Chasing Aphrodite (3 page)

Now alone, surrounded by servants and sycophants, Getty found his life incomplete. He had no heir to take over, and it was clear that Getty Oil was unlikely to live much beyond him. Only his art offered him the promise of life after death. "The beauty one can find in art is one of the pitifully few real and lasting products of human endeavor," he once said.

Getty had begun collecting art in the wake of the Great Depression, when loss weakened the strong hands holding many of the world's finest collections. His approach to art was not so different from his approach to business. Getty was a bargain hunter, more interested in discovering the undervalued or overlooked than paying full price for an established masterpiece. He was hungry for that piece of art that, like a neglected plot of land purchased for pennies an acre, would gush fountains of wealth once its true value was recognized. On his annual travels across Europe in the late 1930s, Getty found that the threat of war and the persecution of Jews had opened up even noted collections, such as that of the Rothschild banking family. He went on a buying spree, picking up several bargains, including Rembrandt's
Portrait of Marten Looten,
which Getty picked up at an auction for $65,000—less, he noted in his journal, than its owner had paid for it a decade before.

His early tastes were eclectic and inconsistent, fostered by his travels as a young man across Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. He bought whatever caught his fancy, giving no particular thought to forming a coherent collection or even to consistent quality. Over time, he came to focus on eighteenth-century French furniture and tapestries; Persian and Savonnerie carpets; Renaissance paintings; and Greek and Roman antiquities.

As his collecting increasingly conflicted with his parsimony, Getty regarded his art habit as a curse, even an addiction. He tried several times to quit, but after
Fortune
magazine dubbed him the world's richest man in 1957, the offers streamed in, and he couldn't help himself. "The habitual narcotics user is said to have a monkey on his back," he wrote in his autobiography. "I sometimes feel as if I had several dozen gorillas riding on mine."

Art satisfied Getty's considerable intellectual appetite. He was fascinated by the science of art, by the mechanics of making it, and by the history it represented. Art was also a vehicle for Getty's intense fantasy life. It was a side he rarely revealed to those around him but that came out occasionally in his writings. "To me my works of art are all vividly alive. They're the embodiment of whoever created them—a mirror of their creator's hopes, dreams and frustrations," he wrote in
Collector's Choice.
"They have led eventful lives—pampered by the aristocracy and pillaged by revolution, courted with ardour and cold-bloodedly abandoned. They have been honored by drawing rooms and humbled by attics. So many worlds in their lifespan, yet all were transitory. What stories they could tell, what sights they must have seen! Their worlds have long since disintegrated, yet they live on."

Ancient Greek and Roman art, in particular, appealed to Getty because of its ability to transport him back in time. He was a student of ancient history and conversant in Greek and Latin. He often visited archaeological sites on his travels and could name the Roman emperors in order. In a novella set in ancient Rome, Getty unabashedly compared his oil company to the Roman Empire and himself to Caesar. He quietly believed himself to be the reincarnation of the second-century
A.D.
Roman emperor Hadrian—a patron of the arts, a traveler, and a prolific builder. One of Getty's proudest acquisitions was the Lansdowne Herakles, a statue of the mythic Greek hero that had been salvaged in 1790 from the ruins of Hadrian's villa and remained in the family of the Marquis of Lansdowne in England for decades.

Ashmole knew that Getty could be tempted to pay for a truly exceptional piece such as the bronze. Arriving at Sutton Place, he handed his coat to the butler, Bullimore, and showed himself upstairs to Getty's study. There the Oxford scholar handed Getty photos of the remarkable statue that had been fished from the sea.

As Getty stared at the images, his hands shook with early signs of Parkinson's disease. It is a true masterpiece, Ashmole said, and would most certainly be the centerpiece of Getty's art collection. It would likely be the most important piece of ancient art in the United States.

Getty needed little prodding. To him, the statue held the promise of legacy.

***

J
UST AS GETTY
was learning about the bronze athlete, word of the statue reached a potential rival: the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Dietrich von Bothmer, the Met's venerable antiquities curator, heard about the lucky catch from his sources in the European antiquities market and passed the news on to the museum's director, Thomas Hoving.

