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Dr Timothy Potts: engagement & interpretation at the Getty Museum

The Getty Museum’s director talks about the institution’s goals and why he thinks museums are important

Dr Timothy Potts, art historian, archaeologist, and museum director, has been director of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles since 2012. His previous position was director and Marlay Curator of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, from 2008 to 2012. During this time, he was also a professorial fellow and director of studies in the history of art at Clare College.

Getty-Museum-Courtyard
Getty Museum Courtyard, 2017 Photo: Elon Schoenholz © 2017 J. Paul Getty Trust

Before that, he was director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas from 1998 to 2007, director of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, from 1994 to 1998, and a research lecturer and research fellow in ancient art and archaeology at Christ Church, Oxford, from 1984 to 1990.

A fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, he was born in Sydney, Australia. Potts holds a BA with double first-class honours and university medals in archaeology/ancient art and philosophy from the University of Sydney, and a D.Phil. (PhD) in ancient Near Eastern art and archaeology from the University of Oxford. He is the author of numerous publications on ancient art, culture and history; museum studies; and art history.

He speaks to blooloop about the institution‘s mission and its collections, and how it is aiming to engage a wide audience.

An interest in ancient history and art

Timothy-Potts-Getty Museum

Potts remembers clearly how he was first drawn into a career focusing on ancient history and art:

“I have a very precise answer to that because I have the books that I requested for my 11th birthday. They were all about Tutankhamun, Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.

At that stage, he adds, his interest can only really have been fed by books:

“There weren’t really those sorts of documentaries on TV and I didn’t visit museums at that age. For my teenage years, it was essentially books, and reading widely. The whole idea of cultures that long ago, and the spectacular nature of things like Tutankhamun and the Assyrian palaces in Iraq and ancient culture in general got under my skin.

” I got the bug and it never really went away, although my interests widened dramatically over the years. But that’s where it starts. That’s my origin story.”

From academia to the museum world

He can pinpoint the incident that drew him from academia to the museum sector with similar certainty:

“There is an equally precise answer to that. I did my DPhil at Oxford and had a research lectureship then a postdoc, and so was in academic life. I was excavating in the Middle East by that stage, co-directing a dig in Jordan.”

It had been his ambition to be an archaeologist:

“I knew that meant attending university and getting the appropriate qualifications. It was very clear to me that was the path I needed to take. I was fortunate that I managed to find opportunities at the different stages of my academic life. I did see myself staying in that world for my entire career.”

british museum
The British Museum

The event that drew him to museums was an invitation to curate an exhibition at the British Museum on the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean and the Middle East:

“This was put to me as a general proposition. So, I crafted it as the narrative of how civilisation, as we call it, is first recognized in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and then right through to the coming of Christianity in the fourth century AD. I chose a hundred objects which told that story, wrote every word of the catalogue, and selected the objects. This exhibition was quite a success.”

Curating an exhibition for the British Museum

The exhibition was Civilization: Ancient Treasures from the British Museum. It traced the story of civilisation up to the Christianization of Rome in the 4th century. After the opening, it travelled to several venues in Australia and Japan. Then, smaller versions of it went elsewhere around the world.

Civilization- Ancient Treasures from the British Museum
Civilization- Ancient Treasures from the British Museum

“Here was a world in which not just a few people, or even a few hundred people, but thousands of people come to these exhibitions, see them, enjoy them,” he says. “The press coverage is then read by many more thousands of people. The idea of the impact that your work and scholarship can have in introducing people to the interest and importance of this material was something I found surprising and also energising. It’s great that your work can affect people’s lives in this way.

This took place while Potts was at Christ Church, Oxford. When the exhibition travelled to the National Gallery in Canberra, Potts went with it. Here, he remembers having a conversation with the museum’s director about a career in museums. This director told him that, while he had good curatorial and academic credentials, he would need to distinguish himself in a management role, if he wanted a senior role in a museum.

Potts resigned from his fellowship at Christ Church, and went into the City for a period. He worked for Lehman Brothers from 1990-1994, which he says was a ‘means to an end’. Goldman Sachs then approached him:

“However, this was when the opportunity at the National Gallery of Victoria came up, and I became the director there instead. I threw myself into it and greatly enjoyed it. I’ve never regretted it for a minute.”

A hands-on director for the Getty Museum

In a previous interview, Potts said:

“Central to my approach to being a museum director is a continuing involvement with the material, and the understanding of it.”

