Los Angeles and London to Share Reynolds’s Stunning Omai Portrait

Plus, the Whitney is selling Hoppers, and Sotheby’s puts a rare Klimt water scene on the auction block.

A huge acquisition was announced last week. The Getty and the National Portrait Gallery in London agreed to buy and to share Joshua Reynolds’s splendid Portrait of Mai (Omai), from 1776. They’ll split the cost — £50 million ($63 million) — and the full-length portrait will travel back and forth from London to Los Angeles, each having it for long periods of time. It’ll be at the NPG when this wonderful museum — my favorite in London — reopens after a nearly three-year overhaul. The Getty will have it during the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.

It’s a magnificent portrait. Mai (1753–1780) was, it’s said, the first Polynesian to visit Britain, traveling to London with Captain Cook in 1774 and returning to Tahiti in 1776 after two years as a celebrity. Reynolds painted the portrait of Mai, known in England as Omai, as a personal project rather than a commission. He kept it until he died in 1792. The Earl of Carlisle bought it and to Castle Howard it went until 2001, when the family sold it to the Irish magnate and horse breeder John Magnier for £10.3 million (the equivalent of $17 million at the time).

It’s a bit of Orientalism — presenting a foreigner as different from the English in looks, habits, and character. While in London, Omai was, in reality, dressed by Savile Row. His white robes and turban are unknown in Tahiti. They’re Turkish or Indian but still signal that he’s foreign. Reynolds skirted the truth in denying his subject the grass and bark skirt he surely wore but let’s not get too technical.

From what we know, Omai was tall, dignified, dark, and handsome, and that’s what we see. Reynolds borrowed the pose of the Apollo Belvedere, as he did for other portraits, to endow Omai with the élan of a Greek god — and Apollo’s the most dashing of the gods — and to show Omai’s impressive tattoos.

The Getty’s got £25 million ($31 million) in change under the sofa cushions. It was willing to buy Omai — lock, stock, tattoos, and turban — for £50 million. The British government, spurred by the NPG and other museums, declared the picture a national treasure. This means two things. First, Omai needed an export license. Second, a set amount of time was given for a British buyer to match the price.

The NPG went from one end of that sceptred isle to the other, hat in hand, and raised its share. Wonderful portrait as it is, and it’s unique, Omai is expensive. The NPG is a government museum. It seemed stalled at £25 million ($31 million), a big part from ye olde public fisc. The U.K. has terrible financial problems now, most from the wreckage its Covid lockdowns caused.

On the one hand, museums on both sides of the pond need to be parsimonious and circumspect given the social problems that Covid mass hysteria caused, particularly for children tossed from school for months. Covid isn’t a risk for them, but unionized public-school teachers sure liked the free time. Los Angeles public-school children suffered the most. Schools there were closed for nearly two years.

The Getty’s endowment is almost all unrestricted. It doesn’t need to buy art. What all big philanthropies, and the Getty’s a foundation, need to do is tackle these problems with creativity and zeal. How can art education make a difference? That’s where the Getty should — in a better world — be putting its many millions.

On the other hand, it’s Omai, it might very well be Reynolds’s greatest portrait, though he did many superb portraits, and the opportunity was unique. So, too, are the Getty’s and the NPG’s spirit of collaboration. When I was a curator, collection-sharing was anathema. “We own this” was a point of institutional and civic pride. Registrars and curators would spit feathers over the inconvenience of taking an object off the wall and shipping it back and forth.

Nicholas Cullinan, the NPG’s director, is a modern thinker, as is Tim Potts, the director of the Getty. The Getty already does a lot for Los Angeles. Both museums have great things. Omai will look fantastic in both places. When it’s gone from the Getty or the NPG, people will miss it. That only means it will come back to fanfare. I hope more American museums have that sharing, win-win spirit.

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The Whitney Museum is selling seven works of art from its permanent collection at two Sotheby’s auctions in mid May. I don’t know the deal the museum is getting from Sotheby’s, but it could make a bit less than $12 million at the high estimate. The money is going into its acquisitions fund.

Museums sell art all the time to buy new art. If something has been languishing in storage for years or the museum has many things like it or the museum adjusts its mission, it’s entirely permissible to sell, to buy new pieces. I never did it when I was a museum director. I think we’re all creatures of today’s taste in some degree, and what’s out of style today often roars back. Fads consume many curators, especially in New York, and they’re the most vulnerable to errors in judgment. Every object is part of the museum’s history, too.

I might be a tad archaic on these points, and happy to stay so. Still, what the Whitney is doing is standard museum practice. It hasn’t sold art to buy art since 2018. The curators have followed the rules in evaluating the collection for what I call functional duplicates. These are paintings and watercolors that are indeed unique, but the Whitney owns things that are very similar and much better. I hope the Whitney focuses on American women artists, who are badly outnumbered in its collection.

