OPENING SHIFTS L.A.'S IMAGE ON WORLD STAGE.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

In the eyes of the East Coast arts establishment it was a vulgar California upstart, an eccentric billionaire's monumental ego trip.

To envious Europeans, the J. Paul Getty Museum's Malibu incarnation was America in microcosm: brash, filthy rich and as quietly tasteful as a Mickey Mouse watch.

John Walsh, the Getty Museum's dry-witted, Ivy League-bred director, had been hearing those cliches for years when he came aboard the Getty in the early 1980s.

``This notion that we were something sinister, something irresponsible, something out of a daytime soap opera connected with Getty's life and oil money, that was plenty for everyone to have fun with,'' Walsh said. ``You don't hear a lot of that talk anymore.''

Walsh and his staff hope to hear it even less after Dec. 16, when the new $1 billion J. Paul Getty Center, an Italian marble temple rising over the concrete and stucco patchwork of the Sepulveda Pass, officially opens to the public.

A private function that seems to have caught the city's collective imagination, the opening will cap more than a dozen years of planning, compromise and curiosity spurred by the stunning generosity of a famously stingy oil tycoon.

In 1954, Jean Paul Getty established what he called a ``modest and unpretentious'' showcase for his art treasures in a Malibu canyon ranch house. Forty-three years later, a massively bulked-up Getty Museum is about to muscle its way onto the world arts scene.

Over the next 3-1/2 weeks, hundreds of politicians, cultural emissaries, captains of commerce, tastemakers and foreign dignitaries, plus scores of carefully screened L.A. community representatives, will flock to Brentwood to toast the new facility. First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton was scheduled to tour the Getty Saturday.

Beyond the black-tie hoopla, the Getty is stirring deeper aspirations and anxieties in its back yard. Like the 1984 Olympic games, the new Getty is being offered as evidence that Los Angeles has shed its perpetual adolescence and finally arrived as a ``world-class city'' - whatever that might mean.

At least for the next three weeks, ``Melrose Place'' and the Sunset Strip are out. Grecian urns and Old Master paintings are in.

The Getty ``clearly will be a focal point to which all eyes will be lured in Los Angeles,'' said Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky.

Around town, you can hear the refrain that the Getty is destined to become our Eiffel Tower, our Gateway Arch - ``an icon,'' in the words of Robert Erburu, chairman of the board of the Getty Trust, the umbrella organization that runs the museum and its five affiliated institutes. In its first year, the Getty is expected to attract between 1.3 and 1.8 million visitors.

Impact on art

In the nation's major arts hubs, rival museums say they're eager for better access to the Getty's troves of European paintings, sculpture, antiquities, decorative arts, manuscripts, drawings and photographs.

``There's no question it's going to enrich our lives, whether we happen to live in Los Angeles or not,'' said Peter Galassi, chief curator of the photography department at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

There's even hope, among L.A.'s scores of small, undernourished arts groups, that the Getty's huge $4 billion endowment somehow will trickle down into a supply-side cultural renaissance.

``Everybody that I've talked to, down to a person, is very optimistic about the opening of the Getty, and they feel that this is going to be the rising tide that lifts all art ships in Los Angeles,'' said Mark Greenfield, director of the Watts Towers Arts Center.

Yet, like many others, Greenfield has mixed feelings about the new center. Though he recently loaned his voice to the museum's official audio guide, he's skeptical about the Getty's desire to become a cultural resource for all Angelenos, not just its traditional core audience of the white, educated middle-class.

``Are the expectations that everybody has of the Getty realistic?'' Greenfield asked. ``Because the Getty's really the type of place that raises more questions than it answers.''

The art of the deal

Few would be more surprised by those great expectations than the late J. Paul Getty, who always cared more about cutting a good deal than being seen as a civic savior.

Getty's life belonged in an Orson Welles film, between the lofty gentility of ``The Magnificent Ambersons'' and the bare-knuckled tenacity of ``Citizen Kane.''

Born in Minneapolis in 1892, he and his family relocated to Los Angeles in 1906 because of his mother's health. It was the first of many well-timed moves. California's oil industry was about to erupt, and the Getty family's oil business was about to erupt with it. At the weathered age of 24, the nervy and opportunistic Paul had made his first of many millions.

When the stock market crashed in 1929, Getty thrived.

Mastering the fine art of leverage buying, he used his money to snap up depressed shares of rivals' stock. He also began collecting art, taking advantage of the drastic slump in overseas prices to pluck Old Master paintings at what were bargain sums. Even so, Getty became notorious for holding out - months, years or decades - if he deemed a price too high, as he frequently did.

Few would claim that Getty's tastes in art equaled his enthusiasm for owning it. Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and one of the Getty Museum's harshest critics, said ``the old man's stuff was fifth-rate.''

``Maybe the carpets were good, maybe some furniture,'' Hoving said.

Other experts offer more charitable assessments. But, by most accounts, it has taken several generations of curators to spackle over the gaps in Getty's parsimonious judgment.

When Getty opened his Ranch House museum in 1954, he'd already quit the United States for Europe, so as to be closer to his Middle East oil fields. From 1951 until his death in 1976, he never saw the California coastline again, but haunted it from afar with restless ambition.

Malibu museum popular

Persuaded by friends and advisers that his holdings needed a proper display case, Getty settled on a lavish reconstruction of the ancient Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum, near Naples, which had been buried under ash by the same eruption that claimed Pompeii.

