Free Museum

 Our LA palatial Getty Art Museum is free. I'm talking about the comparatively new structures on top of a small mountain about 25 miles from the Pacific Ocean. Art treasures, paintings mostly, have been moved from Malibu where they were in danger from Ocean air and hung in regal splendor way up on a mountain, safe.

The trouble they went to, whoever 'they' are, is so lush it's almost embarrassing. What looks like white marble covers nearly everything outside, and lots inside too. There is no finer setting for an art museum anywhere else in the world. Lots of light! The Prado? Forget it. The Ufizzi? Not even close. The museums in London are dark and dingy by comparison. The Frick in New York charges an arm and a leg, and is itsy bitzy and they charge so much they must be battling threats of bankruptcy. Robber Baron Frick was a piker, evidentally, compared to Oil Man Getty. The Metropolitan Museum on Fifth Ave in NYC is a drab cottage on fat stilts by comparison with the new Getty in Brentwood.

Getty was so rich that he was able to have public telephones placed in the downstairs of his mansion in England for use by his guests. He was called names for this oddity, including 'Miser.' Such nonsense: he was being considerate. He strove to spare his guests the embarrassment of having their telephone charges appear on his bill showing telephone numbers and length of call. (Of course this was before the advent of cellphones.)

My initial motive for going to art museums came from a girl friend, about whom I was more interested than she was in me, who related that a young man took her to the Met art museum in NYC. He did what!? I was a rube from Australia and had never, ever, been to any kind of museum. So I tried to catch up. I got the art, but not the girl.

I mention this to note the obvious, but almost never mentioned: Art is sexy. Last weekend the majority of visitors were couples. A crippled man with a gorgeous woman. A white woman with a black man. German tourists. (Art promotes tolerance, empathy.) And, more common, young couples who might be taking Art History in college. The patrons were quiet, orderly, gracious, ready for a joke from a stanger. Convivial, aroused somehow. And the place and the company were all free. I like free. Feels like love.

This time I really must post some photos here. Next week. You can't use flash at the Getty anymore, as you could at the Getty in Malibu, but the photos I took outdoors will give some idea of the place and how worth trekking to it really is. Parking takes place in an underground garage, six floors of garage underground, from where you take a silent tram up the mountain side at a slant. Fabulous. The kids loved it! When you first arrive on the top you can hardly believe your eyes.

My favorite on that day was a large landscape, maybe six feet wide, four feet high, by 17th century Dutch painter Hobbema, pupil of Ruisdael. The work must have been restored, cleaned, because it sparkles as if the paint were still wet. And to think it was painted around the time of Shakespeare!  Space goes off in two directions, a rural scene, minimally idealized, happy, so lovingly done one gasps. In art history classes years ago Seymore Slive told the class that it was the custom to place a sheet over a painting, invite guests, then when they were seated take away the sheet. Surprise!

Barry