BRAVO! BRAVO!

By ROBERT HUGHES

A Benedictine chronicler once wrote of a "white mantle of churches" stretched across medieval France. In a related way, America in the past century has mantled itself with museums, as the temple of art gradually replaced the church as the emblematic focus of civic self-esteem. Now, two grand projects by leading American architects, utterly different from each other in purpose, appearance and design philosophy, may be said to mark the climax of the age of American museum expansion. One is in Los Angeles and opens officially in December--though small flotillas of previewing VIPS have been trawling through it for the past few months. The other, already open, is under American management but is set in Bilbao, in the Basque region of northern Spain. Neither is likely to have any architectural rivals in what is left of the 20th century, or for a good slice of the early 21st.

In Los Angeles, after 14 years, the Leviathan surfaces at last: Moby Museum, a.k.a. the Getty Center, sheathed in light tan aluminum and elegantly rugged honey-colored Italian travertine, nearly 1 million sq. ft. of it at roughly $1,000 per sq. ft., designed by Richard Meier and perched on a 710-acre hilltop above the San Diego Freeway in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. The Getty is the most expensive arts complex and by some calculations the most expensive building in American history. Large expectations ride on it as both a cultural institution and an emblematic focus for Los Angeles itself. Meanwhile, Frank Gehry's $100 million Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao opened two weeks ago. Built and financed by the Basque regional government, it is essentially a franchise: a major step in the effort by Thomas Krens, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York City, to parlay his museum into an international network of satellites exhibiting art from a common pool--an innovative idea that is still viewed with a good deal of skepticism by more traditional museum officials.

The Getty is not "a building." There are moments, both off site and on, when its collection of six separate units on a ridge linked by plazas and terraces resembles a very honed and buffed Modernist version of an Italian hill town. Architect Meier himself has grown wary of the hill-town analogy. "Think of it," he says, "as a small college campus with different departments, some more visible than others--not a museum but an institution in which art predominates."

Meier, 63, has come up with a superb piece of place making. When the Epcot-style tram delivers you from the parking garage at the bottom to the plaza at the top of the ridge, you step out into a space that seems both amiable and Utopian, dignified but, despite its acreage of travertine, not authoritarian: a respite from the visual chaos of Los Angeles, but offering the best views a public could have of the city spread below.

The six units gathered in this stunning setting are devoted to an art collection, ambitious archival facilities, high-tech conservation, broad research and educational programs, all intended to serve as a sort of cultural condenser for the humanities in Los Angeles and beyond. There is the Getty Grant Program, which has given out some $63 million since 1984 to support worldwide research in the history and conservation of art--projects ranging from computer-aided studies and reconstructions of half-effaced 8th century Mayan murals to the conservation of monastery temples in Nepal.

Its work intersects with that of the Getty Conservation Institute, which promotes and underwrites techniques for preserving the world's cultural heritage, working only in partnership with other governments and foreign institutions. Then there is the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, which at any given time will have a dozen scholars-in-residence working on their specialties, backed up by an 800,000-volume library. The plan is for scholars to work around themes, the first of which is "Perspectives on Los Angeles: Narratives, Images, History," covering a wide range of subjects from urban growth to street art and vandalism. Other institutes apply themselves to arts education and to creating a vast database of humanities texts and art images, whose L.A. Culture Net Website at present reaches 14 million people who speak 90 different languages, cross-linking the city's mosaic of cultural organizations online.

The museum will inevitably be the Getty's main focus of public attention. Its director is John Walsh, 59, formerly of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, who was hired in 1983. He is a patrician, dryly witty scholar and administrator whose specialty is 17th century Dutch painting but whose eye and expertise are remarkably broad ranging. Given an enormous acquisitions fund, Walsh has bought prudently and selectively. The art world's fear that the Getty would crash the Old Masters market like an 800-lb. gorilla has proved largely groundless. The collection's focus is fairly narrow; it was never, Walsh points out, meant to be a "Western Met," an encyclopedic museum. Its collection of painting and sculpture, entirely European, stops at the threshold of the 20th century--the most recent picture in it is James Ensor's huge, pullulating satire, The Entry of Christ into Brussels, 1888.