Critics panned Getty's faux-Roman building as a piece of folk-art kitsch. But the public loved its beautiful inner peristyle, sculpted gardens and air of casual hedonism.

Soon, instead of handfuls of visitors, the museum was attracting busloads of schoolchildren, Israeli and Japanese tourists, visiting scholars from Paris and Rome. Slowly, word filtered back to New York and Europe that maybe these Californians weren't such Philistines after all.

But outsiders' fears and resentments intensified when Getty died in 1976 and, stunning everyone, left the bulk of his estate to the museum. When the legal dust settled six years later, the Getty Museum had inherited an endowment worth $1.2 billion (doubled in 1984 when Texaco gobbled up Getty Oil).

The art world braced for these nouveau Getty bucks to send art prices skyrocketing.

``There was a general fear that the Getty, with more money than anybody else, would launch a campaign of dragging off everything that wasn't screwed down to the floor,'' said museum director Walsh.

Painting a new L.A.

So far, that's not quite the way things have worked out. Under the leadership of Harold Williams, the Getty Trust's president since 1981, the Getty has shopped aggressively, but not recklessly.

Newspaper headlines usually focus on the Getty's big-ticket buys, such as the reported $54 million it paid for Vincent van Gogh's celebrated ``Irises.'' But in other ways the Getty has shown considerable tact and restraint. Quietly, it has put together top-drawer collections of drawings and decorative arts. It avoided the ``ugly American'' label by passing on a famous German manuscript that the German government was eager to buy.

In 1983, it leapt to photography's forefront by purchasing two first-rate collections, Samuel Wagstaff's and Arnold Crane's, in a hush-hush deal that took rivals like the Museum of Modern Art by surprise. But instead of resentment, the Getty's move prompted admiration.

``Whenever somebody does something good, lots of other people like to grumble about it,'' said New York's Galassi. ``But in the end I'm serving the same ideal as the Getty, so if they serve it better than I'm able to, I'm delighted.''

Meanwhile, the museum's sister institutes are apparently bent on saving world culture for posterity, piece by piece. Every few months the Getty announces it's funding some new, irreproachable-sounding project, such as restoring an eighth-century German cathedral, resurrecting a David Siquieros mural in downtown L.A. or preserving early human footprints in Tanzania.

The Getty is helping teachers in Reseda and Van Nuys learn to use art to communicate other subjects.

Last April, it teamed up with more than 15 local cultural entities to launch LA Culture Net, an online community arts and culture network. Among the participants were California State University, Northridge; the Korean American Museum; and Break Away Technologies, a nonprofit founded in the wake of the 1992 riots that provides telecommunications access to L.A.'s digital have-nots.

Independent scholar Mike Davis, who wrote about L.A.'s emerging new corporate-arts-political axis in his book ``City of Quartz,'' dismisses the Getty's community outreach efforts as ``chump change compared to these $20 million French masterpieces they keep buying.''

``They're trying to create a little legitimacy because they've done almost nothing for the city,'' Davis said in an interview.

But to those who doubt the Getty's do-good intentions, Break Away President and CEO Joseph Loeb asked: ``Who else is stepping up to the plate?''

Whether the Getty ultimately strikes out or belts a grand slam, it seems to be earning points for least taking a big swing.

``I think, worst case, the Getty can perpetuate the profound racial and class divisions in Los Angeles by being an arts center built on top of a beautiful ridge line. It's almost feudal in the projection of its power and its importance,'' said State Sen. Tom Hayden, D-Los Angeles.

``On the other hand, the Getty people seem slightly embarrassed by this, or painfully aware of this, and will certainly make an effort to integrate with the people south of them.''

In a recent article about the Getty in The New Yorker, John Walsh suggested that, as L.A. comes of age, some Angelenos are loathe to let go of a cherished self-image: the city of crude energies and cheap thrills, the noir Los Angeles the world loves to hate.

Erica Yenning Huang, an Orange County-based painter who also contributed to the Getty audio guide, thinks the world might change its view of L.A. and L.A. culture - if only it would come look for itself.

``My friends back east, they really are very down on the West Coast,'' Huang said. ``If they were to come here and see the Getty, I think they might change their minds a little bit, maybe - though they would hate to admit it.''

GETTING THERE

Where: Getty Center Drive, off Sepulveda Boulevard west of the San Diego Freeway.

Hours: 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday; 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Thursday, Friday; 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday, Sunday. Closed Mondays and major holidays.

Admission: Free, but car parking is $5 and advance reservations are required if you plan on arriving by car. For reservations, call [phone]. A TDD line for the deaf and hearing impaired is available at [phone].

How to get there: You do not need a reservation if you are traveling by public bus, taxi or bicycle. Walk-in visitors are permitted.

CAPTION(S):

4 Photos

PHOTO (1--color--ran in Bulldog edition only) A naturalistic rock fountain burbles outside a gallery at the Getty Center.

David R. Crane/Daily News

(2--color) First Lady Hillary Clinton admires a Domenico Fetti painting Saturday with Getty Museum and trust officials at the Brentwood facility. See Page 20.

Michael Owen Baker / Daily News

(3--color) An aerial shot, taken as finishing touches were being added in October, shows the Getty Center's dominance of the Brentwood ridge line from which it overlooks West Los Angeles.

Cecil Yates/Daily News

(4--color) An open plaza's pool of water reflects the Getty Center's angles-and-arcs design.

David R. Crane/Daily News