Building a Collection

Visitors to Getty are often curious about what the Museum collects and doesn’t collect.

Most know that Getty is well funded—so shouldn’t it have some of everything? Why, for example, does it collect 1980s American photography but not 1930s American painting? Why does it collect French decorative arts but not German or Japanese? From the outside, the Museum’s collecting parameters can appear somewhat puzzling.

The evolution of the collection

The answers have much to do with the Museum’s founder and namesake, J. Paul Getty. Mr. Getty became a serious art collector in the 1930s, focusing almost exclusively on ancient (mostly Roman) sculpture, 18th-century French furniture and decorative arts, and European Old Master (and some 19th-century) paintings. For many years, these were the only types of objects visitors saw at Mr. Getty’s ranch house in Malibu, where he opened a small museum to the public in 1954. As his collection in these three areas grew, it needed more space; construction began on the Getty Villa, which opened in 1974.

Following the settling of Mr. Getty’s estate in the early 1980s, Getty Trustees established several new collecting areas: drawings (1981), illuminated manuscripts (1983), and sculpture (1984). At the same time, the terminus for collecting was pushed out another century, to 1900—a date used by many museums to differentiate their historical and modern collections. The decision to acquire photographs, also made in 1984, enlarged this remit, crucially moving one aspect of the collections into the 20th and now 21st century and welcoming work by artists beyond Europe. Expanding in media, geography, and time span, the collection changed dramatically. In 2004, the Getty accepted the donation from the Fran and Ray Stark Foundation of 28 20th-century outdoor sculptures. The acquisition of the Stark Collection was seen as an exceptional opportunity to enhance the visitor experience of the Getty Center campus.

After more than 45 years of active acquiring in these new areas, the collections have grown but have also been refined through deaccessioning (the sale, exchange, donation, or restitution of previously acquired works of art). Currently, the Museum owns and stewards more than 200,000 artworks.

How does the Getty Museum’s collection compare to that of other museums? Richard Rand, associate director of collections, explains, “This is something of a parlor game and always difficult to judge like to like. But it’s fair to say we’re more the Frick Collection than the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That is, we’re not a huge encyclopedic museum that collects across all cultures. Like the Frick, we began as a private collection and have continued to add to our collections through gift and purchase, and we’re focused primarily on European art before 1900. But we’re not a house museum reflecting the lifestyle of our founder (as is the case with the Frick or the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston), and our collections have been transformed by our post-founder acquisitions. As for photographs, that’s an easier call: Getty has one of the largest and deepest collections of any art museum in the US.”

Collecting criteria

A common question is how Getty curators decide what to add to the collections. One of the measures they use is whether the proposed work of art is in any way “transformative.” Does it add something new and different to the Getty’s collection? Does it connect in exciting ways to works we already own? Will it capture the viewer’s imagination and be a visual focus in the gallery?

They also think about the collections in the context of other museums in the Los Angeles area, particularly the Norton Simon, the Huntington, and LACMA. Sometimes, Getty acquires major artworks in partnerships with them, such as Robert Mapplethorpe’s art and archive acquired with LACMA, or the joint purchase of paintings by Degas and Poussin with the Norton Simon. Most innovatively, in 2023 the Getty Museum partnered with the National Portrait Gallery in London in the joint purchase of Joshua Reynolds’s famous Portrait of Mai (“Omai”), about 1776, a full-length portrait of the first Polynesian to visit England.

Several factors inform judgment of potential acquisitions, Rand explains, but quality and condition are paramount. Of course, he acknowledges that “quality” can be elusive but says it comes down to whether the work of art is beautiful, well-made, and the best of its kind, adding that the Museum has sought to acquire works of art historical significance by established, canonical makers.

That said, Rand notes, “We always are on the lookout for works of art that enrich the stories we can tell and the communities we can represent, whether that’s adding more work by women artists, a greater diversity of subjects and themes, or even cultures beyond Europe that connect in meaningful ways with our collections.”

In recent years the Museum has made targeted acquisitions of (nonphotographic) works of art from cultures that interacted with Europe in ways that bring broader context to the holdings. Examples include Egyptian art, sculpture from Palmyra (modern-day Syria), and Armenian and Ethiopian manuscript illuminations. The decorative arts collections have long included important examples of porcelain and lacquerware from China and Japan. “We intend to continue to develop these categories of art from ‘European adjacent’ cultures,” adds Rand.

The exception: photographs

Due to the wider collecting parameters of photography, and its relative affordability and availability (compared, for example, to pre-1900 European paintings), this area of the Museum’s collection has had the most freedom to grow. In 2005, the Getty Museum Photographs Council was formed, a donor group that funds acquisitions primarily of works by contemporary photographers. The Museum’s photography collection was already large and significant, but this effort began to deepen both a global and local focus and include more diverse perspectives. It was boosted in 2021 with the exhibition Photo Flux: Unshuttering LA, guest curated by jill moniz, which featured recent work from mostly artists of color in Los Angeles. The department committed to acquire pieces by many of the artists involved. As department head Jim Ganz noted at the time, “every new photograph we acquire creates ripples and crosscurrents that spread out and fundamentally change the whole collection, sometimes in surprising ways.”

This commitment bears fruit in the kinds of shows Getty can now present and the new stories it can tell. This fall, two collection-based exhibitions on LA-oriented contemporary Chicano/a photographers and 20th-century Mexican photography will open, and an exhibition on pre-WW2 Japanese American photographers working in California will open in 2027.

The expanding collection also impacted the soon-to-open exhibition Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985 (February 24–June 14, 2026 at the Getty Center), which highlights artworks made to advance civil rights and Black self-determination. Spanning several countries and decades, works have been borrowed from many lenders. Notably, the exhibition also includes 29 photographs from the Getty Museum’s collection—a feat that wouldn’t have been possible just 10 years ago. Recent acquisitions include images by celebrated photographers from the Black Arts Movement era, like Louis Draper, John Simmons, and Senga Nengudi.

This exhibition was organized by and first shown at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, before coming to the Getty Museum, and then will go on to the Mississippi Museum of Art. In its Los Angeles iteration, curator Mazie Harris added a selection of works by Southern California photographers, an area of the collection the department has been working to deepen.

“Besides enriching our collection, such acquisitions open new opportunities for storytelling and new areas for research,” says Harris. “Now we can tell a broader and more reflective history of photography.”

The future of the collection

Every year the Museum’s collection changes subtly: new works of art are added, and occasionally some might be deaccessioned. Sometimes the change is transformative, usually in the form of a gift that suddenly bolsters a new focus. A century from now, the collection may be unrecognizable—either further from Mr. Getty’s personal tastes or expanding upon them in profound and unexpected ways.