Provides a history of the buildings that have housed the Getty Museum collections, overviews the collections themselves, and offers a biography of J. Paul Getty "I don't think there's any glory in being remembered as old moneybags," said oil baron J. Paul Getty in the early l950s, when he was vacillating between amassing all kinds of art and narrowing his focus to ancient sculpture. Getty's fabulous billions have spawned three museums, most recently the "architectural commission of the century," as Richard Meier's hilltop Getty Center, 13 years in creation, is called. In the early '70s, Getty oversaw the previous museum, the fabulous, 48,000-square-foot, pseudo-Roman villa overlooking the Pacific just north of Los Angeles that was greeted with critical jeers and popular accolades when it opened in 1974. As this beautiful book makes clear, Getty's spending has not been in vain. Written by John Walsh, longtime director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, and Deborah Gribbon, associate director, it serves three purposes: it is a biographical sketch of the eccentric, high-living billionaire; it is a selective catalog of the Getty's peerless collections of sculpture, illuminated manuscripts, paintings, drawings, and decorative arts: and it is a history of the three "eras" of the Getty's three locations. The quality of the museum's holdings, from Greek statuary to early-20th-century photographs, is breathtaking, and the 200 color plates here do them justice. Carpaccio's Hunting on the Lagoon , van Gogh's Irises , and Michelangelo's sketch for The Holy Family with the Infant Saint John the Baptist , along with drawings by Titian, Raphael, da Vinci, Rubens, Poussin, Watteau, Cézanne, and Rembrandt are pictured, as is the classical statuary for which the Getty is justly world-renowned. --Peggy Moorman The vast resources of the J. Paul Getty Museum?heir to its namesake's oil fortune, and with an endowment exceeding $3 billion the world's richest museum?have rapidly propelled what was once a modest collection into what will be one of the nation's best when the multipurpose Getty Center opens this month. Congruent with this milestone, the museum has published an attractive book, half a history of the young institution and half a guide to its quickly growing collections. In recent years, the museum has concentrated on buying large existing collections. This book showcases some of these big-ticket purchases of ancient sculpture and photography, as well as paintings (by van Gogh, Degas, and Renoir) that came with multimillion-dollar price tags in the notoriously inflated art market of the 1980s. Director Walsh and Chief Curator Gribbon contribute short, lively essays describing their collections and programs, but the bulk of the pages are given to artworks reproduced in large, beautiful illustrations. A major new title; for all collections. [For an account of building the new Getty Museum, see Richard Meier's Building the Getty, reviewed on p. 98.?Ed.]?Douglas F. Smith, Oakland P.L., Cal. -?Douglas F. Smith, Oakland P.L., Cal. Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. Used Book in Good Condition