50 Years of the Getty Villa Museum

To the Los Angeles Times art critic, it was “an incredibly eccentric extravaganza.”

To visitors interviewed by a New York Times reporter, it was “gorgeous, just marvelous” and “an intellectual Disneyland.” But to founder J. Paul Getty, the Getty Villa was simply “what I felt a good museum should be, and it will have the character of a building that I would like to visit myself.”

Since opening to the public in 1974, the Villa has inspired passion—from visitors, who drive up Pacific Coast Highway to spend a day among its immersive architecture and artwork, and from staff, who enjoy its intimate, family-like atmosphere and commitment to bringing the ancient world alive. Where else in Los Angeles can you peruse treasures of the ancient world and gaze out at the shimmering ocean?

As the Villa celebrates its 50th anniversary, we journeyed back to its early days as a collector’s seaside retreat and traced some of the most memorable moments in its colorful history. Let’s raise a chalice to the next 50 years!

1954: The Ranch House

The Villa’s story begins with the Ranch House, as it would come to be known: a sprawling residence atop 64 acres in oceanfront Pacific Palisades. Getty bought the property after World War II for his fifth wife, Teddy, to offer space for her to ride horses and to house his growing art collection. He had been bitten by the art bug decades earlier, and his holdings included decorative arts, paintings, and objects from antiquity.

“In his memoirs, Getty talks about his belief that art is a civilizing thing, and to be civilized, you need to appreciate art,” says Kenneth Lapatin, curator of antiquities at Getty since 2002. “And the money was always important to him. He saw collecting as an opportunity not to buy low and sell high—because he didn’t intend on selling—but to get good value and acquire outstanding objects. And he wrote about it as a form of addiction he tried to quit many times and couldn’t.”

Getty left the US permanently for England in 1951, but he continued to add to his collection at the Ranch House and opened it to visitors in 1954 as the J. Paul Getty Museum. For a few days each week, people could drive up to the Ranch House and browse the collection, which was displayed in a separate wing of the residence. Visitors could even see some marble sculptures displayed outside.

Besides his interest in art’s “civilizing” qualities, Getty was also attracted to the tax benefits of turning his art collection into a museum. “When Teddy was around 100 years old, I got a chance to ask her questions about Getty’s early collecting, and she said, ‘Well, you know, Paul never met a tax deduction he didn’t like,’” Lapatin remembers.

1968: Building the Villa

As his collection outgrew the Ranch House, Getty began working with architects to draw up plans for a new museum. He rejected proposals for Spanish, Renaissance, and modern buildings, instead opting to re-create the Villa dei Papiri—an ancient Roman luxury villa that had fascinated him for decades. Named for the library of charred papyrus scrolls found within it in the 1750s—the only library from antiquity to survive with its contents—the building was buried by the same eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in AD 79 that had destroyed and paradoxically preserved Pompeii. Getty never saw the ancient villa (it remains buried under 75 feet of volcanic debris) but knew of its art collections, recovered by a Swiss military engineer working for the King of Naples, who mapped its plan. Today, most scholars believe that the sumptuous seaside retreat was constructed by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. Getty hired Norman Neuerberg, a historian of ancient Roman architecture, to ensure that the new structure would be as historically accurate as possible, despite modern necessities like air ducts and elevators.

A few months before the Villa opened, Getty asked another consulting architect, Stephen Garrett, to move from England to California and run the place in his absence. Garrett’s daughter, Rebecca, was eight years old at the time and remembers her entire family viewing the experience as a grand adventure.

“I know that my father really liked the construction part of it because Getty was very involved,” Rebecca says. “Getty wanted photographs of everything—cement they poured, trucks coming in, things like that. Most other people, it seems, found Getty incredibly difficult. But my father loved working for him because he told him what he wanted and was very straightforward.”

1974: The Getty Villa Opens

On January 16, 1974, the Villa opened its gates to visitors. Getty had wanted his friend, President Richard Nixon, to attend the opening, but Getty’s aide Norris Bramlett talked him out of it, given the Watergate scandal. Still, plenty of other visitors arrived and seemed to love wandering the grounds and gardens, exploring the art, and marveling at the Roman architecture. The “culturati” critics weren’t so enthusiastic though. While modern architecture was all the rage, Getty had created this ode to the classics, Lapatin explains. Digs like “cheap,” “garish,” “Hollywood,” and “Disneyland” littered their reviews.

Although Getty died just two years after the Villa opened—without ever seeing it in person—he left his entire estate to the J. Paul Getty Trust and is buried on the property. Through his correspondence, it’s clear that he wasn’t pleased with the critics’ negative response to his project—possibly even unhappier than he let on, Lapatin suggests.

