Los Angeles wildfires put museum-lender relationships in spotlight – The Art Newspaper

The French Impressionist painter Gustave Caillebotte was a man about town, an aristocrat, an observer of the lives of gentlemen in Paris in the late 1800s. He took picturesque boat rides in the lakes of the French countryside and painted his friends strolling in gardens and peering out of Parisian balconies. Walking through the new exhibition Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men (until 25 May) at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles—the first international lending show to open there since wildfires ravaged the city in early January—is a relaxing journey to late-19th-century Paris for residents of a city still very much in recovery mode.

But the escapism of the show is only what the visitor sees. Behind the scenes, it has been a difficult few months at the Getty specifically, as fires came close to both the museum in Brentwood and the Getty Villa in the Pacific Palisades. The Caillebotte exhibition was due to open in just a few weeks when the fires began.

“One of the things that was exceptional … is that a huge proportion of the paintings in the [Caillebotte] exhibition came from private collections and specifically from private collections of the descendants of Gustave Caillebotte himself,” Katherine Fleming, chief executive of the Getty, tells The Art Newspaper. “There were some anxieties on the part of the family, as is completely to be expected and totally normal, given that you have media in France showing you, in effect, the city in flames, making it look very much as if anybody who was in LA was in the direct path of calamity.”

Museum officials and outside experts concur, the Getty—and big, well-funded institutions like it—are probably the safest place for art through any type of natural disaster. But that does not mean the fears were unwarranted or that the future of art in Los Angeles and other areas prone to climate disasters is not at risk.

Expect the unexpected

The fires in Los Angeles in January were extraordinary, but destructive climate events are becoming more and more frequent and unpredictable, posing a challenge for both museums and lenders. “For something like this, I always just say that there are inherent risks any time an artwork is moved,” says the art adviser Kelly Cahn, who works with lenders to large institutions. “Whether it’s Los Angeles or anywhere else—who could have foreseen the floods in Asheville, North Carolina? With climate change, I think we’ll see this happen in more and more places that are unexpected.”

Fleming says the lenders she spoke with were quickly put at ease. “I had one video call with ten or 12 members of the [Caillebotte] family and they were asking completely reasonable questions about [things like] particulate matter in the air,” she says. “Then it turned into a more wide-ranging conversation… about what lending protocols are and I had the sense that for a number of them, it might have been the first time that [anyone in] their generation had participated in a show. But they were unbelievably generous on the part of that family. It’s really different when you’re a private owner and especially when you’re the private owner of something that really is part of your own personal heritage and your family.”

A few miles down Sunset Boulevard at the Getty Villa, an exhibition of Thrace gold from Bulgaria was facing a more immediate threat in early January as the fires grew and headed deeper into the Pacific Palisades.

Les Borsay, the emergency preparedness specialist at the Getty and Getty Villa, and his team stayed on site once the fires broke out to help secure the galleries and put out any fires that neared the property. He took photos and video in real time of both the Thrace exhibition and the Egypt exhibition (on loan from the British Museum) and shared those images and their timestamps as the fires continued. “That made a big difference, because from what I understand, we were top news for about a week in Bulgaria,” Borsay says.

Fleming praised her team and the support of lenders and partner institutions from around the world. She preemptively reached out to colleagues like Nicholas Cullinan, the director of the British Museum. The response, Fleming said, was overwhelming—colleagues at other museums were more concerned about the safety of Getty staff when she spoke with them and less worried about the art. “It was the nicest thing in the world,” she says. “I really think that people who understand these things understood that we were keeping everything really, really safe.”

Across town, leaders at the Norton Simon Museum were reassuring their recent partner, the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, that the loan of the Diego Velázquez painting Portrait of Queen Mariana (1652-52), which was on display at the Pasadena museum from December to March, was safe. VP of External Affairs Leslie Denk, the museum’s vice-president of external affairs, says that the museum’s chief executive called the director of the Prado to detail the museum’s safety protocols. The Norton Simon was close but not within the mandatory evacuation zone near the Eaton Fire and has since reopened to the public.