Getty Museum gallery
© 2006 J. Paul Getty Trust
Getty Museum gallery © 2006 J. Paul Getty Trust

He qualifies this:

“I wouldn’t want that to sound too narrow and academic. It’s about the engagement with the material and its interpretation, and why it’s interesting. So, it can be very unacademic. For instance, ot can be talking to people. It can be communicating the interest and importance of it to 12-year-olds, not just to other academics. It’s the interest and continuing fascination with the material, and your belief that it just is important.”

“This stuff deserves to be in museums, where it can be studied and made accessible to people. It can be an important part of understanding where we came from, and why our lives are the way they are today. These cultures made a difference. To use a cliché, it’s part of who we are. It’s important and meaningful.”

This speaks very much to his own interpretation of his role. He says:

“There are directors of museums who see their role much more as the sort of CEO who manages the budget and operations, and perhaps spends most of their time managing up to the board, and is not directly engaged in decisions over which exhibitions are done and which acquisitions are made. But the great appeal to me of being a museum director lies in being involved in those decisions. And in being, occasionally, a curator or co-curator.

“I wouldn’t want the job, frankly, if it were a purely administrative role.”

What makes the Getty Museum unique?

After four years at the National Gallery of Victoria, Potts went on to be director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas from 1998-2007, then of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge from 2008. He has been leading the Getty since 1 September 2012.

A few things, he contends, set the Getty apart:

“It is, in some ways, unique. Its origins are not unique – a wealthy American collector, J Paul Getty – but the size of the endowment that he left and the richness of the programming that has been possible from that perhaps is.”

Getty Center Garden
Central Garden designed by Robert Irwin Photo by Jim Duggan © 2006 J. Paul Getty Trust

“We have, famously or infamously, become the wealthiest museum institution in the world, in terms of our endowment. So, we can make the decision that everything we do should and must be at the very top level of quality, importance, and relevance, and have the latest research behind it. It gives us the freedom and independence to do topics that might otherwise be seen either as too esoteric or quirky or controversial.

“Because of the strength of the engine under us through the endowment, we can make those decisions to be a bit bolder, perhaps, than other institutions who might have to worry about how the press will read it, and whether that might have implications for their reputation. We are, of course, equally conscious of our reputation. But we believe that being bold at times will enhance it rather than diminish it. We want to engage with the big issues of the time.”

Collecting challenges

Collecting is, increasingly, a contested issue:

“There is the decolonisation of museums; there is the restitution issue, which, of course, has affected the Getty as much as other museums. These are all big issues. We take a considered and ethical position on them, but these are areas which, in today’s world, are very much under scrutiny.”

He highlights another factor that makes the Getty unique:

“We are part of a bigger Getty. The museum is the core and the origin of the institution. But, in the early eighties when the Getty Trust came into existence from the estate of Mr Getty after his death, other programmes were created. These are the Getty Research Institute, the Conservation Institute, and the Foundation.”

Getty Center
Getty Research Institute Photo: Scott Frances/Esto © 2003 J. Paul Getty Trust

“The Getty Center is a bit like a campus. Less than a hundred yards from the museum is the Getty Research Institute. Here, visiting scholars are doing research on all sorts of things. The library resources are second to none.

“The Getty Conservation Institute is another 50 yards away. We have some of the best conservation scientists in the world doing research on the materiality of objects and conservation issues in environmental treatments and so on, as well as conservation departments within the museum that do the treatments on our paintings, sculptures, and other objects.”

Conservation at the Getty Museum

The Getty does a lot of this sort of work on works of art from other museums. He explains:

“We have the expertise and resources to do it, and they don’t. We’ve got, for instance, a very major painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, which was blown up in the explosion in Beirut. It has been very seriously damaged. It’s in our labs now. We will bring it back to life, and it’ll look almost as good as it did before the blast. It’ll take years and a lot of resources. But we can do it, and it will bring this painting back to life.”

Ulrich Birkmaier uses a q-tip and solvent to

clean the painting surface
Photo: Cassia Davis
© 2022 J. Paul Getty Trust
Ulrich Birkmaier uses a q-tip and solvent to clean the painting surface Photo: Cassia Davis © 2022 J. Paul Getty Trust

The painting was discovered in the wreckage of the 18th-century Sursock Palace after the warehouse explosion in August 2020. Subsequently, it was discovered to be a previously unknown work by Gentileschi, the 1630 ‘Hercules and Omphale.”

