The Getty Goes Tahitian, Premiering Its Splendid New Reynolds Portrait

The rollout of Portrait of Mai is botched, but it’s still a great acquisition.

F rom sea to shining sea, the Pacific to the Atlantic to the Adriatic. Over the next few weeks, I’ll write about the Getty and the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles and Winslow Homer’s prints at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. I’ll also finish my series on the Biennale in Venice. A couple of months ago I got my first cortisone shot in my creaky, tender left knee, and since then I’ve been leaping from place to place like a gazelle.

The J. Paul Getty Museum is showing — for the first time — its Portrait of Mai, the magnificent full-length depiction of the young Polynesian grandee thought to be the first Polynesian to visit London. Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792), London’s preeminent portraitist, painted it around 1776. Mai arrived as an exotic in 1774, in his early 20s, a guest on one of ships traveling with Captain Cook. He was aristocratic in blood and bearing, and by the time he left London, in 1776, he was a celebrity in high society. He’d traveled to London in search of English supporters and weapons for his efforts to retake his home island — Raiatea — from the evil occupying forces of Bora Bora. He died, alas, in 1780, in Tahiti in an English-style house that Cook’s crew had built for him, livin’ la vida English and easy.

It’s a superstar picture — more than life size, at 7 feet, of a subject with Valentino looks. It stayed with Reynolds in his studio until he died. Frederick Howard, 5th Earl of Carlisle, then bought it, and it stayed at Castle Howard, out of public view, for around 200 years. The Getty bought Mai with London’s National Portrait Gallery in 2023 for £50 million, then about $62 million. Joint ownership of art is very rare, but this was the only way the Brits could keep it, at least some of the time, in the UK. It’ll be at the Getty until March and then return to London and then go back to the Getty in 2028 in time for the Olympics.

The exhibition’s called Joshua Reynolds’s Portrait of Mai and 18th-Century Portraiture. It feels like a throwaway show, which is surprising since the picture is new to the collection and to Los Angeles and the fuss over its purchase was close to shock and awe. The Getty does acquire out-of-this-world art often, but this one is pure grandeur. For its premiere, curators needed to think movie-star treatment, giving Mai a spot on the Walk of Fame, searchlights sweeping the night skies, and an honorary entree to the most chichi substance-abuse clinics in town, things that a new sensation would die to have. They needed to treat it as a big deal and haul out the star-spangled Welcome Wagon.

Instead, they hauled out a few things: a Grand Tour portrait by Pompeo Batoni, from 1773; a Gainsborough from 1777; and Joseph Ducreux’s Self-Portrait, Yawning, from 1783, which made smile since the gallery is a yawn. Likely the analogy is unintentional. I was surprised to see a Getty show that’s badly lit. Their installation standard has always been nothing less than perfection. A glare from an ill-placed light obscures the Batoni and the Gainsborough. People in the gallery were complaining about it.

The labels are sloppy, as if written by AI or a curator on autopilot. Mai “fascinated the British public” and he was “a full-fledged celebrity.” I’m curious about what this meant in 1776 London, Enlightenment London, London on the cusp of empire, London packed with bored, rich wives of fat, rich husbands in love with their horses. Any romance for Mai? After all, he’s got tats — dot-and-squiggle tattoos on his hands. A parade down Pall Mall? Lunch with the king? Front cover of The Tatler?

“Behind Mai lies the dramatic reality of a remarkable individual whose story was profoundly impacted by British imperialism,” I read. Boring. This is bland to the point of banal. And why British imperialism? Mai “was scrutinized for his cultural differences.” How so? “Scrutinized,” I think, isn’t the correct word unless he was thought to be, say, a cannibal. It suggests Sherlock Holmes and klieg lights. It seems more like he inspired people’s curiosity, and who wouldn’t be curious? “Reynolds may not have understood the significance of the tattoos for Mai or his culture,” I read, which is “a dissonance.” What in the world does this mean? What was Reynolds to do? Provide annotations?

“Contradictory European attitudes toward indigenous societies dominated Mai’s short but momentous life.” Contradictory? How so? It’s hardly a crime to compel us visitors to crack open a few books, which I did afterward, so I learned that the botanist Joseph Banks squired Mai around town. Among those he met were Dr. Johnson and, yes, George III. He was a Royal Society favorite, not as a pet oddity or status symbol but as a charmer whose Tahitian values pleased and heartened and elevated. He probably introduced Londoners to the concept of taboos, to the practice of surfing, and to massage, a revelation to a stiff-as-a-board people. Reynolds depicts him in a toga, an assault on the authenticity fad. This demeans Mai, the wall labels suggest, but Mai posed for this. He was no shrinking violet.

Why no depth? Why deploy the usual clichés? Sometimes the Getty’s curators seem lazy. Did a graduate student do this show? And, of course, they can’t admit that the indigenous Mai was treated well and not waterboarded for talking surfboards and catching a wave. No matter, the picture is a splendid thing to have. When The Portrait of Mai returns to the Getty, I hope it gets a focus show and the full treatment it deserves.

