Getty Villa Museum grounds catch fire

Amid the devastating and fast-moving fire in Pacific Palisades, the grounds of the Getty Villa have caught fire, the museum confirmed Tuesday.

Fire officials said that trees and brush were ablaze and that flames were approaching structures, but the museum said the Villa and its art had been spared so far. A video on the social media platform X showed the flames approaching the Villa de Leon, a historic home near the museum’s driveway entrance on Pacific Coast Highway.

“Fortunately, Getty had made extensive efforts to clear brush from the surrounding area as part of its fire mitigation efforts throughout the year,” Katherine E. Fleming, president and chief executive of the J. Paul Getty Trust, said in a statement. “Some trees and vegetation on site have burned, but staff and the collection remain safe.”

Fleming noted protection measures such as water stored on site, irrigation to wet the grounds, double-walled construction and air-handling systems to seal the galleries and library archives from smoke.

Built in 1954 by oil tycoon J. Paul Getty and opened as a museum in 1974, the 64-acre Getty Villa houses more than 44,000 objects, including priceless antiquities — Roman, Greek and Etruscan relics dating from 6,500 BC to AD 400. The most prized piece in the collection is “Statue of a Victorious Youth,” circa 300-100 BC, also known as “The Getty Bronze.” Other important works include the Roman “Lansdowne Herakles,” which dates to about AD 175, and the Cycladic “Male Harp Player,” 2700-2300 BC.

The Getty Villa was designed and constructed as a full-scale replica of the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum, in what is now southern Italy. From 1974 to 1997, the Villa housed the Getty Museum’s entire art collection. European paintings, drawings, sculptures, manuscripts, decorative arts and some photography were moved in 1997, when the Getty Center opened in Brentwood. The Villa was later closed for renovations and reopened in 2006 after a $275-million project transformed the site into an educational center and museum dedicated to ancient art.

The Villa will remain closed at least through Monday.

The Getty is no stranger to the perils of fire. In 2017, and again in 2019, the museum’s Brentwood campus closed because of a fire near the 405 Freeway. “The safest place for the art is right here at the Getty,” the Getty’s vice president of communications, Ron Hartwig, said at the time, listing fire safety precautions that included a million-gallon water tank on site.

The biggest concern, Hartwig said, was the possibility of smoke damaging the art — a threat ameliorated by sealing off the galleries, as the Villa reportedly has done.

This is a developing story and will be updated.