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ERROR: type should be string, got "https://www.barrons.com/articles/getty-museum-world-s-richest-art-institution-1411688975\nBehind The Scenes At the Getty\nStacy Perman\nFrom its sprawling perch high above a pair of Los Angeles hilltops, the J. Paul Getty Trust has long been viewed as something akin to the overlord of the art world, with its $6.6 billion endowment. Drawing on its immense treasure chest, the Getty in a single generation has built two world-class museums, featuring works from antiquities to contemporary outdoor sculpture, while leading the global charge for art research and conservation. But since its heady ascent three decades ago, the world has changed, and so has the Getty's take on its lofty place in that world. Under new management since 2011, it has been busy killing off once sacrosanct practices in order to stay nimble and relevant. For the first time in its history, the biggest, richest art institution in the world is launching a fund-raising program. \"The Getty can do anything at once -- just not everything at once,\" cautions soft-spoken James Cuno, the museum's president and CEO.\nIt's not art, it's math. As the prices for important works are driven ever higher by voracious private collectors -- in turn driving up the museum's costs -- investment returns, even those of the mighty Getty, haven't kept pace with the institution's financial needs. Therein lies a valuable lesson for every family art foundation in the world, no matter how big and rich they may be: Art-collecting institutes of the 21st century must continuously replenish their coffers to stay in the game.\nThe professorial Jim Cuno, CEO of the Getty Foundation, standing at the Getty Villa that houses the museum's unique Roman and Grecian antiquities collection. The Getty Villa's eight-year, $275 million renovation is one reason Cuno is starting to fund raise. Photo: Thomas Michael Alleman\nIt was not always so. From the very beginning, the Getty Trust was something of an anomaly among cultural institutions. In 1976, the oil man J. Paul Getty left four million shares of Getty Oil stock worth $700 million (equivalent of $2.9 billion today) in trust to the modest private museum he built on his 64-acre ranch overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Overnight, the Getty, one of the smallest major museums, became the world's richest, its endowment dwarfing that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It still does.\nA penny-pinching billionaire who made his guests use a lobby pay phone for their long-distance calls from his United Kingdom mansion, Getty began collecting only during the Great Depression, when extraordinary deals could be had. As he noted in his diary on April 8, 1939, \"Prices about one-fourth 1910-1929. Present prices are the lowest of the century.\" Getty spent months in Europe meeting with dealers. He made a study of the great museums, often comparing his works with theirs, and always with an eye to the great American collectors who had made their mark before him, such as Henry Clay Frick.\nGetty's tastes ran to old masters, 18th century French furniture, and antiquities. It was during his travels in Italy that he developed a deep passion for ancient Rome. He chose the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum to serve as the model of his own California villa. Getty also favored work from notable collections, such as the Roman marble statue, Lansdowne Herakles, purchased from the family of the eighth marquess of Lansdowne.\nTHE ORIGINAL TRUSTEES, led by former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Harold Williams, imaginatively pursued Getty's tersely worded but broad instructions on how his bequest should be spent -- \"a museum, gallery of art, and library\" for the \"diffusion of artistic and general knowledge.\" The trust spent prodigiously, acquiring a late-fifth century statue of the Greek goddess Aphrodite, which became ensared in a provenance and looting scandal, and Van Gogh's Irises (reportedly for $20 million and $54 million, respectively). It expanded its collections from its founder's \"narrow and uneven\" assembly of ancient and European art to include one of the largest collections of Rembrandts and illuminated manuscripts. Its stealthy acquisitiveness became legendary. Critics denounced \"the Getty factor\" -- the organization's ability to dominate and roil markets. After a string of major purchases by the Getty, the Economist noted, \"The world art market will never be quite the same.\" Few had the ability to outbid the Getty, leaving art connoisseurs little else to do but \"shudder.\"\nBut the Getty always saw itself as more than just a museum. From its inception, it has also been an all-embracing patron of art history, facilitating new research and forging collaborative ways to advance practices in a variety of art fields. While training a new generation of experts to preserve old masters painted on wooden panels, the Getty developed an innovative Web-based tool that essentially enables scholars to use infrared and X-ray technology to, for example, zoom in on Herbert and Jan van Eyck's famed Ghent Altarpiece at a resolution of over 100 billion pixels, thereby peering below the surface of the painting and creating infinite leads for conservators. The Getty Conservation Institute's reference collection resides in underground storage vaults at the Getty Center. It's an immense trove of more than 9,000 items, from Renaissance pigments to fragments of Nefertari's tomb. The Getty Research Institute alone possesses 26 linear miles of shelving for nearly 50,000 rare books, 27,000 prints and drawings, more than 12,000 linear feet of manuscripts and archives, 30,000 original architectural drawings, and two million photographs. The Getty's total assets (art, real estate, everything) are valued at over $10 billion.