Hawaii’s World
I had the privilege recently of visiting two of America's greatest art museums. Comparing two
great art museumsThe Getty Center, some 25 miles from downtown Los Angeles, is hands down better for the audacity of its architecture.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, between 80th and 84th streets on Fifth Avenue, New York, is better by far for the breadth of its collections.
The Getty Center is the new boy on the block, open only two years to the Met's 129.
Getty is a white, travertine marble, angular wonder sitting on a hilltop in the Santa Monica Mountains. Its buildings and gardens cover 24 acres of a 750-acre site and are accessible to the public only via a tramway three-quarters of a mile long.
Parking in an underground garage at the foot of the tramway is so limited it is booked months in advance, but visitors can arrive also by taxi or tour bus. They have to use the tramway, however. No way can the Getty be the kind of drop-in place the Metropolitan is in Manhattan.
The final site selection came down to one near the heart of Los Angeles vs. the one chosen.
Architect Richard Meir was chosen for his high reputation among architectural modernists and didn't disappoint.
He also believed visitors should have time to relax and be comfortable. Thus there are numerous restrooms on the sprawling property and numerous places to snack or fine-dine. Plenty of places to rest, in other words -- mostly places with a view of the gardens and waterfalls on the downhill slope and an outlook over Los Angeles.
Getty's collections are housed in five two-story buildings, rising from a long, bean-shaped marble platform that affords ample open space. Second floor galleries oft-times are skylighted.
Each has an information center. They make substantial use of video presentations. The overall ambiance is more visitor friendly than the more formal Met. We saw magnificent French furniture collections at both museums. The Getty won for better display.
On the other hand, the Getty has far less to display and less room to display it. The Metropolitan has more than two million works of art in its collection with several hundred thousand on view at any given time. They span 5,000 years of world culture.
Of course, at either museum, we viewers, in any one visit, can gulp only small amounts of what is offered.
We can come back quite a number of times to either but the Metropolitan with direct access from Fifth Avenue is much easier to visit. It, too, has a garden. Central Park surrounds it and is visible from its windows.
It has a Beaux Arts facade and a turn-of-the century Great Hall as its entryway.
The Getty's displays are primarily from the collections of the late J. Paul Getty, whose $400 million bequest to the center has grown to $6 billion.
The Metropolitan describes itself as having been founded by a group of distinguished public figures, philanthropists and artists in 1870. It has had many benefactors, with John D. Rockefeller one of the more prominent among them.
An old museum on our East Coast. A new one in the West. Both are very much worth visiting. So is Hawaii's small but architecturally superb Honolulu Academy of Arts.
A.A. Smyser is the contributing editor
and former editor of the the Star-Bulletin
His column runs Tuesday and Thursday.