A Gift Freshens Up the Getty Endowment

The Getty Museum has announced a gift to its endowment from Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle. The funds will support museum exhibitions and educational programs. The gift also makes the museum directorship an endowed chair, henceforth the Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Attorney Hummer-Tuttle long served on the Getty board and has spearheaded a drive to raise funds for the already wealthy Getty. In 2016 the Tuttles (he a car dealership entrepreneur and former UK ambassador) pledged $2.5 million to Caltech. The Getty press release describes the couple's generosity as a "transformative gift," but no dollar amount is given (and the T word tends to be used loosely in such announcements). For fiscal 2019 the Getty Trust reported an endowment of $7.3 billion.

Another gift, evidently anonymous, is a 1779 painting, Portrait of José Nicolás de Azara, Marquis of Nibbiano, by Anton Raphael Mengs. It's the second version (on canvas) of a near-identical panel painting in the Prado. The museum has a finished pastel portrait by Mengs, but this is the first oil painting by the artist. José Nicolás de Azara is now on view.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Is $7.3 billion not enough of an endowment? How much money does a museum need? There are so many other LA museums who can barely raise enough funds to keep the lights on.
Anonymous said…
Then there are museums like the one at 5905 Wilshire Blvd whose director and board of trustees are getting deeper and deeper into red ink while planning to spend more and more money. All while destroying the very institution they're supposedly overseers-caretakers of.