Getty Museum. The J. Paul Getty Museum, commonly referred to as the Getty, is an art museum in California housed on two campuses: the Getty Center and Getty Villa.
The two locations received over two million visitors in 2016. The primary museum, located at the Getty Center, is in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, on a hilltop above the west side of the Sepulveda Pass and I-405 freeway.
The Museum houses primarily-European paintings, drawings, sculpture, illuminated manuscripts, and decorative arts; and photography from its beginnings to the present, gathered internationally. The secondary museum, the Getty Villa, is in the Malibu neighborhood and displays art from Ancient Greece, Rome, and Etruria.
In 1974, J. Paul Getty opened a museum in a re-creation of the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum on his property in Malibu, California. In 1982, the museum became the richest in the world when it inherited US $1.2 billion.
In 1983, after an economic downturn in what was then West Germany, the Getty Museum acquired 144 illuminated medieval manuscripts from the financially struggling Ludwig Collection in Aachen; John Russell, writing in The New York Times, said of the collection, One of the finest holdings of its kind ever assembled, it is quite certainly the most important that was in private hands. In 1997, the museum moved to its current location in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Ang