Valley Life : jaunts : Cultural Getaway : Sweeping views and outdoor venues enhance a visit to three fine Getty exhibits.

The Getty Center has commandeered its lavish hilltop site long enough now to stop us from doing double takes while driving over Sepulveda Pass. It has become part of the landscape, however grandiose its villa-like setting.

One of the world’s impressive art spaces, the Getty, opened in late 1997, is free to the public and easier to access for Valley-ites than for most Angelenos. It should not be taken for granted, and in the waning days of summer, as the flood of out-of-towners subsides, it’s a perfect cultural getaway.

There are extra-art rationales for making the trek: panoramic views, spiraling garden paths and a meal in one of the eateries.

Art beckons, too, of course. The permanent collections on view emphasize work of centuries past, from antiquities to the wild retinal tickler that is Belgian painter James Ensor’s epic late-19th century painting, “Christ’s Entry into Brussels,” a feverish and quirky vision.

Currently, a few of the changing exhibitions accent different strong points in prevailing Getty aesthetics, especially the fields of photography, pre-Modernist painting and art research.

“Light in the Darkness: The Photographs of Hill and Adamson,” made up of mid-18th century portraits--mostly of clergy in beatific poses--by the Scottish team of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, is a subtle and affecting show.

It offers an intriguing glimpse at early photographic art.

The most provocative show on view, “Nadar/Warhol: Paris/NewYork,” makes a cross-historical comparison between Andy Warhol, the celebrity-loving social climber, and the photojournalist, caricaturist and man-about-19th-century-Paris known as Nadar (real name: Gaspard Felix Tournachon). Both thrived on contact with artists and socialites of their mythic, self-made art worlds.

Warhol is represented by no-nonsense, disaffected, anti-style Polaroid portraits of friends and scene makers, including Robert Mapplethorpe, Mick Jagger, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Nancy Reagan. We even see one of Warhol’s streetwise heroes, super-paparazzo Ron Gaella, choked by his camera gear, snarling at the thought of a good shot just around the corner.

Nadar’s world strikes us as more exotic, partly because it is more removed from our cultural memory.

Images of the homely George Sand, the self-satisfied painter Jean-Francis Millet and Alexander Dumas, among many others, appear formal to our modern sensibilities, but not so different, really, from Warhol’s own secret love of simplicity and formality.

Over in the Getty Center’s Exhibitions Pavilion, the idea of celebrity portraiture gets a vintage, romantic spin.

Lavish glorification of the subject replaces Warhol’s cool eye. Here we find elaborate portraiture, by no less than painters Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds, of the respected actress Sarah Siddons (1755-1831), so-called “queen of tragedy.”

In Gainsborough’s elegant, full-length 1785 painting, she appears with graceful detachment--an aristocratic slope of the nose and an embarrassment of fabric and fur.

Reynolds’ portrait finds her with a martyred expression, pearly skin against a furling tapestry passing for a dress.

A later replica of the same painting, probably rendered by an assistant, is examined via computer and X-ray technology for its subtle, inferior details.

Here, the Getty’s research resources enter the gallery space. This is no garden-variety museum, and we’re lucky to have it in our easy-driving radius.

BE THERE

“Light in the Darkness: The Photographs of Hill and Adamson,” through Oct. 10, “Nadar/Warhol: Paris/NewYork,” through Oct. 10, and “A Passion for Performance: Sarah Siddons and Her Portraitists,” through Sept. 19 at the Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles. Hours: Tuesday-Wednesday, 11 a.m.-7 p.m.; Thursday-Friday, 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Free. Parking is $5; reservations required. (310) 440-7300.