Page 15 - Demo

Following the completion of his studies (Getty took courses at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Berkeley before earning a diploma in Economics and Political Science from Oxford University in 1913) George suggested he spend a year prospecting for oil. Though Getty hoped to be a diplomat or writer, he found the diversion appealing. By the age of 23, Getty had enjoyed so much success as a wildcatter that he had become a millionaire. In May 1916, Getty Oil Company was incorporated as a father–son partnership. Getty promptly decided to retire and enjoy a life of ‘total indolence’, as he put it, until his own case of oil fever motivated him to return to the oil business in 1919. At his father’s death in 1930, he became the president of Getty Oil and by the 1960s, had grown it into a global conglomerate dealing with all areas of oil production from exploration to shipping.
Vittore Carpaccio, Hunting on the Lagoon, 1490-1495 ca, sold through intermediaries to the J. Paul Getty Museum, 1979 Lysippus. The Museum’s first major acquisition was a $3,900,000 life-size bronze statue dating from the 4t century BC and believed to be the only surviving work by Lysippus, court sculpture of Alezander the Great. Originally discovered on the sea bed neat the Italiano port of Fano in 1964, it was bought by a dealer and hidden in the house of a priest while negotiations were open. The bronze then disappeared for years to be turned up in South America and acquired by Luxembourgish Artemis. When it was revealed that the Paul Getty Museum had bought it, there was an uproar in Italy and the museum was accused of buying an illegally-exported treasure.
Described as an eccentric, a playboy, a genius, and a tightwad, Getty was a non-conformist, suspicious of conventional wisdom in business and art over his entire life span. He married five times and had five sons – I am a failure at marriage, he once proclaimed. It is in Venice that he once proposed to his third wif, ‘Fini’. The German Adolphine Helmle, known to her friends as Fini, was 18 when, on her first grown-up trip abroad with parents and friends, Paul, nearly twice his age, met her at Vienna’s Grand Hotel. He spent time with her whenever she was able to steal away without raising the suspicion of her parents and at departure date Fini gave him her post office number him to write. Paul was however too impatient: he followed the Helmle family backwards and forwards across Europe and, when they boarded a train for Venice for their annual holiday, he followed by car and resumed clandestine trysts with Fini among the venetian canals and palaces. It was while sightseeing together in Venice that he asked her to marry him, she accepted and Paul kissed her for the first time.
He described himself as an ‘addict’ of art collecting. His private art collection, shaped by his extensive travels, trusted advisors, and willingness to take risks, indeed reflected his personality and tastes. He appreciated the technical quality and provenance of a piece as much as he loved a bargain, and alternated periods of intensive collecting with time spent writing about his thoughts on art. He prized beauty for its permanence: ‘I never like to follow the crowd’ he wrote at one point.