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n an unusually hotday for January inLos Angeles, withthe mercury hitting 90degrees, Barry Munitz, the president of the $9

billion J. Paul Getty Trust, the world’s richest art institution, wasdoing his best to strike a pose to match the sunshine.

“Hi, I’m Barry Munitz. I provided the weather,” he says, pump-ing my hand in the parking lot of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s mag-nificent Roman-style Getty Villa, in Malibu. Situated on 64 hillsideacres overlooking the Pacific, it stands just in front of the ranchhouse that once belonged to the collection’s founder, the industrialistJean Paul Getty. The site of the original Getty Museum, the Villawas closed for eight years for a $275 million renovation so it couldhouse the Getty’s collection of ancient artifacts. The January 28reopening was meant to be the jewel in the crown for Munitz,64, who was appointed president and chief executive officer ofthe Getty Trust in 1997. That same year the Getty’s collection

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EXHIBIT A From above: thenewly reopened Malibu Getty

Villa; newspaper headlinesabout Getty scandals; former

Getty antiquities curator MarionTrue on trial in Rome.

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The Getty’s Blue PeriodThe president of the world’s richest art institution, the $9 billion J. Paul Getty Trust,

Barry Munitz is on the ropes, with the press lambasting his tenure, California’sattorney general investigating, and former Getty antiquities curator Marion True on

trial. In a tearful interview, Munitz tries to set the record straight

By Vicky Ward

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of European paintings, drawings, manuscripts, decorative arts,and photography was relocated from the Villa to the Getty Center,Richard Meier’s famous, $1 billion complex of structures, clad inwhite travertine marble and white metal panels, in Brentwood.

Munitz, slight and lean, with a gray mustache, is wearing apurple jacket that matches the color of his car—a 1996 ChevroletCamaro convertible. When people talk about Barry Munitz, theytalk about his snappy dressing, dynamism, and charisma; somespeak with enthusiasm, some witheringly. “I think he spendsmore time picking out his wardrobe than he did trying to under-stand the issues and politics of C.S.U.,” says one of the latter, aformer colleague from Munitz’s days as chancellor of the Cali-fornia State University system.

“I’m a communicator,” says Munitz later, sitting at a table in theVilla’s sunlit conference room. We’ve just finished a tour of theplace, and Munitz has, with his trademark puppy-dog enthusiasm,pointed out its highlights—particularly the technology that enablesthe temperature and humidity of the earthquake-proof display casesto be monitored from a central station. Already, he claims, museum

officials from around the world have come to look and learn aboutthe technology. “The point of the Getty is about sharing,” he says.

But there is a nervous energy in his voice which increases as hetalks; one is not altogether surprised when, toward the end of theinterview, in which he protests that “it’s been a painful personalyear, but a remarkable professional year,” Munitz bursts into tears.

T he painful part starts with his former curator of antiquities,Marion True, 57, who is on trial in Rome, accused of con-spiring to acquire illegally 42 ancient objects now in the

Getty’s possession. She knew, it is claimed, that they had beenunearthed by looters—tombaroli (tomb raiders), as they are known.(Italy’s 1939 antiquities law says that the Italian state rightful-ly owns all objects proved to have come out of its ground after1902.) Also on trial is Robert E. Hecht Jr., an 86-year-old Paris-based art dealer, accused of selling to True many of the antiq-uities, sometimes through other dealers—although True shouldhave known, according to prosecutors, that they were in fact com-ing from Hecht and that he dealt in illicit trade.

True was indicted last April by Paolo Ferri, a tenacious Italianprosecutor who had been working on the case for many years.The primary evidence was Polaroid photos of thousands of al-legedly looted antiquities, some still covered in dirt, which hadbeen discovered in a Swiss warehouse belonging to GiacomoMedici, a Maserati-driving Italian dealer. While True is the onlymajor museum curator to have been indicted by Ferri, the Gettyis not the only U.S. museum to own objects that appear in thephotographs. So do New York’s Metropolitan Museum, Boston’sMuseum of Fine Arts, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the To-ledo Museum of Art, and the Princeton University Art Museum,according to Italian court records. However, True’s case was nothelped by a 2001 raid on Hecht’s Paris apartment, where Ferricame across a diary, the entries of which he claims confirm thelinks among Medici, Hecht, and True.

