Getty Seems to Be Missing Bigger Picture

Eighteen months ago, who would have thought that a Las Vegas casino would be buying major art appropriate for (and much needed by) the new Getty Center’s museum collection? Talk about an inconceivable idea.

Well, last week the inconceivable happened. Flamboyant Vegas entrepreneur Steve Wynn bought Georges Seurat’s “Landscape, Island of the Grande Jatte” (1884) for the Gallery of Fine Art at Bellagio, his newest desert gambling palace. A painting ideal for the Getty, the Seurat had been in the celebrated private collection of Mr. and Mrs. John Hay Whitney for more than 43 years (he died in 1982; she died last year).

Bidding was active on the Seurat at Sotheby’s May 10 auction in New York, but not unusually so. The rare picture had been estimated at $25 million to $35 million; Wynn paid $35.2 million.

The prospect that the landscape might come to Los Angeles had been making mouths water. If the Getty acquired it, the Seurat would have provided an eye-opening counterpoint to perhaps the most important work in the museum’s otherwise modest painting collection: James Ensor’s big, roiling, hallucinatory 1888 vision, “The Entry of Christ Into Brussels in 1889.”

Painted, in good visionary manner, a year before the title’s date, the Ensor is the fountainhead for all of 20th century Expressionist art, a textbook picture miraculously snagged by the Getty in a breathtaking coup a dozen years ago. By means of a jangling mosaic of thickly painted colors, a carnival of leering, sometimes masked figures becomes a torrent of humanity flooding the streets of Brussels. The raucous mob nearly obliterates the small, strangely detached figure of Christ, shown numbly riding an ass in the distance.

Ensor’s is a deeply personal image--paranoid, pessimistic, passionate. It couldn’t be more different from Seurat’s prim, coolly controlled, now widely renowned “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte” (1886), for which the recently auctioned landscape is one of two major studies. (The other, which focuses on the placement of strolling figures in their Sunday best, is in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.) Seurat carefully orchestrated line, color, value and shape into a composition of almost abstract stillness.

Here’s the kicker: Seurat’s ethereal masterpiece had been shown with great fanfare in Brussels in 1887, and Ensor’s canvas was the Belgian artist’s white-hot retort. Ensor painted his raucous picture partly because he had been so disgusted by the passive bourgeois propriety that characterizes Seurat’s severely ordered painting, which shows self-satisfied Parisians out for a holiday stroll. There’s also a question about whether Ensor’s unusual use of blunt, mosaic-like patches of paint was meant as a sneering rebuttal to the precise, almost scientifically calibrated dots of color pioneered by Seurat’s divisionist style.

Seurat’s finished masterpiece has, of course, long been a prized possession of the Art Institute of Chicago, whose galleries it never leaves. The smaller landscape, which lays out a grassy, unpopulated field crisscrossed by shadows and dappled sunlight and punctuated with trees, isn’t the same; but, it’s more than just a study. Here, an urban French park recalls the legendary Greek pleasure-isle of Cythera, where Aphrodite emerged full-grown from the sea, and where bourgeois love can apparently luxuriate among the tiny particles of pure color from which the picture was laboriously built.

Imagine the soul-stirring thrill of seeing the remarkable landscape hanging in the same room as the great Ensor. One is an icon of intensely intellectualized Modern art, the other of primal Expressionist urges. Taken together they stake out highly charged poles of modern life. That’s the kind of unmatchable art experience I long for in a museum, and it’s the kind I’ve long thought only the Getty still had the resources to pull off.

Apparently not. Seurat’s “Landscape, Island of the Grande Jatte” hangs today in Wynn’s Las Vegas casino.

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Why didn’t the Getty buy the Seurat? A spokesman says the museum seriously considered a bid, but finally determined that the landscape wasn’t a good enough example of the artist’s work--especially given the expected price. My guess, though, is that price played a big part in the decision. This may be the richest museum around, operated by a trust with an endowment in the vicinity of $5 billion. But the Getty Trust has expenses.

Operations-wise, the new Getty Center on its Brentwood promontory is a voracious money-pit. Ongoing renovations of the Getty’s original villa at the edge of Malibu, converting it into a center for the study of antiquities, is another expensive proposition (it’s slated to open in 2001).

The trust also administers a variety of diverse programs in research, conservation and such around the world--although recently it’s been cutting back. And, despite the newness of the Getty Center, there’s already a space crunch: The trust has quietly leased additional office space in Santa Monica, while talks have been held about possibly building another parking garage on-site to accommodate the crowds.

So, a lot of expensive things are going on. What’s startling--and disappointing--is that buying great art is plainly not the Getty’s highest priority right now, after which other obligations might come. Those other obligations mightily intrude.

In the year before the Getty Center opened, the museum’s regular acquisitions budget was slashed almost in half, from $46 million to $25 million. It remains at the lower figure today.

Since opening in Brentwood in December 1997, the Getty has made few acquisitions. Here’s the unimpressive tally: two paintings, four sculptures, three plaques, a Byzantine manuscript, nine drawings and one album (with 20 drawings), a porcelain box, four wall lights, and 123 photographs, plus various stereographs, cabinet cards and cartes-de-visite (photographic calling cards). The museum has also accepted several dozen gifts.

According to the Getty, unexpected opportunities to acquire unusually important works of art aren’t charged against the regular budget, as we saw in December when Claude Monet’s historically significant little oil “Sunrise” (1873) was bought privately, for an undisclosed sum. Apparently, the Seurat didn’t fit that bill.

That’s odd, though, because none of the recent acquisitions (including the Monet) has been as significant as the missed Seurat. Overall, the Getty collection is strong in decorative arts, medieval manuscript illumination and photographs, and the drawing collection is growing; but the holdings in painting remain erratic. There’s a long way to go before they reach a level commensurate to the palatial container constructed for them. Prior to its opening in Brentwood the Getty had been working toward that goal with diligence and skill. Now, the museum seems to have stalled.

L.A.’s loss is Las Vegas’ gain. But there’s one important difference.

Reading the New York press would lead you to believe that Wynn’s Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art is, like the Getty, an art museum. Both Time magazine and the Nation have incorrectly characterized it as such, while the New York Times story on the Seurat purchase actually called it a museum. But it isn’t.

Despite a $12 admission fee (which gets donated to charity), it’s actually a commercial gallery like any other on the secondary market. Everything in the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art is for sale--a shiny brass plaque on the wall even announces the fact--and many of the works that were in the gallery on opening day (by Brancusi, Giacometti, Kline, Johns, etc.) have indeed been sold since. Presumably, the Seurat is also available. It’s one of two Bellagio pictures that would do the Getty--or any other major art museum restricted to painting before 1900--proud. (The other is Degas’ pristine 1877 gouache and pastel, “Dancer Taking a Bow,” formerly in a Rothschild collection.) So, conceivably, the Getty could still buy it. I just wonder what the markup would be.