Cahn stresses that for individual lenders, showing at big institutions adds significant value to their asset, so it comes down to a personal cost-benefit analysis and the reassurance of the institution that they are as protected and ready for climate events as possible. “Usually you see damage happen in transit, less often at the site of the institution, but [the increasing frequency and intensity of climate events] bears thinking about,” she says.

She adds that when it comes to insurance, she makes sure that clients have a certificate of insurance from the lending institution “showing the work is fully covered for the retail replacement value, not the fair market value”.

Crisis planning and communications

Anne Rappa is the Fine Art Practice Leader at the Marsh McLennan Agency. Her job often entails reassuring lenders that their work is safe, and that goes hand in hand with understanding the precautions the museums already have in place.

“Whenever there is a large extent of loss, anxiety is high and we need to talk to our clients and speak also to collectors who may have artwork with either art dealers or with cultural institutions and there’s just a lot of activity,” Rappa says. A direct line with institutions is key. “Communicating directly with the source is always best, transparency and direct communication.”

Rappa says that the fear that art won’t be insurable at all in places like Los Angeles is overblown. “That’s more an insecurity than it would be a reality,” she says. “The majority of the institutions that would be taking in artwork have exceedingly capable staff who have planned for events exactly like this for a very long time.” She adds: “If lenders truly understood the level of professionalism and intention that exists at the cultural institutions, they would feel a sense of comfort.”

In a recent Los Angeles Times article, the art critic Christopher Knight made the case for moving the Getty and the Getty Villa out of their hilltop, fire-prone locations. “The question now is whether readiness is enough. It is certainly extreme to think of walking away from two existing museum complexes. But so is what happened in January,” Knight wrote. But experts stress that if we have learned anything from the recent disasters in Los Angeles, it is that nowhere is safe from the climate crisis and that the museum’s expertise in preparedness is the best safeguard.

“I wasn’t here working in the 1970s when [the Getty Villa] was completed,” Borsay says. “But I have to believe that the architects—and Mr. Getty himself—were aware of where they were. This burns, Topanga burns every 25 years… it’s like clockwork. [He knew] to make it solid enough that it’s going to withstand that and remain as a vault for his treasures that he wanted to share.”

Fleming described walking through the Getty Villa’s galleries just after the fire and how pristine everything remained. “A couple days after, I went into the galleries and they were like an operating theater, they were so clean,” she says. “I’m not normally in a gallery running my finger along the surfaces and then looking at it… it was just so wild to me to think that just there were all these antiquities, they’ve been chill for thousands of years and they were just sitting there, totally chill.”

Speaking at the Villa grounds, Borsay says he has learned a lot in his 20 years at the institution and particularly since the last major Getty Villa remodel in 2006 about what protects the space from fire. “We want to make sure that it’s concrete, double concrete, and [that] the tile roof, there’s no ways for embers to get in,” he says. “Our grounds department has done a lot more—trimming back on the number of trees, changing some of the plants.”

Fleming says there are plans to revisit landscaping options and take other precautions. “While we feel good about how we came through, there’s certainly no hubris there,” she says. “You can always be better.”

Fleming plans to have the Getty Villa open again in time for the late June opening of the exhibition Princes of Pylos: Bronze Age Treasures of Messenia and would like to create a community space for people to gather at the Villa before then. Of course, that is dependent on the city’s plans for recovery and reopening the Palisades. When visiting the Getty Villa in mid-March, two National Guard checkpoints were still in place and the roads were open only to residents or those with business permits; the area is still burnt out with debris lining both sides of Sunset Boulevard.

Los Angeles is a long way from feeling as relaxed as one of Caillebotte’s Parisian friends strolling the Tuileries, but walking through the gardens at the Getty is a pleasure that fires did not take from this city.