True’s indictment, however, was only the start of Munitz’sproblems. In June, the Los Angeles Times ran a profile that char-acterized him as a fast-talking operator who in 2003, while cut-ting jobs and budgets, was receiving an annual compensationpackage worth more than $1 million. The article detailed a tripon a yacht with former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan and

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KING OF THE HILL Top, Richard Meier’s Getty Center, in Brentwood,California. The 945,000-square-foot complex of white travertinemarble, metal, and glass cost $1 billion and took 13 years to complete.Above, Barry Munitz at a museum opening in Germany in 2004.

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“Barry was never going to fit well with the museum types,because he didn’t have an arts background,” says an art dealer.

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his wife, and lavish Getty-financed junkets to Cuba and Greece.Munitz’s contract allows him to fly first-class, and he did so withgusto—taking 30 trips between 1999 and 2002. Also, he pur-chased, on the Getty’s dime, a $72,000 Porsche Cayenne, whichhe had souped up with the “best possible sound system, the big-gest possible sunroof,” and “power everything.” (The car wasjustified as being for board members when they visited.)

Perhaps most serious, the article accused Munitz of unloadinga piece of Getty land for what was alleged to be $700,000 lessthan market value to his friend the wealthy philanthropist EliBroad. (In a strongly worded response to the paper, the Getty’sboard denied that the sale price was beneath market value; infact, they said, they were pleased to be able to unload it, becausethe land has restricted access and they saved a broker’s fee.)

Also controversial—actually, it’s the main gripe of many of theGetty employees interviewed by V.F.—was that Munitz hired ashis chief of staff Jill Murphy, now 33, whom he had discoveredwaiting tables when she was a student at Cal State Sacramento

and he was the C.S.U. chancellor. Not only her lack of back-ground in the arts but her management style offended manypeople. “She’s the type who would [figuratively] kick you in thekneecaps,” says one person.

There has been a steady trickle of senior executives out thedoor. In 1999, the general counsel of the Getty Trust, ChristineSteiner, left amid rumors about a conflict with Munitz. In 2002,acting general counsel Penny Cobey and longtime executive andchief operating officer Stephen Rountree both departed. In Au-gust 2004, the museum’s associate director for administrationand public affairs, Barbara Whitney, resigned. Two months lat-er, Deborah Gribbon, the museum’s director, left amid reportsthat she and Munitz had philosophical clashes. “I think she leftbecause she no longer had any faith that the Getty was beingrun according to sound principles,” says John Walsh, Gribbon’spredecessor. In September 2005, her successor, acting museumhead William Griswold, quit to take the reins at the Minneapo-lis Institute of Arts.

Whitney was outspoken in her criticism of how the Getty wasbeing run. “Barry and his key staff members not only lack theexpertise but have little regard—and actually seem to have con-tempt—for those who do have it,” said Whitney.

“I’m concerned that the Getty board has been spending [toomuch] time watching old episodes of Lifestyles of the Rich andFamous,” commented Iowa senator Charles Grassley, the chair-man of the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees tax-exempt organizations, after he read the June 2005 L.A. Timesstory about Munitz’s alleged extravagances. According to a staff-er, Grassley’s office is considering writing a letter of complaint tothe Getty board.

M unitz’s reaction to the L.A. Times article, he says now,was astonishment. He was particularly hurt by the impli-cation that his wife is a diva in the mold of the Joan

Collins character in Dynasty. “I’m sure you’ve heard from othersshe is the most caring, modestly living person,” he says.

But more shocks were in store; just four months later, in Oc-tober, an L.A. Times investigation cited information from confi-dential documents, widely thought to have been leaked by a formeror current Getty employee, showing, among other problems, thatMarion True had in 1995 been given a loan of nearly $400,000

for a house on the Greek island of Paros by an associate of Lon-don art dealer Robin Symes, who had sold objects to the Getty inthe late 80s and early 90s. (Symes spent seven months in jail lastyear for perjury after he lied about two antiquities sales worthmore than $2 million.) The next year, True borrowed another$400,000 from the collectors Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman torepay the loan just three days after she and the Fleischmans sealed ahuge deal for 334 Greek, Roman, and Etruscan antiquities to fill ingaps in the Villa collection. Evidently, senior Getty executives hadreceived a tip about the first loan as long ago as 2002, but didnothing about it. By last fall, California attorney general Bill Lock-yer had begun a formal investigation into the finances of the J. PaulGetty Trust, including the pay and perks received by Munitz.