\nThe Getty is back full force: Launching a new round of major acquisitions under CEO Cuno, the Getty Museum recently purchased Rembrandt Laughing, for $25.1 million, a self-portrait by the Dutch master. That was after the museum spent $45 million on a major work by J.M.W. Turner. Photo: Courtesy of The J. Paul Getty Museum\nAs we walked through the research facility, curators were unpacking giant wooden crates filled with the Knoedler Gallery archives, a repository of letters, sales books, and ledgers. The gallery had handled significant artists such as de Kooning, Manet, and Homer during the 19th and 20th centuries. Once cataloged and digitized, the Knoedler archives will be made accessible to research scholars. Upstairs, in the brightly lit laboratories of the Conservation Institute, scientists are testing modern acrylic-paint strips on machinery also used to test athletes for doping. The aim is to provide conservators a better understanding of the properties of pigments and binders used by 20th century artists, so the likes of Rothko and Basquiat can be properly restored.\nAcross town, meanwhile, at the Getty Villa's labs, the staff is designing and building customized mounts to protect the Berthouville treasure, a cache of Roman silver, from earthquakes. These range from tiny U-shaped clasps to seismic isolators. The Getty holds a patent on the isolators and has routinely provided its expertise to museums around the world.\nWHICH GETS US TO an important point. Considered a rich outlier by some, remote and elitist by others, the Getty Trust has long been a place so reflexively decried by critics that it's easy to overlook the fact that the organization is a far more subtle and complex creature than meets the eye. It acquires art and mounts exhibitions free of charge for over 1.7 million visitors a year; that much is bracingly simple and clear. But through its grant-making, preservation, and scholarship, it also plays a towering behind-the-scenes role in the international art world. Structurally, it hews more closely to a university model than that of a traditional museum -- with one major exception. Thanks to the Getty's tremendous endowment, it has existed almost entirely off its investment income. Unburdened by the pressure to corral donations, the 15-member board has been historically compelled to spend money, not raise it.\nUntil now, that is. In 1998, the former trust president, Barry Munitz, floated a development initiative; it so rankled the Los Angeles art community, fearful the Getty would cannibalize the city's cultural and philanthropic resources, the project was quickly scuttled. Internally, the debate fared little better. But things started changing four years ago, following nearly two decades of lavish spending, including the trust's eight-year, $275 million renovation of its Getty Villa, which showcases magnificent Greek and Roman antiquities.\nRoutinely criticized, it is easy to overlook the fact the Getty plays a huge role behind the scenes as an industry-leading researcher, educator, and conservationist. Above, a Getty course on the latest mosaic conservation and management techniques held at an archaeological site in Paphos, Cyprus. Photo: Courtesy of Scott S. Warren/J.Paul Getty Trust\nThen came the $1 billion Richard Meier-designed Getty Center. Housed on a 760-acre campus, its buildings sheathed in white Italian travertine soaring above Bel Air like a modern-day acropolis -- home to art works ranging from the Middle Ages to contemporary photography.\nThe center was all self-financed, but then the outside world introduced some new realities. The supply of great masters and antiquities -- the lifeblood of the Getty collection -- was in decline, partly the result of provenance and looting scandals that had embroiled the museum. Furthermore, a new breed of private collector was lobbing prices into the stratosphere. Unlike the Getty, these U.S. hedge fund managers, Chinese billionaires, Russian oligarchs, and petro-sheiks, did not have to seek permission from a board to spend more than $1 million on an acquisition; they routinely bid tens of millions at auction for a single work. \"Five or 10 years ago, our competition was mostly other museums,\" says Timothy Potts, the museum's director. \"It has totally flipped.\"\nBy the time the stock market crashed in 2007, the Getty was operating two museums on one income stream, and the price for art had exploded while its costs -- and goals -- had greatly expanded. That's when the financial crisis hit. Between 2007 and 2009, the trust's endowment lost 31% of its value, plunging from $6.4 billion to $4.4 billion. The $35 million Major Initiatives and Acquisitions Fund, set up in 2009, lost 80% of its value as it sank to $7 million.\nBy March 2009, with the endowment in free fall, the trust slashed its overall budget 24%, to $216 million, while cutting the museum's budget 25%. Almost 100 staff members were laid off. The trust reduced or cut many of its educational programs and exhibitions. The foundation completely remapped its grant-making process. Proposals were now approved on a tactical basis rather than decided upon as they came through the transom. Tim Whalen, director of the Conservation Institute, likened this painful period to \"ripping off a Band-Aid.