BARRY MUNITZ IS A SHITTY HUMAN: 'Rift Grows, Challenging Leadership at the Getty'

article by RANDY KENNEDY here.

He wanted it to be the perfect evening - the kind of courting of collectors the museum should do more often, he told the staff.

Barry Munitz, president of the J. Paul Getty Trust, had invited his good friends Sherry Lansing, then the chairwoman of Paramount Pictures, and her husband, the director William Friedkin, to dinner last year in a house used for parties at the hilltop Getty complex in Los Angeles.

Because the couple collect Dutch art, Mr. Munitz wanted to impress them by having two 17th-century drawings by the Dutch artist Herman van Swanevelt from the Getty Museum taken to be displayed at the house.

Museum officials, who said they felt that the event was more about socializing than about wooing important collectors, protested. They argued that moving the drawings posed too many risks, and that the climate control in the house was inadequate for fragile works on paper.

The drawings were moved anyway.

For Mr. Munitz's critics, such anecdotes are a kind of shorthand for explaining a range of troubles that have engulfed the Getty Museum over the last few years.