Meanwhile, the Getty tried to take control of events. In Oc-tober, True retired, although the Getty is still paying her legalfees for the ongoing trial. She was, say sources, disinvited from thereopening of the Villa. (A Getty spokesperson says True is wel-come at the Villa at any time and does not need an invitation.)

In October the board of the Getty Trust set up a five-memberteam to conduct an internal investigation, spearheaded byRonald L. Olson, a high-profile Los Angeles lawyer who has rep-resented former Hollywood superagent Michael Ovitz and in-vestor Warren Buffett. Both Olson and the board chairman,John Biggs, who is head of the new team, claimed that theinvestigation would be entirely “independent.” The L.A. Timesand The New York Times, however, pointed out that most of theboard members, and especially those on the five-member inves-tigative team, were friends or appointees of Munitz’s. (Olson saidthat anyone with conflicts of interest would be removed fromthe investigation.)

Then, in late December, the Washington, D.C.–based Councilon Foundations, an advocacy group for nonprofits, announced itwas placing the Getty Trust on a 60-day probation pending thedelivery of documents answering allegations of financial miscon-duct. It is tantamount to a notice that the trust is “not in goodstanding,” said president Steve Gunderson.

Still, the media assaults on Munitz kept coming; a Novem-ber New York Times piece claimed he had greatly upset Gettymuseum officials by moving two 17th-century drawings by theDutch artist Herman van Swanevelt to a room without climatecontrol for a dinner with former Paramount head Sherry Lan-sing and her husband, the director William Friedkin, who col-lect Dutch art.

“Could all this stuff in the paper possibly be true?” wonderedan old friend of Munitz’s. It was a question many of Munitz’sfriends were mulling.

“The person that I have been reading about is not the personI know,” says Sherry Lansing.

‘I t’s a miracle,” says Munitz of his journey to the Getty fromBrooklyn, where he was born. His father, an accountant,walked out on his mother, his sister, and him when Barry was

seven, and disappeared. When Munitz is asked about the impactthis had on him, his voice cracks, and tears well up and rolldown his cheeks. “There was no role model,” he says. “Therewere mentors who were crucial to me . . . and that’s becomemy life. I mean the driving theme was outreach and educationand . . . giving back.”

Significantly, perhaps, despite four marriages, he has never had

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“The board voted me in . . . in 2004,” says Munitz. “It pains me I missed the opportunity to be a better communicator.”


children of his own. When asked once by Lansing’s 12-year-oldstepson, Jack, why not, he replied, “Well, I just think I wouldworry all the time that something would go wrong, and I wouldbe so pained for them. . . . If something would hurt them, I thinkI couldn’t exist.” To me he says, “Clearly, when you’ve beenraised with that kind of dysfunction and challenge, you want totry to lessen the likelihood that it’s going to happen to others.”

Munitz was married briefly to his college sweetheart. He gothis B.A. at Brooklyn College and then went on to Princeton forhis Ph.D. in comparative literature. He started teaching at theUniversity of California at Berkeley, where he married a formerstudent. He worked on the president’s staff at the Carnegie Foun-dation Commission on Higher Education for two years and thenmoved to the University of Illinois, where he eventually becamea vice president. There he broke up with his second wife andembarked on an affair with Martha Sanford, the beautiful andintelligent wife of a wealthy local businessman. Seven years Mu-nitz’s senior, Sanford was interested in education and knew herway around university politics. “I think I was useful to him inthat sense,” she says now. But she was also the mother of threedaughters, and her friends were concerned she was making amistake in divorcing her husband to marry Munitz.

“It was quite the scandal,” Sanford remembers. “But at thetime Barry dazzled me.”

The pair got married in September 1971. Sanford remembersthat even back then Munitz had “a different vision from mostpeople in academia . . . he basically became unwelcome in Illi-nois—although that was never made public,” she says. Anotherperson there recalls, “He didn’t quite fit, in my opinion, in theacademic life. I think he was very ambitious and often didn’trecognize when he was crossing a line. I don’t know that he wastold to leave. I know that he might have been encouraged tolook at his options.”