“A lot of the initial reaction was, ‘Oh, crazy billionaire does this gauche thing,’ and he thought he was doing something nice for the people of Los Angeles,” Lapatin says.

Getty never saw how the criticisms gave way to accolades, as local and international visitors flocked to this interpretation of an ancient Roman estate in the middle of Southern California. Micah Fields-Cosey, who has worked at Getty as a security officer since 1995, first visited the Villa on an elementary school field trip around 1979 and remembers being awed by the site’s beauty and grandeur.

“It just felt like a totally different place than where I came from, in the inner city,” she says. “The way it was set up with all the marble, it just took our breath away. I think that was the only time I really paid attention on a field trip.”

Staff who were there in the early days remember the Villa as a museum working to find its footing—people figured out what they were doing as they went along, and a sense of camaraderie and family permeated the halls. “We had fewer rotating exhibitions and almost no outgoing loans,” says Marie Svoboda, who worked as a graduate intern at the Villa in 1995 and then returned as an antiquities conservator in 2003. “We had fewer commitments than we have today, so things were a little bit more social and relaxed, and we had the opportunity to admire and savor the collection and grounds.”

Even the docent program began in a somewhat ad hoc fashion, eventually coalescing into a well-oiled machine. Patti Amstutz became a guide in 1979, though at the time, docents jokingly referred to themselves as the “T and P” group, since they spent so much time telling visitors where the Tea Room and bathrooms were.

“We stood on the ledge at the end of the Outer Peristyle garden, and we would chat for no more than 10 minutes to visitors to give them a little bit of background on the Villa,” Amstutz says. “And then we would go sit on a chair in front of the little bookstore, which was nothing larger than a closet.”

Over time, the strength of the collection grew, conservators tackled the latest techniques and technology, and the Villa began to prove itself as a powerhouse among museums.

“I looked at Getty like it was Mount Olympus,” Svoboda says. “It was such an amazing place to be because we were always organizing conservation events that really proved at the time that we were leaders in the field and very ambitious. It was incredibly desirable to be a part of it all.”

1997–2006: The Remodel

As beloved as the Villa had become, by the mid-1980s its facilities could no longer support the crowds of visitors and expanding conservation department (a priority of Garrett, who served as director of the Getty Museum until 1984).

As soon as the Getty Center opened in 1997, the Villa closed to fully prioritize an extensive renovation led by the architectural firm Machado and Silvetti Associates. Over the next decade, the Villa was transformed. Structural improvements, like seismic retrofitting, and accessibility features made the site stronger and safer. New design elements included windows and skylights on the museum’s once-enclosed second floor and tiled floor patterns. Additional construction included an Entry Pavilion and the Barbara and Lawrence Fleishman Theater (embellishments that direct visitors down toward the museum entrance, evoking the feeling of descending into an archaeological dig), plus a café, store, and auditorium. Unseen but equally important additions included a loading dock, freight elevators, and an X-ray room.

The European paintings, decorative arts, and other articles in Getty’s collection moved to the Center, allowing the Villa to lean into its identity as a hub for antiquity. The Ranch House was then converted to offices and a library, and added structures for laboratories gave staff more space and tools to meet and conduct research.

“Now we have state-of-the-art conservation spaces with all the right tools and equipment, a built-in gantry crane that is helpful for lifting and moving large objects such as marble sculptures, a machine shop and spray booth within our lab—a conservator’s dream,” says Svoboda.

2006: Villa Theater Program

After the remodel, staff wasted no time creating programs that made use of the Villa’s new auditorium and outdoor theater, kicking things off in early 2006 with the Villa Theater Lab. In this ongoing series, playwrights workshop their shows for two weeks and stage a weekend of performances in the auditorium. Later that year, the Outdoor Classical Theater (OCT) program was launched; actors perform one play per year for five weeks in the outdoor theater. Both the Theater Lab and OCT only feature plays inspired by the ancient Greek or Roman theatrical canon. Initially, that meant staging translations of the original texts, but that strategy evolved to include reimaginings of these plays for LA’s diverse audiences, like the East LA–set Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles.

Despite the outdoor theater’s challenges—no backstage, no permanent lighting, only half an hour to transition the space from a hangout spot to a theater—audiences have witnessed eye-popping special effects (a five-ton revolving wheel for Prometheus Bound), accessible inclusion of people with vision and hearing impairments (Deaf West Theatre’s Oedipus), and breathtaking vocal choruses (as in The Gospel at Colonus).

Over the last 18 years, the OCT program has built a loyal fan base, with many audience members returning year after year no matter what play is on stage. Among the most memorable theater-goers: Liza Minnelli, who in 2021 caught a performance inspired by her, LIZASTRATA, and was heard remarking, “Bob [Fosse] would’ve loved this show.”