The acquisitions strategy

Potts outlines the Getty Museum’s acquisitions strategy.

“First, we’re not an encyclopedic museum; we are, essentially, the history of European art,” he comments. “The big exception is photography, where we collect up to the present day, and globally.

“We are a museum of European art from antiquity – Greece and Rome – up to 1900, which is our endpoint. It was 1800 when the trust came into existence; it was decided at that point to push it to 1900. We have flirted with the early 20th century. We have acquired works up into the teens of the 20th century, but only a handful. It is only artists whose main career is in the 19th century, but who continue to work into the early 20th.”

Landscape with Ruins, about 1615-1616 Jan van de Velde (Dutch, 1593-1641) Black ink with gray wash 12.4 × 18.4 cm (4 7:8 ×7 1:4 in.) Getty Museum 2020
Landscape with Ruins, about 1615-1616 Jan van de Velde (Dutch, 1593-1641) Black ink with gray wash 12.4 × 18.4 cm (4 7:8 ×7 1:4 in.) Getty Museum 2020. 14

“Our collecting is essentially European. We are wanting to push that a bit, and build bridges into cultures and periods where there are connections with our European tradition, but in different areas.

“For instance, we have a department of medieval manuscripts up to the Renaissance period, but we have also begun acquiring Armenian, Ethiopian, and Arabic Quran manuscripts. They are in the same medium. This is a period when there was a very rich and real exchange in both artistic traditions, and in the faiths that were represented. These are usually, though not exclusively,  religious texts.

“We also recently acquired the first Hebrew manuscript of Torah from the great Rothchild Torah. So these traditions of working, and even, in some cases, the iconography involved, are very much related. There was an active trade for other things, but also artistically, in these periods. It makes sense for us to put some context around the European manuscripts. These are, of course, the core of the works in the collection.”

Extending the collection

Similar interventions are underway in the decorative art galleries:

“We will be bringing in works from other museums,” he says. “Chinese works, because there was this very rich exchange in ceramics, particularly between the Far East and Europe from the 16th century on. Often Chinese ceramics were given ormolu mounts when they got to Europe and displayed in Versailles. These cultures were always in conversation, artistically as with trade, so we want to explore and show those connections.”

Three Lidded Vases, 1781 Sèvres porcelain manufactory
Soft-paste porcelain Getty Museum
Three Lidded Vases, 1781 Sèvres porcelain manufactory Soft-paste porcelain Getty Museum 84.DE.718.1-.3

“The meta-theme of these new extensions is to highlight the connectivity between cultures and the cross-influences between them, which have been there throughout history. They’re always there if you look closely enough.”

Reaching more visitors at the Getty Museum

Under Potts’ leadership, the Getty is extending its reach to under-served communities. He explains:

“Our education programme, for instance, is entirely targeted at Title I schools.”

These are schools that have at least a 40% student population from low-income households:

“They are the least affluent and the most diverse communities. We have the largest program of bringing students onsite. We give them instructed tours through the galleries and introduce them to what a museum is about, to art, and also to the idea of how you look at a work of art. What are the questions you could be asking yourself? How do you understand why these works were made? Why do the people in the pictures look different from today?

“The explanations are, of course, historical, cultural, and all sorts of other things. We are trying to give as many students from Southern California, particularly LA County, as much experience and exposure to art as we can.”

An increased focus on diversity

While the Getty Museum is also trying, in general, to engage younger audiences, he adds:

Getty Museum entrance Photo: John Linden
© 2003 J. Paul Getty Trust
Getty Museum entrance Photo: John Linden © 2003 J. Paul Getty Trust

“The average age of our visitors is in the forties, not in the sixties, which is a positive sign. In a way, I don’t think it’s our role to decide which audiences are most important. We want to be there for everyone, whether it’s the 11-year-old who is interested in Egypt or the grandparent who is most interested in French 18th-century furniture.

“We want to be there, doing a good job of explaining the material we have that might engage them, at whatever their age, whatever their interest, and whatever their stage of education and background.”

The acquisition of works that have an aspect of diversity to them is being prioritised:

“This might be either in the subject matter or the artist. We want women artists, we want artists of colour, and so on. Or it might be that the narrative in the work of art raises an issue which then connects with diversity and cultural context: why is it that some of the people of colour in this painting seem to be servants, and others seem to be in better clothes? These are all teaching moments, and they raise issues that are very much part of our lives.”