I n 1976, the couple relocated to Houston and a year laterMunitz became president of the University of Houston’s30,000 -student central campus. There he got involved

with the Houston Grand Opera, where he met wife numberfour, Anne, who worked in the music and production depart-ments. Friends say Martha Munitz was very hurt by the wayhe flaunted his new girlfriend in public.

In 1980, Charles Bishop was appointed chancellor of the Uni-

versity of Houston system. He and Munitz, evidently, were likeoil and water, and few were surprised when, in 1982, Munitz de-cided to go into the private sector, after his tennis buddy, localbusiness executive Charles Hurwitz, threw down the gauntlet,saying, “You think you’re so smart, why don’t you come in andtry to do this?”

In 1982, Hurwitz made Munitz a senior executive of MaxxamInc., a large shareholder in the United Financial Group (U.F.G.).Unfortunately, Hurwitz had gotten involved with the notorioushead of Drexel Burnham Lambert’s bond-trading department,Michael Milken, and soon Munitz was caught up in one of thecountry’s costliest and thorniest savings-and-loan disasters.

Using the United Savings Association of Texas (U.S.A.T.), theprincipal subsidiary of U.F.G., Munitz and Hurwitz bought near-ly $1.8 billion of Milken’s junk bonds and other Drexel-brokeredsecurities, while Hurwitz was pursuing aggressive takeover schemeswith Drexel financing, including the acquisition of Pacific Lumber,



“How could the Getty be run by someone who would not be allowed to work in a bank?” asks one employee.

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OUR CROWD Clockwise from above: Getty antiquities; from left, RichardMeier, Getty board members Robert Erburu and Harold M. Williams, andGetty Center director John Walsh, 1997; Munitz, ex–chief of staff Jill Murphy,and filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, 2001; J. Paul Getty in 1966.

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where he compiled a controversial environmental record andclosed down the company’s pension fund. In 1990 the govern-ment had to spend $1.6 billion to bail out U.S.A.T., and in 1995the U.S. Office of Thrift Supervision filed a civil suit againstMaxxam, Hurwitz, Munitz, and other parties who it said had con-tributed to U.S.A.T.’s failure. In addition to charging that Hur-witz and Munitz and the others who controlled U.S.A.T. ran itinto the ground with decisions that were “unsafe and unsound,”the government accused its senior management of taking exces-sive bonuses and severance packages before its collapse. Accord-ing to the Office of Thrift Supervision, Munitz was, in 1989, 1990,and 1991, “unjustly enriched” by a salary which totaled $959,876,paid from assets that should have gone toward maintainingU.S.A.T.’s net worth.

Munitz and four others settled with the government for morethan $1 million in 1999, a year after he arrived at the Getty. Allfive were prohibited for three years from working at a federallyinsured bank or similar business. (Hurwitz settled the chargesagainst him in 2002 and then won $72.3 million in sanctionsfor the government’s having brought a frivolous lawsuit. The gov-ernment is appealing the sanctions, and evidence has emergedthat California Republican congressmen John T. Doolittle andRichard W. Pombo joined forces with former House majorityleader Tom DeLay to pressure the Federal Deposit Insurance

Corporation to cease its investigation, which it did in 2002. Hur-witz contributed thousands of dollars to all three, including dona-tions made while the F.D.I.C. case was ongoing, and he has given$5,000 to DeLay’s current legal-defense fund.)

T he irony of the troubled years spent with Hurwitz is thatwithout them, Munitz agrees, he would not have had suffi-cient business experience to run the Getty. “If I had it to do

over again I absolutely would have taken a detour in business,” hesays. When asked if he would repeat the Hurwitz experience, hesays, “I’m not at all prepared to say absolutely not. I don’t know.Because life doesn’t present you those retroactive choices. Youknow, sometimes you learn more from the painful pieces.”

Bruce Rinaldi, the federal regulator who deposed Munitz, says,“My feeling was that while Barry Munitz certainly had close in-volvement with Charles Hurwitz—his office was virtually nextdoor—he wasn’t the one with the financial wherewithal or ex-pertise behind these mortgage-backed securities. Munitz playedmore of a front-man role.”