The big piece of meat headed for the grill is Edward Hopper’s Cobb’s Barns, South Truro, from 1930–33, with an estimate of $8–12 million. Hopper and his wife, Josephine, spent summers in Maine and Gloucester through the 1920s but by 1930 settled on Truro, a tiny town near the tip of Cape Cod, as a place for a permanent summer cottage. The picture is a modest view of modest barns, seen from a hill, but it’s a Hopper and it hung in the Oval Office for a time during the Obama years. The Whitney is also selling three Hopper watercolors, each at an estimate of $500,000 to  $700,000.

Hopper’s Cape Cod work is a tangent in his career, as are his paintings of architecture sans people. No institution has done more on Hopper than the Whitney. It inherited Mrs. Hopper’s estate when she died in 1968, including Hopper’s studio contents. And the Whitney consistently acquired great Hoppers from the early ’30s. It has produced the bulk of scholarship on Hopper. Its Hopper in New York exhibition, which I reviewed, was great. It’s got 300 Hopper watercolors. Many are of better quality than the three it’s selling. It’s got more than 200 paintings, among them Cape Cod Sunset, Road and Houses, South Truro, and a Cobb’s Barns view that’s much nicer.

Maybe the Obamas, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, will spring for a Hopper or two.

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There’s a handful of works of art, maybe two, that I think about like a dog thinks of food. Whistler’s Chelsea in Ice, from 1864, now at the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, is one of them. There’s Winslow Homer’s Sleigh Ride, from the early 1890s, which I saw most days when I was a Clark Institute curator. Alas, these and other ultimate favorites are taken, but Gustav Klimt’s Island in the Attersee, which I’ve loved for years, is tauntingly, teasingly for sale at Sotheby’s on May 16. Sotheby’s has been on a roll in the last couple of years. It’s had some fantastic sales.

I first saw the painting in the late ’90s in the office of Jane Kallir, whose Galerie St. Etienne in New York specializes in the best German and Austrian art. At the time, I was a curator at the Clark and working on a Klimt landscape exhibition. Island in the Attersee isn’t strictly a landscape, but there’s an island in it. It’s 39-by-39 inches. Klimt painted it in 1901 or 1902. Otto Kallir, Jane’s grandfather, bought it in 1937 while he was a dealer in Vienna. He escaped Vienna for Paris after the Anschluss and came to New York for good in 1939.

I’m afraid to say I didn’t know Kallir’s gallery for its Klimt before I started working on the Clark show. Simple Americanist that I am, and I think I was living in Vermont then, I knew Otto Kallir for discovering Grandma Moses. Galerie St. Etienne represented her for 40 years.

I’ll skip Klimt’s art history. Looking at the picture in Jane’s office, I felt suspended over the lake, flying over it, as green, yellow, and salmon strokes of paint shortened and tightened, turning mauve, blue, and white, the island is a stump, and the hills in the distance are violet. No, I hadn’t had a martini for lunch. It was a very hot day. The painting looked fresh, free, and radiant. Klimt made his big money from portraits. He did Island in the Attersee and his other landscapes for pleasure, and it shows.

Jane very generously lent the painting to the Clark, taking it from the wall facing her desk. We desperately needed it. Our partner in the project, the Galerie Belvedere in Vienna, was doing a slow-motion about-face on its promise to lend the Clark three of its Klimt landscapes. It was in the middle of Maria Altmann’s Nazi-provenance lawsuit over three other Klimts in its collection. The three landscapes the Clark wanted had no provenance issues, but the Belvedere feared they’d be confiscated and held as hostages if they traveled to the United States.

I suspected at the time that the director of the Galerie Belvedere was waiting for a bribe. The Clark probably wouldn’t have paid it, but, goodness, I’d worked for the Connecticut legislature for years! Having smelled a skunk, I should have insisted we feed him a pricey dinner.

Island in the Attersee made a huge difference in the exhibition. The show was small, only 14 pictures, so each was essential. Some of the other landscapes had bits of water in them, but Jane’s was nearly all water. That alone made it special. And it’s the most abstract painting Klimt did.

I like art that radiates light and art that takes paint, creates something lustrous and translucent, but it still looks like paint. That’s Island in the Attersee. The estimate’s on request only, and that means the target price is for serious buyers only and not for publication. Yes, I could be in the running if Sotheby’s lops five or six zeros from the low estimate.

As a water picture, it’s almost a one-off for Klimt, which might attract some people but deter others who want a Klimt that looks like a Klimt. I think it’s sublime.