Engaging online

The Getty Museum’s digital strategy is another means of reaching a new audience:

“COVID was the turning point for that. Not having the possibility of bringing students onsite, we did a very quick pivot to engaging digitally, with art explorations and other programs. There are links to them online. We did the fun art challenge, too, where people reconstructed artworks in their living room from household objects, then sent them in, and we posted them.”

getty museum artworks social distancing - museums engaging during coronavirus shutdown

“Digital is, of course, where we can reach the largest audience. The people who were zooming in to our events weren’t primarily from Los Angeles or Southern California. They were from all around the US. They were in India and Australia; they were in Britain and France and Germany and China. It is a big growth area. As a museum, our natural inclination is to prioritise the actual experience in front of the real work of art.

“Otherwise, why have a museum? If everything were digital, then we wouldn’t need physical museums to visit. So we do, in a way, prioritise the real experience when it can be had. But we certainly don’t want to forget about the many millions of people out there who, in theory, can engage with us digitally. They’ll never come to the Getty, but we want to have as rich a program of material and content for them to see online.

“I think we’re doing a good job, but we’re not where we want to be. The digital world changes so quickly; our ambitions have to adjust and become even greater every year.”

Specially commissioned show

Currently on show at the Getty Museum is Uta Barth’s: Peripheral Vision, curated by Arpad Kovacs, assistant curator of photographs. The exhibition, which examines the artist’s 40-year exploration of subtle changes of light as it illuminates a range of surfaces, features an entirely new piece created for the exhibition.

“She is an artist who has spent much of her career in Los Angeles. We have collected her work in the photographs department in the past, but decided we wanted to collect more of it, and, indeed, to commission a work to celebrate her, but also the 25th anniversary of the Getty Center.”

and to draw a bright white line with light 2021 Uta Barth
…and to draw a bright white line with light (11.2), 2011; printed 2021 Uta Barth (born in West Germany, 1958, active in the United States) Pigment prints. Getty Museum © Uta Barth 2021.51.1-.2

Barth decided which part of the site she would photograph:

“She has a very structured and precise way of recording this material. She would photograph every five minutes of the day, from sunrise to sunset, on two days of each month. It’s all about light and how the changing light, the materiality of the physical world as we see it changes from the light that is cast upon it, and the shadows.

“These works are all about light, but she does manipulate the images. She also introduces some colour and other elements. There are these very rich subtleties in the work that you can only really experience by seeing them as a whole collection, so we have a whole gallery. The exhibition’s largest space is this commission work. Everyone who has seen them, I think, has been extremely affected. They are subtly, gently, and quietly extremely beautiful works.”

Typically of the artist’s work, they encourage the viewer to question their own perception:

“She did a nice little twist on that in this display,” Potts comments:

“One of the photographs is actually a video. You have to watch it very carefully, but if you do stand in front of it for a few seconds too long, as it were, you see it morphing. It surprises people when they think their eyes are playing a trick. One, out of the hundred or so photographs, comes alive.”

Future exhibitions at The Getty Museum

In terms of photographs, a ‘Gettified’ version of the Tim Walker V&A exhibition will follow in May. This focuses more on photographs than the scenography that characterised the V&A’s version.

“Tim has made the judgment as to how to make those adjustments,” Potts explains. “They will still reflect his idea of what the installation should be like. But it’ll be different from the V&A one. Then we have a show up at the moment on ancient Nubian goldwork and jewellery and some sculptures. This has been a great success. We also commissioned an African American curator to organise satellite exhibitions by African American artists in Los Angeles.

“They are doing contemporary work, inspired in some way by the works at the exhibition at the moment.”

He adds:

“We are working towards an exhibition led by the manuscripts department. This will also involve painting, sculpture and other things, on light: both the science and the art of light. It will relate to our Pacific Standard Time project coming up a few years from now. With this, the theme is art and science, and the interface connections between them.

“So we’re working on that, and dozens of other exhibitions as well. We’ve got, I think, as active a program of exhibitions as any museum.”

Top image: Getty Museum Courtyard. Photo: Alex Vertikoff © 2003 J. Paul Getty Trust

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Lalla Merlin

Lalla Merlin

Lead features writer Lalla studied English at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford University, and Law with the Open University. A writer, film-maker, and aspiring lawyer, she lives in rural Devon with an assortment of badly behaved animals, including a friendly wolf

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