Getty Glow-Up & "Mai" Debut

Installation view of gallery E204, "Dutch Landscapes and Interiors"

The Getty Museum has reinstalled five painting galleries in its East Pavilion and opened a West Pavilion room celebrating the first Los Angeles showing of Joshua Reynolds' Portrait of Mai. The Reynolds portrait, of the first known Polynesian visitor to England, was acquired jointly with the National Portrait Gallery, London, in 2023.

 

Gallery W102, "Joshua Reynolds and 18th-Century Portraiture"

This is the year of thematic installations of L.A. museum collections. The Getty's upper-level  East Pavilion galleries are now installed thematically in what I'd imagine is a preview for the whole museum after its pending year-long closure (Mar. 15, 2027 through spring 2028). "Thematic" means different things to different curators. Anyone burnt out on Geffen gray and Lucas hypercube white will find walls of plum, teal, and Prussian blue. Each room has a theme that is declared and explained in plain English and Spanish. The installation is a bit denser than it was, with a few paintings stacked above eye level. 

The new East Pavilion does not try too hard to mix up chronology and geography. It's all European painting and sculpture of the 1600s or thereabouts. In fact, the East Pavilion's one time-warp provocation—Roy Lichtenstein's brushstroke sculpture—has been taken off display. Most key 17th-century objects have landed roughly where they were before. There's still a big room of pan-European artists in Rome, and a space devoted to Rembrandt and his students. The main difference is that these galleries now have names ("The Allure of Italy" and "Rembrandt and the Dutch Republic") and posted explanations.

Gallery E201, "The Allure of Italy"

Gallery E203, "Rubens and the Southern Netherlands"

Rubens and his circle now get their own room. This is anchored by Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder's The Return from War and includes paintings by Brueghel, van Dyck, and Sweerts.

"Poussin and the Changing Landscape"

There are themes within themes. One is "Poussin and the Changing Landscape," an unbilled nano-exhibition consisting of the Getty's Poussin Landscape with a Calm paired with its pendant, The Storm, on loan from Rouen. As the gallery text has it, "Poussin's landscapes often reference philosophical ideas about fate, life, and time." 

Jan Davidsz. de Heem, Banquet Still Life, 1649. Private collection

Another loan is the Jan de Heem pronk Still Life that sold to an unknown party for £3.67 million at Christie's London in July 2025. It's shown in the same room as the Getty's recently purchased de Heem flower piece. 

Workshop of Peter Paul Rubens, Four Studies of a Male Head, about 1617–20

"Rubens and Black Models" pairs a painting that's long been in the storeroom with an oil sketch on paper that was part of an expensive 2017 group purchase. The Four Studies, an oil on panel, was purchased for a record sum by J. Paul Getty himself in an attempt to break his Rubens curse: Every painting that Getty had bought as a Rubens turned out to be a copy. Unfortunately scholars have concluded that the Getty Four Studies is not by Rubens' hand.

At right is the newly acquired Philippe de Champaigne Saint Augustine in His Study Trampling the Heretics

The Getty's star (and autograph) Rubens, The Entombment, is not in the Rubens gallery but in the adjacent "New Sensibilities and Subjects"

Gallery W102: Joshua Reynolds, Portrait of Mai, about 1776. Purchased jointly by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Board of Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery, London

Mai is now in the West Pavilion, behind glazing and surrounded by painted and sculpted portraits of roughly the same period. Conventional wisdom holds that Reynolds is the dull rival to Gainsborough; and neither Briton is to be taken so seriously as Goya, whose work is political with a satirical edge. This display of Mai won't upend that view. Reynolds' well-mannered paint handling can't compete with Gainsborough and Goya's pyrotechnics. 

But pictures work on many levels. The Portrait of Mai compels, largely for Mai's extraordinary life story. Reynolds wouldn't have intended Mai to be a political picture "about" colonialism, but that's what it's become, for our time at least. Reynolds didn't intend self-satire either, but what else can you call an Enlightenment painter who sees the global Other through the lens of the Apollo Belvedere?

If you don't know anything about Mai, Reynolds, or the portrait, the Getty's bilingual labels will answer your obvious questions without taking much time from your face-to-face encounter with art. There's also trilingual (inc. Tahitian) audio accessible with a QR code. Why can't LACMA/Geffen or the Lucas do likewise?

Thomas Gainsborough, Portrait of Anne, Countess of Chesterfield, 1777–78

Jean-Antoine Houdon, Bust of Marie Sébastien Fontaine de Biré, 1785