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The Headlines
MAI, OH MAI. Joshua Reynolds’s monumental 18th-century portrait of Mai, a young Tahitian man who arrived in London with Captain Cook in 1774, will soon make its West Coast debut, the Los Angeles Times reports. After a joint acquisition, for more than $61 million, between the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the National Portrait Gallery in Los Angeles, the eight-foot painting made a transatlantic and transcontinental trek to the Getty, where it is currently undergoing intensive conservation research, which has so far revealed layers of paint, revisions, and pigments including lead and vermilion. Going on view at the Getty next month and until the institution’s 2027 closure, the striking work is a rare example of Reynolds’s Grand Manner style depicting a person of color, and captures a complex cultural encounter between Tahitian traditions and Georgian Britain.
ARTIST ON ARTIST. Director Finlay Pretsell speaks with Deadline on his latest film, Douglas Gordon By Douglas Gordon, which premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival. The documentary gives an “insightful” portrait into the work of the Scottish artist known for filmic installations like 24 Hour Psycho (1993) and Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006). “As the title suggests,” Damon Wise writes, “Gordon was not a passive subject, actively fighting his director for authorship of the story. The result is a fascinating deconstruction of the documentary process, with Pretsell both charmed and exasperated by his mercurial and temperamental subject.”
The Digest
Could Brighton & Hove, England, create its own “Bilbao effect” by building a major landmark art gallery on the seafront? [The Argus]
Gazelli Art House, which has spaces in London and Baku, Azerbaijan, spent $7.5 million to acquire the 10,000-square-foot Chelsea space that Marlborough Gallery once called home for its forthcoming New York outpost. [FAD Magazine]
The Cinema Museum in London is hoping to crowdfund £500,000 by December to buy its Elephant & Castle home and finally secure its future. [Time Out]
A rare Picasso print stolen from a Milwaukee gallery in 2018 has been found by a landlord cleaning out an apartment. [The Guardian]
A new art-focused dinner series is bringing young Washingtonians together over food while helping them plug into the city’s gallery scene and beat loneliness IRL. [Axios]
The Kicker
CRIME AND CANVAS. London mobster Eddie Richardson, who fought a notorious turf war with the Kray twins before his life took an unexpected turn into art, has died aged 90, the Telegraph reports. He discovered painting in prison, quickly becoming a prolific artist whose subjects were strikingly removed from his violent past. He portrayed friends, sporting scenes, children playing, and people enjoying a drink. Richardson, who ran the notorious “Torture Gang,” exhibited some 80 works in 2003 and even made a portrait of Lord Longford sold to benefit charity. In later life, he also became an author and public speaker, leaving behind a body of work that offers a surprisingly gentle counterpoint to his notorious past.