That role, however, had its own problems in that it requiredMunitz, in his capacity as a director of Maxxam, to be associatedwith two controversial projects—the clear-cutting of ancient red-woods on land owned by Pacific Lumber and the construction ofa luxury hotel in Rancho Mirage, California, on lambing groundsfor the now endangered Peninsular bighorn sheep. These wouldplague Munitz when he returned to academia. Appointed chan-cellor of the C.S.U. system in 1991, he was nicknamed “the Texaschain-saw chancellor” by environmental activists, and there wasa series of demonstrations against him on campuses. At onemeeting, he recalls, demonstrators dressed up as trees and felldown when he entered the room, so he addressed them, “Ladies,gentlemen, and trees . . . ”

Munitz says he made no attempt to hide his past controversiesfrom C.S.U. “It was very public,” he says. “Everybody had achance to take a shot at me in 1991. There were long newspaper

stories about Maxxam. . . . And what I said to them, and I guesssuccessfully to be hired, is ‘Here’s who I am. These are what myvalues are.’”

California state senators Tom Hayden and John Vasconcelloswere among the most vocal opponents of Munitz because ofthe Maxxam experience. Munitz says they were “unbelievablytough on me in the beginning [but] interestingly, I got to be pret-ty close to both of them.”

“I loved him. I trusted him,” says Vasconcellos. The key is-sues facing C.S.U. at the time were “diversity and quality of fac-ulty. . . . I thought Barry was so bright and so charming. . . . Hewas a spectacular chancellor.”

Blenda Wilson, president of Cal State Northridge until June1999 and a former board member of the Getty, adds, “We need-ed someone with the skills to be able to talk to everyone to raiseawareness within the legislatures so we’d get the necessary fund-ing. Barry is great at that.”

N ot all the members of his faculty and staff loved him,however. “I’ve just blurred that from my memory as justa bad dream,” says a former colleague. Even so, the arti-

cles about Munitz at the time were flattering, bordering on unc-tuous. A Los Angeles Times Magazine cover story gushed, “Hequotes William Butler Yeats, rock star Bob Seger and IBM

chairman Lou Gerstner. Speaking without notes and unaccom-panied by handlers, he is charming, even entertaining.”

It was this article, people assume, that brought Munitz to theattention of Robert Erburu, the chairman emeritus of the TimesMirror Company, which then owned the Los Angeles Times. Erbu-ru also happened to be chairman of the board of the Getty, whichwas then looking to fill its top job. To his surprise, says Munitz,he got a call from a recruiting firm, but initially he wasn’t inter-ested. “Ironically, you’re usually a lot more effective when youdon’t think you either want or are going to get the job,” he says.

In the interview he said that the Getty was widely seen as tooelite and that it needed to have greater outreach and fiscal re-working. He argued that the trust’s wealth should be used tospread excellence around the world—by sharing with other cul-tural institutions. He placed emphasis on education rather thanart, although the museum, he realized, would always be themost visible part of the trust. The search committee voiced itsconcerns about Maxxam, just as C.S.U. had. When asked nowwhy the board was prepared to offer the post of president tosomeone who would a year later be barred from working ina bank, a Getty spokesperson said that assurances from C.S.U.lawyers satisfied them.

When Munitz was offered the post, Sherry Lansing says, shetold him not to take it. “Sherry argued in the most caring way. Itwasn’t so much an argument. It was basically ‘O.K., tell me againwhy you think this is a good idea given what you care about andgiven what your values are,’” says Munitz. But the Getty, he says,told him, “We don’t think you understand what the job is. . . . Weare committed to having this be an educational institution.”

W hen J. Paul Getty died, in 1976, the irascible, unpre-dictable oil magnate, who had never liked any of hischildren—or, indeed, any of his five wives—left $700

million, the bulk of his fortune, to a trust for funding a museumto be started with his antiquities collection: around 9,000 or so




“I loved him. I trusted him,” says State Senator John Vasconcellos. “I thought Barry was so bright and so charming.”


pieces he had collected and housed at his Malibu ranch, whichhe opened to the public. The first curator of antiquities was JiriFrel, who left the Getty amid allegations of buying fakes andovervaluing donated artworks.

In 1981, Harold Williams, a mild-mannered lawyer who hadheaded the Securities and Exchange Commission under Presi-dent Jimmy Carter, was brought in to take charge. Williams didnot know much about art, but he hired experts considered to bethe best in their fields. Premier among these was John Walsh, anexpert in 17th-century Dutch paintings, who was appointed themuseum’s curator in 1983. He, in turn, hired Deborah Gribbonas his number two, and the pair were widely admired by the mu-seum staff. “John Walsh was the kind of person who wrote end-less handwritten notes,” remembers one person. “He was a veryserious academic. Debbie was the perfect counterpart for him.They even began to talk alike, they worked so closely together.”