The collection moves with ease between fine works by major masters--Rembrandt, Pontormo, Rubens, Mantegna, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Turner--and illuminatingly good ones by less famous figures, such as Franz Xavier Winterhalter's coolly sumptuous portrait of a 19th century princess on the terrace of her villa in the Crimea, or a small, haunting study of a young girl by the Belgian Symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff. It is already a deeply serious and discriminating collection and may turn into a great one.

Walsh and Meier had their disagreements about its display--Walsh liked sober, richly colored walls as a background for the art and insisted on "period room" effects for the furniture, whereas Meier wanted neither. The period decor, which was handled by the New York City architect-decorator Thierry Despont, is a flop. But Meier served the art very well, with a series of generously proportioned, plain, high-ceilinged and top-lighted galleries that don't clamor for attention and do create a feeling of undistracted serenity. They recall the enfilade effects of older museums, but Meier has cunningly provided the links between them with unexpected openings, panoramic glimpses of the radiant townscape through glass walls, views of the museum's own light-struck exterior. It is a walker's museum, full of variegated spaces, points of rest, vistas, curves and a continual respiration between inside and outside.

The Getty began in the mind and pocket of the man whose name it bears: J. Paul Getty, the oil billionaire who in 1974 had installed his collection of Roman and Greek antiquities, French furniture and medium-level European paintings in a preposterous $17 million replica of the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum, overlooking the Pacific at Malibu. Those who sneered at this as the Disneyism of a crackpot Scrooge McDuck were staggered when, after Getty died in 1976, it turned out that he left his museum almost $700 million--the largest endowment ever given to a cultural institution, in or out of the U.S.

The money was all in Getty Oil stock, and its sheer bulk was obviously going to force the trustees of the J. Paul Getty Trust to revise their ideas of a cultural mission. The man mainly responsible for this reshaping was Harold Williams, former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission in the Carter Administration and dean of UCLA's Graduate School of Management. In 1981 the Getty Trust hired Williams to manage the money and figure out what the new institution should do.

The first item on his agenda was to diversify the trust's money. "It wasn't prudent," says Williams, "for an institution to have such a large portion of its endowment subject to the vicissitudes of a single stock." After some years of litigation, he and the board managed to clear the way to sell, in 1984, its Getty Oil stock to Texaco for $10 billion. In the end, this gave Williams $2.3 billion to play with in creating the Getty Center. With shrewd management, this endowment has since grown to $4.3 billion--four times that of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Because the Getty Trust is obliged to spend 4.25% of its endowment on its own programs every year, it has as much as $225 million to spend on itself annually--which means roughly $40 million a year for buying art, a budget to make any other museum green with envy.

The diversified Getty envisioned by Williams and the trust had to be, in every conceivable way, a class act. After the original list of 33 architects had been whittled down to three finalists, the committee in 1984 settled on the New York City-based Meier, America's chief exponent of "late Modernist" classicism. He was the one who, it was believed, could deliver an impeccable and thoughtful level of planning and detailing. One of the factors in Meier's favor was that even then he was an experienced museum designer (the Frankfort Museum for Decorative Arts, 1979-85; the High Museum in Atlanta, 1980-83).

Now the hard stuff began. With Walsh, Williams and other members of the building committee, Meier went all over the world studying museums and monuments, from the Certosa near Florence to the Glyptothek in Munich, from the Villa Lante in Bagnaia (a distant memory of whose watercourse is preserved in one of the Getty's gardens, designed by the California artist Robert Irwin) to key American museums, such as the National Gallery in Washington and the Yale Center for British Art. "This," says Meier dryly in his memoir Building the Getty, to be published next month by Random House, "generated a great deal of discussion about what we ought to avoid."

Most intractable of all was the task that faced Meier and Stephen Rountree, the director of the building program, in getting a conditional-use permit from the city of Los Angeles. This entailed dealing with scores of regulations; no excavated earth, for instance, could be moved off the site. It also meant interminable meetings, sometimes verging on the rancorous, with associations of homeowners in the surrounding areas of Bel Air and Brentwood.

