Dr. Katherine E. Fleming
Trumpeting public pride in one’s children, though a sacred parental right, can be ghastly bad form, and so far as this blog goes, I try to limit myself to one such transgression per decade per child. Even with three dynamic offspring, this stingy policy keeps the self-advertisement to a tolerable level. The last time I exercised my self-authorized privilege with regard to our daughter Katherine was in 2010 when she was awarded a fancy prize at the Sorbonne. That was more than twelve years ago, so I feel permitted to mention that she is just at the moment in Los Angeles for consultations. The trustees of the J. Paul Getty Trust, having concluded an exhaustive intergalactic search process, have just announced her appointment as President and Chief Executive Officer of their well-heeled cultural and educational institutions.
J. Paul Getty was a twentieth-century oil tycoon who died in 1976. He amassed a vast fortune. In the days when a million dollars was still a significant amount of money, he was a billionaire. But the American attitude toward people of great wealth is hopelessly ambiguous. Being as rich as Midas often invites the Midas curse. Really rich people are eminently otherable. Getty was often said to be the richest man in America, and a license to despise the richest man in America will always be a part of our national birthright. “Let me tell you about the very rich,” says the narrator of an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story barely distinguishable from the author. “They are different from you and me.” Hemingway’s sensible answer, unfortunately apocryphal, was “Yes, they have more money.” I know little enough about the historical Getty. My first conscious memory of hearing his name is musical, a reference in a satirical song sung by a left-wing folk singer. “John Paul Getty is just plain folks/The UN charter is a cruel hoax/How do I know? /I read it in the Daily News”. The satirical object here was not the billionaire but the then right-wing popular newspaper, the New York Daily News, which in that epoch was roughly analogous to today’s Fox Network. Getty was not just plain folks, to be sure, but he didn’t light cigars with hundred-dollar bills either. Sensational displays of conspicuous consumption are more characteristic of the wannabe superrich than of the real deals. He was frugal enough to haggle with his grandson’s Mafia kidnappers even after they had sent him a morsel of the kid’s severed ear. When it came to wine, women, and song, he appears to have concentrated on the middle term, and in a big way. But he also loved works of art, was active and informed in putting together one of the world’s great private collections, and visionary in establishing a trust with a huge potential for advancing the study, understanding, and creation of art in a world-wide context. I have a keen sense of appreciation for cultural philanthropists. Henry Clay Frick and J. P. Morgan are often catalogued among the robber barons, but when I’m looking at the Holbein portraits in the Frick Collection or examining a medieval manuscript in the Morgan Library I want to classify them as friends of humanity. As so often, Shakespeare says it best: “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”
The Getty’s activities are distributed among four divisions, each with its own director, under the leadership of the President of the Trust. The one that most people know about is the Getty Museum, magnificently set into a coastal hill in Los Angeles and stunning alike in the architecture of its buildings and in the opulence of its collections. In fact there are two museums. But the Getty also runs a unique atelier to preserve fragile and vulnerable works of art and to train the skilled professionals who conserve them, administers an important program of research grants and fellowships, and maintains an academic research institute supported by a huge library devoted to art and architectural history with a broad approach to visual culture. I have personal experience of only two of these. I visited the Getty Museum a few years ago. Thirty years earlier I had failed in an application to gain one of their fellowships to research a book on Franciscan painting. So I know they have a great museum and high standards.
That this unique cultural institution of international consequence would seek out and cajole our daughter to be its leader naturally warrants our parental pride. The Board of Trustees must include some very persuasive folks. It is one thing to get a job one has applied for and quite another to be lured away from a job in which one is fully engaged. Being a successful seeker doubtless demonstrates force of character and initiative, but being sought after out of the blue is even better and can capture the imagination in a uniquely persuasive fashion. So we are proud of Katy’s having been searched out, but even prouder of her spunk and energy in taking on the challenge. Moving from being the Provost of a huge, sprawling university to the presidency of a very different kind of institution will not be just the same old same old in a different place. My response, less as a father than as a humanist scholar in a culture where by and large the humanities are undervalued, is a humanist’s response. The humanities are devoted to the study of things created by human skill and imagination. Some of these are material and physical. All are what Collingwood called “artefacts of human intellection”—the results of men and women thinking. And the diversity of human thought has been in the past, and continues to be today, most remarkable. One of the first books to expand my appreciation of the humanistic dimensions of art history was Ernst Gombrich’s Art and Illusion (1960). Aided by a Saul Steinberg cartoon, he makes the claim that no one could possibly credit that human beings have changed as much through history as their artistic representations might suggest. Viewing an object, like reading a book, always invites interpretation or “judgement,” as it was called in the neo-classical period. Are there sound humanistic canons of judgement? Are there objective standards at all? Another famous theorist of the visual arts, Heinrich Wölfflin, says “People have at all times seen what they want to see.” Never has this startling idea seemed more challenging than in the present cultural moment. Museums and libraries are therefore not merely the indispensable repositories and protectors of the of the artifacts of human thought, but also the arenas in which they are tested and contested. Hence the educational function of such an institution at the Getty is obvious. Indeed, one of its earlier presidents called it a “university”.
The tendency of the elderly to wax valedictory is probably a natural one. Certainly we are very aware these days of narrowing horizons and lengthening shadows. That is even without the discouragement of world event. How wonderful it is, then, to see ever arising on the horizon a new and improved generation in whom one can discern the continuity of one’s own best values while appreciating and indeed marveling at the new, independent, and daring nature of their expression. Although they are our superior successors, they still have a few things to learn. For example, too few of them are readers of Tennyson. The old order changeth , yielding place to new, And God fulfils himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
-o-
Happy Palm Sunday
James Ensor: Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 (detail)
Getty Museum of Art
