Name: The Getty
Address: 1200 Getty Center Dr, Los Angeles, CA 90049
Telephone: (310) 440-7300
Rating: 4.8

Famous, sizable free museum highlighting American & European art, architecture & manicured gardens.

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The Getty Center offers free admission to all visitors, making it a great option for budget-conscious art enthusiasts.

Admission

The Getty Center sits on a sprawling 110-acre campus overlooking the Pacific Ocean, offering breathtaking views and a serene atmosphere.

Acres of Beauty

It took 14 years to complete the Getty Center, a testament to the scale and complexity of its design.

Years of Construction

The Getty Center sits 900 feet above Interstate 405, providing a unique perspective on the surrounding landscape.

Feet Above the Freeway

The travertine limestone used for the Getty Center's exterior was mined from the same quarry as the Roman Colosseum, adding a historical touch to the modern architecture.

Shared Quarry

Visitors can often find fossils embedded in the travertine tiles, adding an element of surprise and discovery to their experience.

Hidden Treasures

The Getty Library boasts a vast collection of over 1,400,000 volumes, including auction catalogues, rare books, and periodicals.

Library Collection

The Getty Research Institute's digitized books have been downloaded millions of times, making its resources accessible to a global audience.

Digital Downloads

The Getty

The Getty in Los Angeles is not merely a museum; it's an architectural marvel perched atop the Santa Monica Mountains, offering panoramic city views that are as captivating as the art within. Its travertine stone cladding, sourced from Italy, gives the complex a distinctive sun-drenched appearance, a deliberate choice by architect Richard Meier to harmonize with the Southern California landscape. Beyond the celebrated Impressionist paintings and antiquities, the Getty's lesser-known drawings collection holds a treasure trove of preparatory sketches and studies, offering intimate glimpses into the creative processes of master artists. The Central Garden, designed by Robert Irwin, is a living artwork, constantly evolving with the seasons and featuring a unique water feature that subtly changes its flow and sound. Interestingly, the Getty's vast endowment allows it to actively acquire significant artworks, ensuring its collections remain dynamic and relevant for future generations. The conservation institute, a vital but often unseen part of the Getty, pioneers innovative techniques for preserving cultural heritage worldwide, from ancient mosaics to modern sculptures.

Introduction

The Getty Center, an architectural marvel designed by Richard Meier, sits atop a hill in Los Angeles, offering panoramic views. Meier overlaid two grids along naturally-occurring ridges that diverge at a 22.5-degree angle, defining the campus space and dividing the buildings' import. One axis aligns with the galleries, the other with administrative buildings. This design emphasizes competing grids, creating strong view lines throughout the campus.

The main north–south axis extends from the helipad, through a walkway between the auditorium and north buildings, past the elevator kiosk to the tram station, through the rotunda, past the exhibitions pavilion, and finally to the ramp beside the west pavilion and the central garden. The east–west visual axis starts at the edge of the Getty Research Institute's scholar’s wing, continues through the walkway between the central garden and the GRI, the overlook to the azalea pool, the walkway between the central garden and the west pavilion, and ends at the north wall of the west pavilion and the courtyard between the south and east pavilions.

The museum building includes a three-level base, closed to the public, and five public, two-story towers: the North, East, South, West, and Exhibitions Pavilions. Computer-controlled skylights on the second-floor galleries allow paintings to be displayed in natural light. The campus also incorporates earthquake and fire safety provisions. The Central Garden, designed by Robert Irwin, complements the architecture with its design as "a sculpture in the form of a garden".

Architectural Masterpiece

The Getty in Los Angeles is a leading institution in art conservation and research, offering a range of resources and initiatives in these fields. The Getty Conservation Institute addresses challenges in conserving cultural heritage through research, field projects, and training. Its work includes projects such as assessing transportation environments and a thematic approach to identifying and assessing twentieth-century heritage. The institute also publishes resources like "Gilding Notes: The Traditional English Method" and "Conserving Concrete Heritage: An Annotated Bibliography."

The Getty Library supports researchers with extensive collections and short-term travel grants. It houses one of the world’s most comprehensive libraries and archives for research in art history and visual culture.