The list of conditions met to get the permit to break ground eventually ran to 107 items. Some were major design considerations. The neighbors didn't want Meier's signature white surfaces glaring at them in the Pacific sun, and the metal cladding panels were accordingly colored a pale tan. They insisted on, and got, strict limits to the height of the buildings. And they hated the idea of culture-curious hoi polloi, 1.3 million of them expected each year, looking down into their backyards. One woman feared that visitors to the Getty would look across the valley from a spur on the site and see her sunbathing by her pool. Meier took her up to this promontory and asked her to point out her house. She gazed about. "I can't see it right now," she said, "but I know it's out there somewhere." The vantage point was turned into a cactus garden whose spines would discourage the feet of the prurient.

"Richard wanted the freedom to play with heights," says Rountree. "He doesn't like having to fight over issues of what color things are. He was driven nuts by the process, and it took time." Time and, by Meier's count, some 300 round-trip flights between New York and Los Angeles--plus living off and on in a "dark, rat-infested, Raymond Chandlery house on the Getty site." During those 14 years "my children grew up, my hair turned whiter, and many friends lost touch with me. In Los Angeles I was forced to develop an entirely new approach in my work. I was picked for the Getty on my record--but on the condition that I broke with my past." Still, what architect will have such a commission again?

If the Getty is a clear, benign and somewhat remote presence in coastal Los Angeles, the Guggenheim Museum has hit Bilbao with the force of an architectural meteorite. No question that it's there. You are walking through the pleasantly undistinguished, mainly 19th century streets of its quarter; you turn a corner, and--pow!--an apparition appears in glass and half-shiny silver (titanium, actually), massively undulating, something that seems at first glance to have been dropped from another cultural world between the gray townscape and the green hills that rise behind it. Not since Joern Utzon's 1973 design for the Sydney Opera House has a building so dramatically imposed itself on a city. On the river edge of a town planned in terms of axial Beaux Arts order, architect Gehry, 68, has inserted a startlingly irregular building that defies every convention of axiality, including the right angle, of which there doesn't appear to be one, either inside his structure or out.

The structure is huge--at some 250,000 sq. ft., with 112,000 sq. ft. of exhibition space, twice as big as the uptown and downtown New York Guggenheims put together. And it is by far the most completely realized of Gehry's public buildings. On his native ground, this most original of American architects has had terrible luck: witness the endless and (to Los Angeles, in a civic sense) humiliating delays involved in the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

But the Basque regional government in Bilbao really wanted the Guggenheim there; it backed Gehry's design to the hilt and poured money into the venture. It provided a free 249,000-sq.-ft. site on a bend in the Nervion, the river that passes through Bilbao; the basic construction cost of $100 million; $50 million more for new acquisitions; a $20 million advisory fee to the Guggenheim; and $12 million a year in operating costs. Hands up, anyone who can imagine an American city doing that entirely with public money.

Here was a rust-belt city, once a capital of Spanish industry, still rich but now decaying and plagued by the murderous Basque-separatist terrorism of the E.T.A. It was eager to remake itself as a tourist center. It needed a solid emblem of peace and cultural openness. So the Guggenheim deal, though costly, was very attractive.

But Gehry was astute in framing his design. He didn't want it to defer to the town architecture, but he did want it to chime with other aspects of Bilbao, particularly its industrial landscape: to commemorate its former power and presence. All along the Nervion are shipbuilding yards, loading docks, cranes, massive obsolete warehouses--the kind of context that not only Gehry but also some of the artists he is closest to, like the sculptor Richard Serra, love. Disregarded, blue-collar beauty. The rusty pecs of Basque industrial capitalism. Seen from the far side of the river, the museum does indeed evoke a vast metal ship, full of compound curves, run aground--a sort of art-ark. "To be at the bend of a working river intersected by a large bridge," Gehry wrote at an early stage of the design, "and connecting the urban fabric of a fairly dense city to the river's edge with a place for modern art is my idea of heaven."

