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Worlds of creativity in a palace for the people - Best of the West - Getty Center in Los Angeles

Sunset, March, 1999 by Matthew Jaffe

Upon arriving at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, you may want to get oriented quickly and begin a direct assault on one of the world's great art collections.

Standing beneath the soaring white modernist rotunda, you'll note that there is no shortage of resources to help you get the Getty: an orientation film, event schedules, walking tours, numerous docents, two separate printed guides designed for people with only an hour to see the center's six buildings and 54 galleries.

But your best approach to the Getty may be simply to wander aimlessly, at least for a while.

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On the day I visit, a steady drizzle falls, and the buildings, clad in off-white enameled aluminum and rough-cut travertine (from the same quarries as Rome's Colosseum), stand out against a brooding slate sky. The rain-slicked walkways shine with a mirror finish. Instead of shadows, visitors walking across the plaza cast faintly tinted reflections, like frescoes sprung to life.

As people have flocked here - for art, for an incomparable perspective on Los Angeles, and sometimes merely to mingle - it has become common to equate the Richard Meier-designed, $1-billion facility with an Italian hill town.

The truth is the Getty feels less like a village than as if the Medicis had opened a castle, with all its riches, for their subjects' enlightenment. The presence of drawbridge-like overhangs above building entrances does nothing to dispel that impression. Nor does the artwork itself.

After watching the film and taking an architectural tour, I finally venture into the galleries. Thanks to the bequest of oil magnate J. Paul Getty, this is one of the world's best-endowed cultural institutions, with numerous superstar works. Many Gettygoers seem to feel they must check off van Gogh's Irises or James Ensor's Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889 on their life lists, just as Louvre visitors head for The Venus de Milo or travelers to the Prado seek out Picasso's Guernica.

As it turns out, I never even see Irises. But I'm hardly disappointed. Instead, I spend the afternoon exploring worlds of creativity I have never visited before.

I lose myself in the gaze of Mary Magdalen as she regards an unseen Jesus in Savoldo's 16th-century Saint Mary Magdalen at the Sepulchre. I peer into the universe contained within Simon Bening's miniature painting Gathering Twigs, an illuminated manuscript. And I struggle to absorb the historic progression from the rococo decorative arts of pre-revolutionary France to the dynamic lines of Soviet futurism.

Emerging from the galleries, I watch the sunset from a terrace. The clouds begin lifting, and the sky over the Pacific turns the red of the leaves falling from the plaza's Japanese maples. The moon, textured and colored like the Getty's travertine, rises slowly in the east as the lights of Los Angeles flicker on, spreading across the plain.

Where: West Los Angeles at Getty Center Dr. exit from 1-405. When: 11-7 Tue-Wed, 11-9 Thu-Fri, 10-6 Sat-Sun. Closed major holidays. Cost: Free. Parking $5, advance reservations required. Or take the MTA 561 bus, the Santa Monica 14 bus, or a taxi. Contact: (310) 440-7300.

Worlds of creativity in a palace for the people - Best of the West - Getty Center in Los Angeles

Sunset, March, 1999 by Matthew Jaffe

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