But there was friction at the Getty even then. The seven de-partments jostled one another for money, and such internal di-visions were exacerbated by the fact that the departments werelocated in assorted buildings around Los Angeles, while the mu-seum was housed in the Malibu villa. Williams and the boardhad the vision of uniting the branches at the Brentwood GettyCenter, a sprawling campus where every building—each housinga faculty—is visible from all the others. In 1984 they commis-sioned Meier, whose design beat out those of I. M. Pei, FrankGehry, and Philip Johnson, among others.

In 1997, at a cost of $1 billion, the Getty Center opened,and soon after, Williams retired and was replaced by Munitz,whose arrival was greeted with suspicion. “Barry was never go-ing to fit well with the museum types, because he didn’t havean arts background,” says a prominent art dealer. “People in themuseum world are particularly resistant to change and are verysnobbish.”

Munitz initially seemed not to care. He introduced himself ina speech in front of all 1,200 employees in the courtyard at theGetty Center. Someone who was there recalls him making prom-ises that might be difficult to keep. When a senior executivepointed that out, Munitz allegedly said, “Theater, it’s theater.”(“Why would I say that?” Munitz asks now.)

Sources said that it was apparent early on that many peoplewould be leaving. “As a change agent . . . I said to them [thestaff], ‘Strap on your seat belts’—not that I was looking forward tohaving a conflict,” Munitz says, adding that the number of peo-ple who have left the museum under his watch is proportional-ly very small.

S ome of the worst resentment was caused by Munitz’schief of staff, Jill Murphy. For one “entire meeting Jillsat in a leather chair [at] a huge conference table,” says a

Getty employee. “She had her legs in a lotus position, sort ofcross legs. She was wearing a little skirt. And she spent thewhole meeting pushing herself off the table and twirling aroundin the chair . . . like a little kid.” (Murphy did not respond to re-quests for comments.)

Munitz was evidently aware of Murphy’s shortcomings—helater described her as having “sharp elbows”—but he didn’t wantto confront her about them.

“To have this twentysomething ex-waitress who really didn’tknow squat about the art world . . . would be forgivable,” says



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“He basically became unwelcome in Illinois,” says Munitz’s third wife, Martha Sanford, “although that was never made public.”

UNDERGROUND ART From top: art dealers Robert Hecht Jr., left, in 2006, and Giacomo Medici after a 1997 police raid on his Geneva warehouse; former Getty antiquities curator Marion True; Italian prosecutor Paolo Ferri.

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an insider, but “the perks issues are so offensive in combina-tion with everything else. . . . If it was a John Walsh, or a Har-old Williams, someone who was passionately committed tothe Getty’s mission, who was tooting around the world,spending big bucks, doing all that stuff, nobody would blinkan eye. No one would care. It’s because he [Munitz] is notpassionately committed, everyone feels he is there for thewrong reasons.”

In August, “amid much rejoicing,” according to one em-ployee, it was reported that Murphy would be leaving the Gettyby the end of the year to fight world poverty. “We all prettymuch fell on the floor and wept because we were laughing sohard,” says a current employee.

Munitz believes Murphy was unfairly demonized: “She wasbasically a very, very smart, very young woman in a settingwhere some people had trouble with that. . . . She was my re-

sponsibility, she was my staff person, and maybe she becamea target because some people didn’t want to fight with me. Butshe wasn’t out there by herself making decisions.”

M eanwhile, the unhappiness spread at what was seen asMunitz’s selfishness. “The Getty, in order to act re-sponsibly with its wealth, had to have a very transpar-

ent and careful process of deciding [in] what areas it wouldmake grants and what its criteria would be for deciding whowould get them,” explains a former employee. “With Barry’sarrival, suddenly he brought a sense of kind of personal pref-erence and interest to things that everybody else at the Get-ty had worked really hard to suppress. . . . The film [First Year,directed by Davis Guggenheim, about education, having noth-ing to do with art] was seen as a vehicle for Barry’s personalambitions.”

