ART LOVERS MUST BIDE THEIR TIME FOR GETTY CENTER DEBUT.

Byline: Jenifer Hanrahan Daily News Staff Writer

Van Gogh and Monet will have to wait their turn.

It's not art but administrators who will be the first to make the Getty Center their home.

The $733 million arts and cultural complex under construction in the Sepulveda Pass will reach yet another milestone this summer as the finishing touches are put on the east and north buildings, the restaurant and the 450-seat auditorium.

In July, the first Getty programs and employees will move into their new digs. But the J. Paul Getty Museum, the complex's biggest draw that will house the J. Paul Getty Trust's collection of paintings, decorative arts, drawings, manuscripts, sculpture and photographs, is still a mass of steel girders.

The building is not expected to be completed until early next year.

Moving the works of art now housed in the Getty museum on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu is expected to be a tedious process that will begin after the building is completed and continue until the center's scheduled opening in the fall of 1997, said Cynthia Wornham, the center's public affairs manager. Greek and Roman antiquities will remain at the Getty's Malibu location.

Designed by architect Richard Meier, the visual arts and cultural center situated on a 110-acre site in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains consists of six low-lying buildings. When finished, the campus-like complex, along with gardens and terraces, will cover 24 acres. The remaining land will be preserved in a natural state.

An electric shuttle will transport a projected 7,000 visitors on weekends from the parking area up a hill to the center's arrival plaza made of travertine stone quarried outside of Tivoli, Italy. Stone, beige metal panels and glass are used for the building facades.

Much of the landscaping is under way, although the central garden with a reflecting pond are still under construction. More than 8,000 trees, including Italian stone pines, jacarandas, sycamore, white crape myrtle trees and California native oaks, have been planted along the perimeter.

This summer, among the programs that will be the first to settle into the new location include the Getty Conservation Institute, dedicated to preserving historical artifacts and monuments, followed in August by the J. Paul Getty Trust, the Getty Education Institute for the Arts, which promotes art education in schools, and the Getty Grant Program, which provides funding for research.

``For years, we have been kind of isolated,'' said Miguel Angel Corzo, director of the conservation institute that is now located in a corporate park in Marina del Rey.

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PHOTO Work continues on the tram arrival area of the new Ge tty Center but employees will start moving in next month.

David Sprague/Daily News