HOCKNEY COLLAGE SOLD TO THE GETTY.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

The rich just got richer, again.

The J. Paul Getty Museum on Thursday announced that it has acquired ``Pearblossom Hwy. 11-18th April 1986, 2,'' one of David Hockney's largest and best-known works composed of assembled photographs.

The first major piece by Hockney to enter the Getty's permanent collection, it was acquired from the artist, who has said he considers it the most successful and complex of his experimental photocollages made during the early 1980s.

The Getty purchased the piece through Hockney's dealer Peter Goulds of L.A. Louver Gallery. In keeping with its policy, the museum would not reveal the purchase price.

``Pearblossom Highway,'' never previously offered for sale, had been part of the artist's personal collection. For that reason, it is difficult to determine what it would fetch on the open market, an L.A. Louver Gallery spokeswoman said. The purchase extends the Getty's streak of aggressively pursuing prominent artworks, often for record sums of money.

The work, 10 feet wide and 6 feet high, will go on display at the new Museum of the Getty Center. The $1 billion Brentwood complex, set in the Santa Monica Mountains overlooking the San Diego Freeway, is scheduled to open to the public in December.

Depicting state Highway 138 as it slices through the Antelope Valley near Palmdale, north of Los Angeles, ``Pearblossom Highway'' combines more than 700 individual photographs into a mosaic that shatters the Renaissance ideal of a single, fixed perspective.

Matching a pale blue sky with the desert's sepia tones, the work is tinged with sly humor. Hockney contrasts the grandeur of nature, glimpsed in the scattered Joshua trees and the distant snowcapped mountains, with the manmade debris - beer bottles, cigarette butts, crushed pop cans - visible in the picture's foreground.

Weston Naef, the museum's curator of photographs, first saw the piece at a 1986 Hockney retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Naef said he ``popped the question'' again recently, after giving Hockney a tour of the Getty's new headquarters, and the artist acquiesced.

``I think the power of it really has to do with the way it brings together such contradictory elements into such harmonious and beautiful results,'' Naef commented.

``This is beauty and ugliness brought together in a very lovable combination, and I think our eyes are just attracted and intrigued when an artist does that. And it represents a place very near us geographically . . . that most of us would not have taken note of, if not for an artist who stopped at a very improbable place.''

A native of Yorkshire, England, Hockney has lived in Los Angeles for more than 20 years. His images of Angelenos lolling by their airy homes and tranquil pools, along with his brilliantly colored seascapes and mountainscapes, have reshaped the world's mental snapshot of Southern California, said museum director John Walsh.