The story
J. Paul Getty was, for a while, the richest man in the world, an American oil magnate who spent his last years in England and never saw the museum that now carries his name across two hilltop sites in Los Angeles. He died in 1976. The collection he left, and the enormous endowment behind it, has been buying and building ever since.
There are really two Gettys. The Getty Villa in Malibu is a full-scale recreation of a Roman country house buried by Vesuvius, built to hold Greek and Roman antiquities among gardens and fountains above the Pacific. The Getty Center, which opened in 1997 high above the freeway in Brentwood, is a vast complex of travertine-clad pavilions by the architect Richard Meier, reached by a tram that climbs the hill.
Up there hang the European paintings, among them one of Van Gogh's 'Irises', painted in the asylum at Saint-Remy in 1889. The museum has had its dramas, from a Greek marble youth whose authenticity experts still cannot settle to long fights over looted antiquities. Both sites are free to enter, unusual for a collection this rich, though you pay to park the car that nearly every visitor arrives in.
