$61 M. Joshua Reynolds Portrait Heads to LA, New Douglas Gordon Documentary Premieres, and More: Morning Links for August 18, 2026

ARTnews’s Morning Links for August 18, 2026 reports that Joshua Reynolds’s eight-foot 18th-century portrait of Mai, a young Tahitian man who arrived in London with Captain Cook in 1774, will make its West Coast debut at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The painting was jointly acquired for more than $61 million by the Getty and the National Portrait Gallery in London and is undergoing conservation research that has revealed revisions and pigments including lead and vermilion; it is scheduled to go on view at the Getty next month and remain on display until the museum’s 2027 closure. The roundup also notes the premiere at the Edinburgh Film Festival of “Douglas Gordon By Douglas Gordon,” a documentary by Finlay Pretsell about the Scottish artist behind works such as “24 Hour Psycho” (1993) and “Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait” (2006). Additional items include Gazelli Art House’s $7.5 million purchase of a 10,000-square-foot Chelsea space for a New York outpost, the Cinema Museum in London crowdfunding £500,000 by December to buy its Elephant & Castle home, and the death at age 90 of London mobster-turned-painter Eddie Richardson, who exhibited around 80 works in 2003.

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