piled on the pale maple desks his firm designed for the offices. In the library of the circular Research Institute, the perfectionist in Meier longed to reshelve books according to size. But these are small things. Some larger issues still gnaw, especially the height restrictions that limited his vision of creating a modernist Italian hilltown. And he won’t even talk about the extravagant maze and water garden that the conceptual artist Robert Irwin is putting next to his museum.
But mostly, the California dream has been glorious. ““It’s a terrific place for an architect,’’ he says. ““The relationship of the building to the land and the ways you can use the outside as part of the inside.’’ Meier loves Frank Lloyd Wright–and in the Getty Museum, where, for example, the stone walls continue from outside to inside, you see Wright’s legacy. But you also see Meier’s connection to Richard Neutra’s modernism in California. And then there’s the dazzling light. Meier’s buildings can look chilly, but here the golden light washes over his spaces and casts deep shadows upon his pristine walls. In the Getty, Meier has really made his place in the sun.
title: “A Place In The Sun” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-29” author: “Stanley Larowe”
France’s quiet and quite confident new assertiveness can be seen on several fronts just now. At the United Nations, Washington gripes about French resistance to its bulldozer resolution authorizing an attack on Iraq. But the Americans have known all along that the French were best able to finesse a diplomatic compromise with recalcitrant Russia and China on the Security Council–even if the result may, in the end, be closer to France’s vision than the United States'.
But it’s in the economic field, especially, that France really seems to be making its own rules–and stirring up Europe’s political beehive. Since President Jacques Chirac and his prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, took office five months ago, they have followed a simple principle: France first. Do other countries want to cut down subsidies to French farmers and impose quotas on French fishermen? Forget it. (The matter was settled with Germany recently, overwhelmingly on French terms.) And when Raffarin (finally) made his first trip to Brussels last month, he might as well have said, “Read my lips.” Lower the Eurotaxes imposed on food and drink served in French cafes, he demanded. Thanks to such national “egotism,” moaned Le Monde in an editorial, France “is becoming the black sheep of Europe.”
If so, Finance Minister Francis Mer doesn’t seem to mind. Meeting in Luxembourg last week with 11 of his peers on the committee overseeing Europe’s single currency, he rebuffed pressures to cut France’s budget by 0.5 percent next year to comply with the European Union’s increasingly shaky “stability pact.” The no-nonsense industrialist showed his steelmakers’ grit: raise taxes and slash spending, just when economic hard times would seem to argue for doing precisely the opposite? Jamais. “There are other priorities in France,” he said, chief among them boosting growth–regardless of what others might think. In a stroke, France has changed the way Europe works, breaking from the culture of compromise and consensus that’s governed the eastern Atlantic community for decades.
What’s going on here? At a time when Frenchmen of every intellectual stripe are bashing the United States for “unilateralism,” could a variant of the old Gaullist arrogance be showing itself? Not quite. For all the tough talk, France isn’t making a strategic doctrine out of narrow self-interest. It’s not about to pull out of the euro, let alone Europe. But there’s no denying the flutter of anxiety (and, in some quarters, hope) that Paris’s recent actions have sent through the Union–especially considering the context. Just last week, after all, the European Commission formally opened the door to 10 new members by the end of 2004. If this “big bang” is to work, the EU must dramatically change everything, from the way it makes decisions to how it spends its money.
French leadership will be key. Chirac has always wanted to climb into the driver’s seat. But when it came to the great European Project (ever-closer union) France always worked in tandem with Germany. Now that partnership has frayed. The political bonhomie shared by the likes of Francois Mitterrand and Helmut Schmidt is gone. So is France’s post-unification fear of Germany, which underlies the partnership. Germany’s size and economic strength intimidated France into a geopolitical collaboration that accomplished much–not least the European Union–but at bottom reflected a deep sense of the country’s own weakness, according to the French political scientist Emmanuel Todd. No longer. Today, Germany is the “sick man” of Europe, drawn inward by its own social and economic problems and no longer able to finance many of the programs that bolstered its leadership in the past. Even German population growth is so weak, says Todd, “that very soon Germany will be the same size as France.” This return to equality, felt in Berlin as well as in Paris, opens the way for France to exert more leadership than it has in decades.
You need only examine the events of the past week to appreciate the scope of this remarkable turnaround. Chirac knows that all he needs is the support of Germany to speak for “Europe,” or at least continental Europe. Thus, on Iraq, France has taken advantage of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder’s firm opposition to war to broker a compromise in the Security Council–to the commingled chagrin and gratitude of the Bush administration. The French line: let’s get inspectors into Iraq with one resolution, and pass another if they run into opposition. That deprives the Americans of the hair trigger they seek to launch a war, but it avoids a Russian veto and probably gets China, as well, onboard. Until recently an afterthought in Washington, France has emerged as a pivotal player.
Chirac seems determined to exercise no less a role back in Europe. Just a few months ago, during the presidential election campaign, all the talk was of the French “malaise.” But now, just as Germany sinks deeper into decline, France is taking determined steps to streamline and rejuvenate its economy. It’s not just Mer’s embrace of go-it-alone Keynesianism to prime the economy. The government has also made several recent moves that signal its pro-growth, pro-business intentions, from incentives for small-business formation (now lagging even Italy and Spain) to delivering on Chirac’s electoral promises to cut taxes, create jobs and even boost military spending. Almost alone on the Continent, the Chirac-Raffarin government recognizes that in order to undertake the more serious structural reforms that will ensure the Union’s long-term future, the country must first enjoy a climate of growth and consumer optimism. Otherwise it risks the massive social fallout that brought down the last Gaullist government under Alain Juppe five years ago. There’s a clear realization that outdated Euro-economics won’t suffice. And a willingness, if other members don’t see the light, to ignore them.
All this may surprise those who thought Europe was “consensualized” to the point of paralysis–or who idealized it as a “postmodern paradise,” free of any real exercise of competitive national power, as the American analyst Robert Kagan would have it. In fact, Europe is not a place where the lion and the lamb, the Germans and the French, lie down together in perfect harmony. “Europeans do not become, say, Danes just because they are engaged in the European project,” says Tony Judt, director of the Remarque Institute at New York University. In the new Europe, as in the old, power is likely to be brokered “viciously and frequently,” he says, even if the battles are fought in Luxembourg conference rooms and not in Flanders’ fields. What the French now know is that they are back in the game.