A tall, handsome man with laser-beam eyes and a commanding voice, Hoving was part scholar, part showman. His background was in Renaissance paintings, but his forte was the grand gesture. Months before hearing about the bronze, however, Hoving's craving for publicity had backfired badly.

In a media blitz, Hoving and von Bothmer had revealed the acquisition of a fourth-century
B.C.
Greek vase adorned by Euphronios, the master Greek painter. The vase was a large krater, a wide-mouthed vessel in which wine was mixed with water before being served at ancient symposia. The remarkable painting on this krater elevated it to high art: a scene from the
Iliad
depicting the death of Sarpedon, Zeus's son. It was an arresting example of Euphronios's intricate brushwork, down to the individual feathers on the wings of the figures depicting Death and Sleep, who were carrying Sarpedon into the underworld. Only a handful of complete works by Euphronios survived, and none as majestic as the krater. The purchase of such an exquisite antiquity was a coup in itself. The price was $i million, some eight times the previous record for an antiquity.

More problematic than the price, however, was the krater's provenance, or ownership history. The Met was vague about the vessel's origins, saying only that the museum had purchased it from a Lebanese dealer who had kept it, in shards, in a shoebox since World War II. Soon after the krater was revealed, however, the
New York Times
began running front-page stories suggesting that Itali an grave robbers had recently looted the krater from Cerveteri, an area near Rome honeycombed with ancient Etruscan tombs. The revelations continued for months, despite blanket denials by the museum.

The fight over what became known as the Met's "hot pot" publicly aired a practice that museums had quietly followed for decades. Coming soon after the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the protection of cultural property, which Hoving had helped negotiate, the controversy outraged the public and pitted archaeologists against their museum colleagues over the morality of collecting looted antiquities. Archaeologists now openly called on museums and universities to honor the UNESCO treaty and stop buying artifacts that appeared on the market without a traceable pedigree.

Hoving was still dodging questions about the vase when he decided to take a detour from a ski vacation in the Swiss Alps to visit Heinz Herzer's Munich workshop to see the bronze athlete. He ran his hands over the statue's mottled skin, now cleaned of its encrustations. He touched its face, the back of its legs, the underside of its arms. He looked at the modeling of the sculpture's fingernails, the details of the navel, the proportion of the penis. Hoving had studied archaeology, and he knew that Roman sculptors imitating Greek art had often left hidden areas unfinished. By contrast, true Greek sculpture was precise in its most minute details. After more than an hour of examining the piece, Hoving was convinced it was a great Greek work of art.

But how to buy it? The Met might be famous, but it was hardly rich. Hoving had hawked the museum's collection of ancient coins to come up with the money for the krater. And there was no way he could outbid Getty, who wanted the sculpture as a centerpiece for the small museum in his home in Malibu. Hoving decided to propose a joint venture: if Getty would provide most of the money for the statue, the Met would reimburse him with loans from its considerable collection, and the two would share ownership of the bronze. Hoving flew to England to pitch the idea to Getty in person.

After lengthy negotiations, Getty agreed to pay $3.9 million for the bronze—not one cent more. In return, he would receive several long-term loans from the Met, including a set of seventeen Pompeian frescoes that entranced him as Hoving projected slides of them onto a wall in Getty's study. They had been rescued from the ashes of a villa at Boscotrecase that was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in
A.D.
79. The villa had been owned by the grandson of the emperor Augustus.

But before buying the bronze, Getty insisted on a series of assurances about the statue's legal status: clarification of how the bronze had left Italy, legal research certifying that Herzer's consortium had clear title, and a written guarantee from the Italian Ministry of Culture and the Carabinieri that there would be no further claims. He also required Artemis to give him a five-year, money-back guarantee in case the Italians or another foreign government filed a patrimony claim.

They were exceptional precautions, underscoring Getty's unease. Even the Met's von Bothmer expressed some reservations about the statue's "mysterious export." As it turned out, both men's concerns were well-founded.

