Torrid Affairs at the Getty Museum

“There was a hazy smoke of sex in the atmosphere, of staff members sleeping with one another,” recalled a former Getty official who arrived in the 1980s and experienced a culture shock when his complaints about unprofessional behavior were rebuffed. “People at a high level of the museum had a reputation for screwing around, for institutional misbehavior. The place was young, boisterous, ambitious. People didn’t know how to behave.”

Another senior official, in the 1990s, was similarly shocked, but was told by members of the board to lay off. “You’re coming off as an incredible prude,” he was told.

An affair between the associate director of the museum, Deborah Gribbon, and George Goldner, the curator of the drawings department, was notable enough to be mentioned in a sexual harassment lawsuit filed by another Getty employee; it led to rising tensions between Goldner and museum director John Walsh, who already shared a mutual dislike. (Some said Goldner coveted Walsh’s job, but Goldner denied this, saying instead, “The truth is, we never liked each other from the beginning.”)

Goldner, an ambitious cut-up and skilled mimic, would entertain guests at London dinner parties by mocking Walsh’s slow manner of speaking, lying on the table and mimicking his boss to general amusement. From a museum standpoint, the affair was awkward; Walsh instructed her to end it, and arranged for the Getty to pay Goldner to leave quietly and work as a consultant in New York. Goldner ended up at the Met, where he became chairman of the department of drawings and prints.

Goldner denied that the contract in New York was because of the affair, though he acknowledged that the relationship “annoyed” John Walsh because the director was “very fond” of Gribbon himself. Goldner said the Getty allowed him to move to New York because his girlfriend, later his wife, was living there, and because “I had quite a strong record at the Getty.”

Ultimately, this culture of indiscretion burst into the public eye when a British-born curator, Nicholas Turner, sued the institution for sexual harassment and sexual discrimination in 1997. It was a modern twist on an age-old complaint.