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The energy and vision missing in the Mai show are abundant in Odilon Redon: Otherworldly Visions, a wonderful exhibition about the Symbolist artist’s love affair with black. Redon (1840–1916), as much dream-based as Paris-based, is best known for his gauzy pastels and paintings rich in gold, turquoise, and cobalt; religious scenes; still lifes; and fantasies that forecast Surrealism. Some of these, done starting in the 1890s, are in the show. The core of Otherworldly Visions is Redon’s noirs, as they were called, prints and drawings in black and done earlier in his career. In his shadows live, if we can call it living, a world of heads, eyeballs, teeth, assembled skeletons, and divinities floating in velvety blacks. Nearly all the art is from the Getty collection.

Redon called black “the most essential color” and “the agent of the spirit,” both sentiments foreign to the Impressionists and reviled by most of them and especially by Monet. Redon was part of the eighth and last Impressionist Salon, in 1888, which exhibited his noirs, though they were stuck in a hallway. Today, it’s easy to be smitten with so much inky, moody black. They suit his subjects.

The lead work is The Battle of the Bones, a charcoal drawing from around 1881. It’s inspired by an 1880 poem about two men who kill each other in a fight over a woman and continue their squabble as skeletons in the afterlife. It’s a funny and sad riff on Medieval-era religious art and Baroque ossuary art. These ask us to think about mortality and the way of all flesh but also about resurrection, about which bones will come rattling back to eternal life. Redon doesn’t reject this, but he suggests that until then, we might very well keep struggling with woes like jealousy, envy, and affection run amok. Purgatory’s no fun.

Redon’s black lithographs were often used for moody, enigmatic illustrations. Lithographs evoke drawing and immediacy but, unlike etching or engraving on a metal plate where the lines wear over time, lithographs can be mass-produced. His resemble his charcoal drawings. A portfolio from 1891 called Dreams points to an impenetrable Surrealism. His Temptation of Saint Anthony portfolio, eleven lithographs shown in a block — inspired by Bosch, Schongauer, and Goya — develop Flaubert’s prose poem of the same name about lust and restraint. Beasts, flaming eyeballs, a chimera, and Jesus are there, cryptic but still hewing to Anthony’s story.

In the 1890s, more or less abruptly, Redon moved to color. His illustrations for The Apocalypse of Saint John from 1899, are less ambiguous and less black, with white space a bigger part of the look. Redon’s just about the best-suited artist for the book of Revelation and goes mano a mano with Dürer’s Apocalypse from 1499. Was Redon’s project a 400th-anniversary response?

No one can be entirely sure why he went to color pastels, and brilliant color, but the best artists often move from one thing to another. In the very spooky Apparition, from the 1880s, nearly all charcoal, Redon uses a touch of yellow pastel around the mouth. Head Within an Aureole, a riveting pastel, is from the mid-1990s and an early work with color, mostly charcoal but with specks of pink and ultramarine. A number of Redon’s flower still lifes are also in the show. They’re as brilliantly chromatic as his noirs are deeply dark, but they’re similar in that they’re flowers as we see them in our dreams. The star has got to be Baronne de Domecy, from around 1900. It’s a portrait, but her face is monochromatic. The flowers are Technicolor and sometimes feathery, sometimes like fireworks.

There’s nothing from Redon’s first portfolio of lithographs, In the Dream from 1879, in which he introduced motifs such as floating heads, severed eyeballs, and barren landscapes. Otherworldly Visions focuses on the three portfolios in the Getty collection. It bought Battle of the Bones in 2024. It might as well have bought examples from other portfolios to make the show more comprehensive. I don’t think there’s anything in the Getty show from the 1886 Impressionist Salon, Redon’s one and only. Why was he included in that salon?

I would have borrowed Cauldron of the Sorceress, a charcoal drawing at the Art Institute of Chicago. It’s from 1879 and as spooky as they come. A flat-faced witch with a gruesome smile boils a skull, her finger poking the empty eye socket, and what looks like ET’s head floats in the cauldron. Forget, climate kooks, about too much carbon in the air. The black steam from that pot is truly toxic.

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I asked the Getty’s press office for updates on its astonishingly expensive — around $700 million — renovation plan but heard nada from them. The Getty Center, part of the Getty Museum complex, will be closed for a year starting in March. Part of the project is surely needed since the complex is more than 30 years old. Its distinctive tram from the parking garage at the bottom of the hill to the museum complex needs to be modernized, as does the HVAC system. Other features, including “enhanced visitor experience” in the parking garage and at the tram, a new Welcome Hall, and attention to sustainability, which might mean the fraudulent “net zero” scheme — well, these are wastes of hundreds of millions of dollars. When I first read about the cost, I wondered whether Somalis were doing the reno, but this is Los Angeles, not Minneapolis, so it must be hospice and home-health-care fraudsters discommoded by the FBI and moving into the museum-enhancement business.

The visitor experience is fine as is. The Getty is as rich as Croesus, but it’s still a nonprofit. Throughout the yearlong work on the Getter Center, the Getty Villa in Malibu will stay open. This will probably be another “work from home” jaunt for the well-paid staff. During the Covid mass hysteria and vacation from reality, the Getty was closed for a year and a half. With yet another closing, Google searches by staff for “Mai and surfing lessons” are soaring, I hear.