Munitz says that in retrospect he misunderstood the nature ofthe institution. “What I hadn’t really fully thought through wasgoing from the underdog institution to the elite institution. Andeight years later I’m still not sure I have fully realized it,” hesays. “It becomes very political and very personal when a mis-sion and a priority decision is undertaken in an institution ofsuch relative wealth.”

Munitz says he had a moment of realization a few monthsinto the job, after he gave a radio interview in which he said thatthe Getty would now consider fund-raising and developmentwork. “It was a front-page story,” he says. Whereas at C.S.U., hesays, he “could have declared the world was coming to an endand it would be maybe a little box on page 137 of the Los Ange-les or The New York Times.”

“After the board had voted me in for a five-year term,in 2004,” says Munitz, “that was the opportunity to reallyspend an enormous time in-house talking to everybody. . . . Itpains me that I missed the opportunity to be a better commu-nicator.”

Lack of explanation from the top is indeed one of the woescited by Munitz’s detractors, who felt, in particular, that whenthe Maxxam case was settled, in 1999, he should have beenmore forthcoming about what had happened. “Instead,” saysone employee, “you had this terrible atmosphere with every-one wondering what it meant. How could the Getty be run bysomeone who would not be allowed to work in a bank? It wasvery demoralizing.”

L ast year the Getty returned three artifacts to the Italians,and few people thought that the matter would get as far asan indictment. “Many antiquities in the market have falsi-

fied backgrounds,” comments Maxwell L. Anderson, the formerdirector of New York City’s Whitney Museum and a principal atAEA, an arts consulting firm. “Museums have had few meansto determine the accuracy of a purported provenance, apartfrom writing government officials in those countries from whichobjects can be assumed to have been excavated, to see if theyhave information about a work or works gone missing. The prob-lem is, if an object was spirited out of the ground in the coverof darkness, the government in question will, of course, have norecord of its disappearance.”

Marion True, it’s been argued by defenders such as MalcolmBell III, a University of Virginia art-history professor and vicepresident of the Archaeological Institute of America, was actual-

ly one of the profession’s moral innovators. “The Getty policyis arguably the strongest of any major American museum, andas far as we know it has not been violated. Other museums, in-cluding the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of FineArts in Boston, and several major university collections (Prince-ton and Harvard among them), instead follow the policy adoptedby the Association of Art Museum Directors, which allows thepurchase of undocumented antiquities if the museum believes ac-quisition is justified,” Professor Bell wrote in a New York Timesop-ed piece.

True’s peers believe that in part she was targeted because of theGetty’s vast wealth. Its operating budget of $250 million a yearmeans it can buy just about anything it wants. But other U.S. mu-seums are staying vigilant. In November, Philippe de Montebello,the director of the Metropolitan, met in Rome with officialsof Italy’s Culture Ministry, and in January the Italians proposedthat the Met return 15 pieces of disputed Hellenistic silver andother artifacts in exchange for a series of future long-term loans.

“The antiquities issue is going to affect all museums, not justus,” says Munitz.

True, meanwhile, faces a possible 10 years in prison if she isconvicted in Italy. In January she sold her Santa Monica condo-minium for just under $1 million and went to live in northernFrance with her husband, Patrick de Maisonneuve, an architec-ture professor.

A t the end of our time Munitz shows me back to the park-ing lot, where he is eager to point out his car—the Ca-maro, not the Getty Porsche. Once again Munitz has a

swing in his step as he takes in the ravishing scenery. Does he have an idea of what he might want to do after his

time at the Getty? He has a tenured teaching spot at C.S.U., hesays, and he might want to do that.

He describes what he thinks of as the most magical momentof his career. “When you stand up at a podium as the head ofthe campus or the head of the [university] system, and you say,as I would do all the time, ‘Would everybody in the audience . . .whose child here is the first person in the family to graduatefrom college stand up and stay standing.’ And then, ‘Everybody inthe audience who wasn’t born in this country, please stand up.’And you look out, and there’s hardly anybody sitting down. Andthen I would say to myself, ‘It was worth it.’”

His eyes tear up again. ��



“It’s because Munitz is not passionately committed, everyone feels he is there for the wrong reasons,” says an insider.



getty

Documents

original getty museum

getty scandals

getty center

paul getty trust

museum barry

im barry munitz

munitz bursts

toledo museum of art