2006: The Villa Scholars Program

After what is now the Getty Research Institute was founded in 1982, then director Kurt Forster spearheaded the Getty Scholars fellowship program so that academics could come to Getty and conduct research under the umbrella of a common theme. Scholars of antiquity were always included in the program, but after the Villa remodel, a separate Villa Scholars Program was launched. The program’s participants have their own offices at the Villa and focus their research on an antiquity-inspired theme, usually for about three months.

“The Villa has a more intimate character than the Center, so there is sometimes more collaboration among scholars and Villa staff,” says Alexa Sekyra, head of the Scholars Program.

Researchers have gone on to write articles and books, generate new ideas for exhibitions, plan conferences, and even come back to work full-time at Getty. The scholars’ investigations have led to unexpected discoveries—something Matthew Canepa, professor of ancient Iranian archaeology at UC Irvine and a two-time Villa Scholar, knows all about. As he was walking back to work from lunch one day during the 2019 program, he passed a lab where a conservator was cleaning a silver Parthian vessel. The conservator invited him in to take a closer look. That chance encounter led Canepa to discover inscriptions on the vessel that had never been published before, and a new method of dating Parthian silver vessels. Moreover, the study of Hellenistic and Parthian luxury material has become a major focus of his current research, an expertise that he contributed to the Getty Museum's recent Persia exhibition catalogue and which he hopes will culminate in a future monograph.

“This is one of the few programs that supports scholarship of the ancient world that isn’t very narrow,” Canepa says. “It brings in people from multiple disciplines. At least for the art history and archaeology of the ancient world and museum studies, the GRI’s Villa program is the most important research institute of its type.”

What’s the biggest challenge scholars encounter in the program? “When they don’t want to leave,” Sekyra says.

2015–18: Gallery Reinstallation

Before Timothy Potts, Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, started his tenure in 2012, he told then Getty President and CEO Jim Cuno, “I’d love to be here, but I want you to know that I think the Villa needs to be re-envisaged.”

The change Potts envisioned was reinstalling the Villa collection to highlight its quality and importance as ancient art history—as the Getty Center does for the post-antique collections. Since 2006, the Villa’s collection of Greek and Roman art had been organized by subject matter and theme, with galleries dedicated to topics like Dionysos and the theater and gods and goddesses. Potts felt this thematic style of organization, which brought together objects from very different times and places, made it hard to trace the evolution of styles, subjects, technologies, and narratives that made ancient classical art so distinctive and influential. “To understand art history, you have to see and appreciate the very real influence that earlier art has on the next generations,” he says.

From 2015 to 2018, Potts led an overhaul of the Villa galleries, grouping objects by eras and regions to help visitors more clearly see how ancient classical art and culture evolved over more than 3,000 years. This gave curators the opportunity to display objects that had been in storage for decades—frescoes from a house excavated near Pompeii, for instance—and make it easier for visitors to appreciate the beauty and significance of artworks like the Roman sculptures now on display under a sunny skylight.

“The other antiquities curators and I would go through our storage and pull out all sorts of things and say, ‘Wow, what do you think of this? What do you think of that?’” says Jeffrey Spier, recently retired Anissa and Paul John Balson II Senior Curator of Antiquities (see sidebar). “We wanted to display the best things, but we also thought, ‘How do you tell this story? What goes together?’ So that was kind of fun.”

Exhibition designers also reimagined the look of the galleries. “The cases are so beautiful,” Spier says. “The colors are so beautiful. We really thought a lot about that—the right colors for backgrounds and for the sculpture and different objects.”

2018: The Classical World in Context

Potts also pitched another project that would address a historical narrowness in Getty’s collection of ancient art: the fact that it encompasses only the “classical” cultures of Greece and Rome, reflecting a narrowly European view of these as the most artistically advanced and important. “In fact, Greco-Roman art was itself the product of extensive cultural interaction throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East,” says Potts.

“Clearly, there was a much bigger and more interesting story to be told, but we didn’t have the collections from other cultures to do this. The only solution to this problem I could come up with, and I think it was the right one, was to initiate a series of exhibitions, bringing in major loans from museums around the world, that would put Greek and Roman art in its broader context.”

This brainstorm became The Classical World in Context, a series of exhibitions, publications, and research projects that investigate and celebrate the connections that ancient Greece and Rome had with their neighbors near and far, from Britain to China. The series began in 2018 with Beyond the Nile: Egypt and the Classical World (held at the Getty Center); Persia: Ancient Iran and the Classical World followed in 2022.

These exhibitions have led to some of the highest attendance numbers the Villa has ever seen, though ultimately Potts says his goal is simply to give viewers a solid foundation in the art and culture of these ancient civilizations. “We want them to be the best exhibitions that can be done on each culture’s connections with the classical world—with loans from major museums all around the world.”