The Getty Research Institute fosters new scholarship through institutional research projects and supports scholars in residence. It offers search tools and databases for visual art and cultural heritage research. Noteworthy projects include the Remodeling the Getty Provenance Index, transforming research on the social life of art, and The Scores Project, providing a comprehensive view of a groundbreaking moment in art history. The institute also examines the use of exotic materials in art, such as gunpowder in the works of Cai Guo-Qiang. AATA Online provides access to over 148,000 abstracts of literature related to the preservation and conservation of material cultural heritage.

Art Conservation and Research

The Central Garden at the Getty Center, a 134,000-square-foot creation by artist Robert Irwin, is designed as a sculpture in the form of a garden. Conceptualized in 1992 and completed in 1997, the garden emphasizes the interplay of light, color, and reflection, offering an ever-changing experience with each visit. Water is a central element, with a fountain flowing into a grotto and a stream cascading down the hillside into an azalea pool. Rocks and boulders of varying sizes are placed in the stream bed to modulate the sounds of the flowing water.

More than 500 varieties of plant material contribute to the garden's dynamic nature, ensuring that it is "always changing, never twice the same." A walkway crisscrosses the stream, leading to a plaza where bougainvillea climbs through umbrella-like trellises. The azalea maze in the pool is surrounded by specialty gardens, constantly updated with new plants.

Originally conceived as a reinterpretation of a classic Italian Renaissance villa and garden, the design incorporates both native and non-invasive plants suited to Los Angeles' Mediterranean climate. The garden design responds to the site’s climate and light, integrating interior and exterior spaces. Stone pines line the entrance drive, and a bosque of London plane trees showcases pollarding, a pruning technique. A cactus and succulent garden demonstrates plant selection based on environmental constraints. A statement by Robert Irwin, “Always changing, never twice the same,” is inscribed on a stepping stone, encapsulating the garden's evolving nature.

Central Garden's Design

The Getty's enduring legacy in Los Angeles is reflected in its commitment to preserving and celebrating human creativity, offering a haven of beauty and contemplation. Community members express gratitude for the Getty's role in providing peace, mindfulness, and a connection to art, with many considering it a "jewel" of the city. The institution's dedication to making its resources accessible, even to those 5,000 miles away through its website, underscores its global impact.

The Getty's influence extends to education, with teachers noting the focused engagement art fosters in students. Its architecture is admired, and events like the outdoor Greek and Roman plays at the Getty Villa are eagerly anticipated, becoming a cherished tradition for many. The institution's values of generosity, inclusiveness, and truth resonate deeply, especially during times of uncertainty, reinforcing its role as a cultural beacon.

Visitors express appreciation for the Getty's efforts to unite people through art, fostering understanding across different cultures. The museum's commitment to dialogue, scholarship, and debate is also recognized as vital to its mission. The Getty's enduring legacy is further solidified by its active engagement with the community, embracing diversity and expansion, ensuring its continued relevance and impact for generations to come.

Getty's Enduring Legacy

The J. Paul Getty Museum, with its two locations, the Getty Center in Los Angeles and the Getty Villa in Malibu, showcases a diverse collection spanning various epochs and cultures. At the Getty Center, visitors can explore European paintings, drawings, sculpture, illuminated manuscripts, decorative arts, and photography, dating from the its beginnings to the present. The collection is gathered internationally. The Getty Villa focuses on the arts and cultures of ancient Greece, Rome, and Etruria, housing approximately 44,000 works of art from the Museum's extensive collection of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan antiquities, with over 1,200 on view.

The museum's curatorial teams actively shape these collections, produce exhibitions, and perform critical research into the history of art made across millennia. The Getty's commitment to collecting extends to global photography from its invention to now, and European art from the Middle Ages to the early 1900s. This broad scope ensures a rich and varied experience for visitors, fostering curiosity and understanding of visual arts across different media and time periods. The museum also makes scholarly resources available, tracing the ownership history of works in its collection.

The Getty

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Admission

Acres of Beauty

Years of Construction

Feet Above the Freeway

Highlights from Reviews

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