Robert Irwin: His Vision for the Getty Central Garden

Visit http://bit.ly/OHC-UCB for complete oral history transcript for “Robert Irwin’s Central Garden at the Getty Museum," interviewed by Martin Meeker for the Getty Institute Oral History Project. Robert Irwin was born in Long Beach, California, in 1928. As a young man, he worked as a lifeguard and professional swing dancer while creating his early paintings. In the 1950s, he became a pioneer of the “Light and Space” movement popular with a handful of now very influential southern California artists. Later in the 1960s and 1970s he moved away from painting and developed what he called “conditional art,” or art that was created in direct response to various physical, experiential, and situation conditions. In the early 1990s, he was brought in by the Getty Trust to design the new Getty Museum’s garden. Although the museum’s architect, Richard Meier, was not a fan of Irwin’s imaginative creation, the Getty Central Garden has proved to be extremely popular with visitors and is now regarded as a masterpiece of landscape art. In this interview, Irwin discusses his approach to conditional art and how it influenced the process of creating the Central Garden and he considers how the garden might continue to evolve in the years and decades to come. Interviews sponsored by the J. Paul Getty Trust Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley