ABSTRACT
Just north of Los Angeles in Malibu, California, on a promontory overlooking the Pacific Ocean, a slab of granite marks the grave of J.Paul Getty, the famous oil tycoon and art collector. Nearby stands the J.Paul Getty Museum, a reconstruction of an ancient Roman villa that is filled with art. Several miles to the southeast, visitors to the Henry E.Huntington Art Gallery explore an English country house. Meanwhile, the Frick Collection in New York City is housed in an elegant French-styled villa. In contrast to these highly personal monuments is the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, a clean-lined, concrete and glass structure holding immense quantities of modern art. Other than the name “Hirshhorn” inscribed on its exterior wall, nothing about its modernist interiors or stark installations recalls particulars of the donor’s dwelling. Like state and municipal art museums, donor memorials frame the activity of looking at art in terms of a ritual scenario. However, as the above sampling suggests, unlike the museums discussed in the last chapter, they cannot be readily defined as a group by their look or collections. Their collections may be encyclopedic or specialized, and their architecture anything from historicist, like the first three examples above, to modern, like the Hirshhorn. Despite their unpredictability, many donor memorials, including most of those discussed in this chapter, are former residences; or they were designed to resemble residences, usually royal or aristocratic dwellings of the past. Thus, a visit to a donor memorial is often structured as a ritual enactment of a visit to an idealized (albeit absent or deceased) donor.2