\" But he also notes that the financial crisis pushed the Getty to refocus. \"Those opportunities help you prioritize very quickly,\" he says.\nThe Getty had experience with self-correction, particularly over the past decade as a raft of scandals rocked the institution. Its remarkable transparency (the Website reveals reams of financial detail) came in response to accusations and formal censure surrounding allegations over the improper use of funds in the mid-2000s by the then-president, Barry Munitz. It also led to his departure a year later. As for the other major scandal, while the Getty returned 40 objects to Italy due to disputes over past acquisitions of stolen antiquities, it simultaneously adopted a series of stringent policies regarding ownership. But the Getty was also without a president. After the unexpected death of James Wood in 2010, a revolving door of executives followed. There was much carping about the need for organizational reform. So while the endowment recovered beyond its prerecession levels, thanks to the stock market, the Getty trustees realized that, once again, some new thinking was in order.\nJ. Paul Getty with his pet lion, Teresa. His taste in art was far more conventional. Photo: Courtesy of The Getty Research Institute\nENTER JAMES CUNO, the professorial former director of the Art Institute of Chicago, and before that the director of the Harvard University Art Museums for 11 years. An internationally respected veteran in the field, Cuno instantly noticed that \"emotionally, the institution was challenged and the question was, 'What's next?' \" His answer was a narrow list of broad goals to encourage collaboration among its four entities, ramp up the collections, and greatly expand its digital imprint, while taking up the fund-raising banner.\nIn 2012, he appointed Timothy Potts, the former director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, to head up the Getty Museum, a clear signal of his intentions to return to the kind of bold acquisitions that had made the Getty famous. Potts says that Cuno's commitment to a major acquisitions budget formed a central part of their initial conversations before Potts came on board. Cuno made good on this promise. Last year, the Getty purchased Rembrandt Laughing, a tiny self-portrait of the 17th century Dutch master painted on copper, for 16.5 million British pounds ($25.1 million). Two years earlier, it acquired J.M.W. Turner's 1839 masterpiece, Modern Rome: Campo Vaccino, for a record $44.9 million. \"My strategy is to maintain the Getty as a major museum force in acquiring great works of art,\" says Potts.\nMore is planned. Cuno, who spearheaded the Chicago Art Institute's initiative to raise $420 million for its new modern wing, says of the Getty, in order to do more good work, \"we need something to complement the endowment for another source of revenue.\" Asking the rich to make donations to a wealthy institution? His short answer is \" 'Harvard and Stanford.' My view is that people like to invest in quality. They like to be associated with an institution that is going to be around forever.\"\nThe Getty's fund-raising strategy is in its early stages, just ramping up. It is, for example, in the process of building fund-raising infrastructure, such as donor databases, while hunting for a vice president to run the recently established institutional-development unit.\nBut Cuno is also quick to point out that he won't set annual fund-raising goals or allocate a percentage of the budget to be covered by donations, or pilfer from other Los Angeles–area organizations.\nAgain, Cuno's game plan is to match particular projects to donors with a particular interest. Consider \"Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980,\" an exhibition where over five dozen cultural institutions across Southern California collaborated, and which highlighted the birth, evolution, and influence of the Los Angeles art scene. It was a matter of civic and regional pride. The Getty kicked in more than $11 million, while raising over $1 million from a spectrum of donors to launch the exhibit's marketing campaign.\nTo make the Getty relevant in the modern age, Cuno is also turning the institution into the leading evangelist of art digitization. \"I do not want to make incremental change,\" he says, \"but to fundamentally change the way we do art history. We can harness the potential of big data in different ways.\"\nPart of that effort is the millions poured into digitizing vast libraries through the Getty Research Portal, where materials are available online for free, while pushing the conservative museum world at large to similarly publish their material online.\nMeanwhile, Thomas Gaehtgens, director of the Research Institute, is also developing open-source tools so scholars in disparate locations can collaborate in real time. \"The questions they ask can be fundamentally different,\" says Cuno.\nIt all sounds promising for an institution that almost lost its way. \"The Getty is still a young enough institution that it is still thinking very big and still defining what it wants to be,\" says Potts. \"In a sense, that ambition is even greater than it was in the early days.\"\nAdmirable -- but none of that ambition is possible without the institution first learning how to renew its treasury. If that's true for the world's richest art institution, it's doubly true for every family art foundation in the country.\nE-mail: penta@barrons.com"