GETTY THROUGH THE EYES OF CRITICS.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

They came, they saw, they gushed.

Well, most of them, anyway.

Last week, the national and international media swooped down on the just-opened Getty Center, the new $1 billion arts complex-turned-overnight L.A. cultural landmark. Critics and reporters jetted in from as near as San Francisco and as far away as Australia to review Richard Meier's pristine white buildings and the treasures contained therein.

A few observations:

East Coast reporters were less easily impressed than their West Coast counterparts.

Robert Irwin's elaborate, mixed-media central garden got decidedly mixed notices (Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times described it as ``a huge gash in the hillside.'')

And practically no description of the Getty apparently is complete without at least one of the following words: ``acropolis,'' ``Olympian'' or ``fortresslike.''

Here's a sample of what the U.S. media had to say:

With the sun shining brilliantly on the dazzling, nearly white, Olympian compound of culture that is the new Getty, it seemed as if the gods of art and culture sent the winds to add one more dramatic, otherworldly element to a scene that was already extraordinary.

As if the $1 billion, astonishingly glorious temple to art and scholarship needed any Cecil B. DeMille-style help from the special effects department.

?13 - Robin Updike, the Seattle Times

Los Angeles' stupendous new castle of classical beauty. ... The basic ingredients of this complex can be summarized briefly: 19th-century concept, 20th-century design, 21st-century city. ... It takes more than one viewing before the Getty's pieces begin to add up. ... In theory, if not in fact, the division of the complex into six buildings mitigates the center's monumental effect. ... Other whiffs of architectural history filter through. The 1930s villas of Le Corbusier. Falling Water. Wright's textile block houses of the 1920s. Walter Groupius' Palace of the Soviets. The strong geometry of the buildings and the overall grid on which they sit may also put us in mind of the plans for ideal cities conceived in the climate of Renaissance humanism.

... How will all this art and high culture affect the lifeguards on ``Baywatch''?

?13 - Herbert Muschamp, The New York Times

Despite carping about it being overbearing and elitist, up there on its hilltop, Meier's building looks wonderfully natural and no more overbearing than, say, St. Mary Magdalene across the freeway, on the hill opposite. The play of light on the travertine is hypnotic, and the campus is arranged so that views - of mountain and sea, of freeway and skyscrapers, as well as self-referential views from one building to another - are jaw-dropping.

?13 - David L. Beck, San Jose Mercury News 

Its centerpieces - the museum, the Getty Research Institute, the hilltop setting - are stunning, while other elements - the administrative buildings, portions of the landscaping and most of the galleries - merely underscore the problems of trying to satisfy too many demands from too many constituents.

... Ultimately this proliferation of separate agendas defeated architect Richard Meier's efforts to make the Getty Center a coherent place. It is a collection of magnificent fragments - cubes, squares, circles, grids - loosely connected by gardens, bridges and plazas but lacking a single unifying design idea.

?13 - David Dillon, Dallas Morning News

It's easy to lose sight of what the Getty Center is not: It is not the biggest museum, nor the best. It will never be the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Louvre.

The Getty trustees and (Getty Museum director John) Walsh know that, and readily admit it. They've purposely built a complex of buildings, gardens and interior places for contemplation that has itself become the star - you don't go to the Getty just for the artwork, although the collections have been vastly improved in the past 15 years.

?13 - Laura Bleiberg, Orange County Register

The poor little rich Getty that everyone loved to mock has quietly matured into an exquisite medium-size museum of European paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, manuscripts and decorative objects.

... Does it seem niggling to question the virtues of the fine museum here? Maybe. But, after all, what is the Getty if it is not a dream of what might be? It is a dream of cultural prestige and tourist dollars for Los Angeles. It is a dream of seemingly infinite private largess for art at a time of public parsimony.

It never was a necessity: the Los Angeles area already had the Norton Simon Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, so the Getty fills no crucial gaps. What this city really needs are important collections of Asian and Mesoamerican art, not European art. The new center doesn't even include the sort of large hall for major traveling exhibitions that the city lacks.

But the Getty is valuable in another, less tangible, way: as a symbol, a civic spur. It is about desire. And the cost to the Getty of having so many billions of dollars at its disposal is to cope with the disappointment people feel when, inevitably, the reality of the place doesn't match their hopes.

?13 - Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times

To have made a project of this immensity hang together is the major design accomplishment. The dozen structures in the complex, including five museum pavilions, are immediately perceptible as part of a single scheme, despite their varying shapes and orientations. Physically it can be traversed in one day, but exhaustion will be the outcome, not the refreshment the planners of the Getty intend.

... The knock on the design is slight but pervasive: With its endless panel grids, staircase pipe rails and louvered baffles, the architecture is relentlessly linear. The lines relieve the buildings of mass, but they can leave the eye reeling.

?13 - Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle 

All that whiteness makes you feel you've died and gone to heaven.

... The Getty preaches accessibility, yet positions itself high on a hill, in imperial isolation. It preaches diversity - California is, after all, the capital of political correctness - yet its new galleries are devoted almost exclusively to the art of Western Europe, the Renaissance to 1900.

Committed to the most advanced technology, the Getty all but ignores advanced art. With a few notable exceptions including Robert Irwin's site-specific garden, contemporary work has a minimal presence.

... Meier's older, all-white museums have tended to get grungy, like the ``before'' in a laundry soap ad. Good thing the Getty endowment is now up to $4.5 billion, plenty to pay for all that upkeep.

?13 - Christine Temin, Boston Globe

It's the sheer gorgeous audacity of the place that gives it authority. With its sweeping piano curves complemented by massive, blunt angles, its gracious sense of air and light, Meier's monument glitters in the smoggy air like a modernist Shangri-La.

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

Photo: (1) Critics and reporters jetted in from as near as San Francisco and as far away as Australia to review Richard Meier's pristine white buildings and the treasures contained therein.

(2) Artworks falling under scrutiny at the Getty Center include Paul Cezanne's ``Still Life With Apples.''