But there was another structure Gehry wanted to refer to--the mother ship, as it were: Frank Lloyd Wright's original Guggenheim on Fifth Avenue, with its great empty center wound about by the spiral of exhibition ramp. Obviously that couldn't be repeated (it is, in any case, a curator's nightmare), but like the Bilbaino industrial metaphor, it could be evoked.

One walks down a long flight of steps into the museum, and then the atrium rises--or rather, soars: a large ceremonial space with catwalks and walkways, branching off into galleries at its several levels. In it, the three surface types of the museum's construction can be taken in: white Sheetrock, plate glass hung on steel members with exaggerated joints and flanges, and titanium skin. (The titanium sounds like an extravagance, but wasn't. Gehry was able to lock up enough of it to cover the museum when the Russians, in 1993, started dumping their stocks of the normally ultraexpensive metal on the market.) Their forms swelling and deflating in a strongly rhythmical way, large trunks of glass, plaster and titanium rise to the top of the five-story structure; they house utilities, a stair and an elevator.

The intensity Gehry can give to a vertical space also transfers to the horizontal ones. The biggest gallery, known as "the Boat," is 1 1/4 times the length of a football field (450 ft.), but with its curved walls and round ceiling trusses, it hasn't a foot of dull space in it. There are a few things in the design that seem arbitrary or merely rhetorical. The towering "parasol" that Gehry put over the river entrance is pointless except as a visual element--its roof is too high to give any protection from the weather. And the twin stone-veneer towers that rise downstream of the La Salve bridge are just a costly logo.

These are quibbles compared with Gehry's achievement in this museum. It's a building that spells the end of the smarty-boots, smirkingly facile historicism on which so much Postmodernist building was based--a quoted capital here, an ironic reference there. It isn't afraid of metaphor, but it insists that the essence of building is structure and placemaking. It confronts the rethinking of structure and the formation of space with an impetuous, eccentric confidence. No "school of Gehry" will come out of it, any more than there could have been a "school" of Barcelona's Antonio Gaudi. His work is imitation-proof, but liberating.

Warts and all, Gehry's Bilbao is the most exciting public building put up in a long time, and, unlike Wright's canonical spiral in New York, it shows every sign of working well as a place in which to show works of art. There are, of course, difficulties here, because the size of some of Gehry's galleries and their eccentricity of shape is bound to tell against the smaller paintings. Moreover, as a work of art in its own right, the museum is far more interesting than many of its contents--the dull, inflated conceptual art and late minimalism that appeals to the taste of the Guggenheim's Krens. There is a whole gallery of messages from Jenny Holzer; a fatuous "work" by Laurence Weiner in the form of the word reduced written in huge block letters on the wall of its main gallery; another gallery devoted to a single drawing by Sol Lewitt; some huge and utterly banal sculpture by Jim Dine; and so on. And, of course, that one-shot icon of the conformity of late-Modernist official taste, Jeff Koons' Puppy, 1992, sitting outside the museum.

Krens seems to have a fixed belief that bigger is necessarily better and that the significant art of the past 30 years is necessarily huge. Some of it is, of course--like Robert Rauschenberg's enormous Barge, 1963, which the Guggenheim recently bought. But a great deal of late-American Modernism is just arbitrarily big. It's as though the larger spaces of Gehry's design caused the art to inflate by suction. Still, some very big pieces work very well here, notably Claes Oldenburg's soft shuttlecock drooping from a balcony of the atrium, and the curving steel sheets of Serra's 104-ft.-long Snake. It would be a tremendous pity if Bilbao ended up with a great building stuffed with heavy-metal, late-imperial American cultural landfill. What broad public is really interested in such art? For the present, however, people will come for the building.

The interesting thing, of course, will be to see how both the Guggenheim and the Getty "break in"--how these ambitious projects will be used, how they will function in (and benefit) the social matrices of their cities. And that will be as much up to the public as it ever was to their architects.

--With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles