Solid Wood: Profile of the Getty’s New President

My sense of James Wood, from interviewing him, listening to him speak and reading about him over the years—first in his director’s post at the St. Louis Art Museum and then during his 24 years at the helm of the Art Institute of Chicago—is that he conceives his artworld role not so much as that of a brilliant scholar, a high-profile spokesman or a social schmoozer, but as a public servant in the best sense.
Without grabbing headlines, Wood has quietly sought to do the right thing, through the conscientious exercise of his institution’s civic responsibilities as a good local, national and world citizen. He projects an unflashy but solid integrity and decency.
If I’m right, he’s the right man at the right time for the difficult job of reclaiming for the J. Paul Getty Trust the confidence of its own staff, the public, government officials and perhaps even the adversarial foreign culture ministers who are seeking the return of allegedly stolen antiquities. Wood has enjoyed close and amicable dealings with Italy, most notably in preparations for Chicago’s 2002 exhibition, “The Medicis, Michelangelo and the Art of the Late Renaissance,” which was made possible, in part, by his museum’s strong history of reciprocal loans with Italian institutions.
When I heard him speak several years ago on a blue-ribbon panel of museum directors grappling with the Nazi-loot restitution issue, Wood impressed me as the only one who seemed wholeheartedly committed to redressing past wrongs, rather than forced into a provenance-review process as an onerous chore, dictated by the need to quell public controversy. At his own museum, he helped engineer a complicated, innovative compromise in 1998 with the heirs of Holocaust victims who were seeking restitution of a Degas pastel that was privately owned but on loan to the museum. It was, as described by the NY Times, “the first Nazi looting case to be settled in the United States.”
In the book “Whose Muse?”—a 2004 compilation of the musings of seven major art museum directors—Wood stood out for such down-to-earth concerns as dropping admission fees to let visitors “drop in to look at a Titian,” and privileging the permanent collection over flashy special exhibitions. A few revealing Wood-isms from that book:
We can have all the educational stuff in the world in the galleries, but it comes down to the experience of the individual work of art.
At the museum’s core was the commitment to promote beauty and qualitative distinction, which place priority on the original aesthetic object and the viewer’s ability to experience it under optimum conditions. Scholarship could provide an important means, but only a means, to enhance an experience that was ultimately inexplicable.
Of particular importance for this country, it is not a local, tribal memory, but a capacious, cosmopolitan one that, thanks in part to the predominantly international nature of the collections in our major museums, encourages the visitor to be an aesthetic citizen of the world rather than of a mere place.
Wood comes to an institution that has sustained turmoil and turnover not unlike that of the Chicago museum when Wood arrived there in 1980: Chicago had been without a director for almost three years, because of the tension and controversy caused by an administrative structure that subordinated the director of the museum to the finance-oriented president. By his own admission (to Stephen West of Bloomberg), Wood is “not a money administrator or a businessman,” so a pressing priority will be the appointment of a permanent chief financial officer for the Getty Trust. An interim CFO and vice president for finance and administration, Robert Abeles, was appointed just four weeks ago.
Wood’s tenure in his new post will probably be relatively short: He is 65. It is a career-capping challenge that this semi-retired museum man just couldn’t resist. But Jim, once you arrive on the job in February, will you have any time to tool around on your kayak?