During negotiations, German and Italian police arrived unexpectedly at Herzer's Munich studio with questions about the bronze. What did Herzer know about the statue's disappearance from Italian soil and its supposed side trip to South America? How had he learned about the statue? When Herzer refused to cooperate, an Italian state prosecutor filed a request to have Herzer extradited to Italy to stand trial for trafficking in looted art. The dealer escaped arrest only because German authorities refused to honor the request.

The deal to buy the bronze came undone. The statue eluded Getty's grasp just as he was building another kind of legacy—one out of concrete and controversy.

T
WO DECADES EARLIER,
the J. Paul Getty Museum had been born as a tax shelter. When Getty left Los Angeles for Europe in 1951, he left behind a sprawling ranch house in a quiet canyon off the Pacific Coast Highway. The house was filled to the rafters with Getty's growing art collection. There was so much art, in fact, that Getty began giving it away. But after donating two of his most prized possessions—the sixteenth-century Ardabil carpet and Rembrandt's 1632
Portrait of Marten Looten
—to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Getty grew unhappy with the anemic tax write-offs he received for the gifts.

Getty's longtime accountant and personal aide, Norris Bramlett, suggested a more lucrative way to dispose of the art. Rather than donate it to various institutions, Getty should create his own nonprofit museum and run it out of his Malibu home. That way, the oilman could take even bigger deductions by contributing stock, paying for operational expenses, and purchasing art—all while holding on to the collection. Getty eagerly agreed and signed an indenture on December 2, 1953, creating the J. Paul Getty Museum, a gallery and art library whose mission was "the diffusion of artistic and general knowledge." All future antiquities acquisitions were made on behalf of the museum.

The small museum opened a few months later with no great fanfare. Los Angeles was still a cultural backwater, and at the modest opening ceremony, the city's mayor said that he hoped the new museum would correct the city's "severe cultural deficiencies." Getty did not bother to attend the opening, but in a telegram from Kuwait he said, "I hope this museum, modest and unpretentious as it is, will nevertheless give pleasure to the many people in and around Los Angeles who are interested in the periods of art represented here."

For years, the Getty Museum did the bare minimum to preserve its tax-exempt status. Museum hours were Wednesday and Friday from 3 to 5
P.M.,
with appointments available on Saturday upon special request. No admission was charged, but visitors had to book reservations in advance for the twenty-four-car parking lot. The museum's five small galleries were so jammed with art that many of Getty's finest ancient statues were kept outside in the courtyard, exposed to the elements.

By the late 1960s, even the house's expanded galleries were so full that a major remodeling was necessary. Getty asked Stephen Garrett, a young British architect who was helping him remodel his sumptuous winter residence on Italy's Tyrrhenian Sea, to fly to Los Angeles and assess the situation. Garrett was skeptical about his task, but as he turned off the Pacific Coast Highway and wound up a long driveway lined with eucalyptus trees, he became enchanted by what he saw. Before him was a lush canyon with a large Spanish ranch house, surrounded by orchards of lemon, avocado, and orange trees.

Garrett's guide for the day was Burton Fredericksen, a toothy, fresh-faced graduate student who introduced himself as Getty's curator. Fredericksen had started working at the Getty Museum in 1951 as a part-time security guard while studying for a Ph.D. in art history at UCLA. The quiet afternoons had given him an opportunity to read in the museum's library. He never completed his Ph.D. but stayed on at the museum as curator. Despite his youth, Fredericksen knew something about displaying art, and he told Garrett that if Getty was serious, he would have to construct a new building. Garrett agreed, secretly hoping that Getty would give him the commission.

Back in London, Garrett suggested to Getty that a new structure would have to be built on the property, one large enough to accommodate the entire art collection, which had grown by more than a thousand objects since the 1950s. Getty agreed, and by 1970 he had settled on a controversial design for the new museum: a top-to-bottom re-creation of the Villa dei Papiri, an opulent Roman estate outside Naples that had belonged to Julius Caesar's father-in-law. The villa had been buried by Mount Vesuvius's massive eruption in
A.D.
79 and been rediscovered only in the eighteenth century by the excavation crews of Spain's King Charles III. The only record of the villa's design was to be found in the careful sketches of the Swiss engineer who oversaw the excavation for Charles.