Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 10
February 12, 2025
Goya to Impressionism review – three salmon steaks blow the soppy jugs and flowers away
Courtauld Gallery, London
Is there an ulterior motive to this drearily grand exhibition of paintings borrowed from a Swiss collection? Could it be to show how vastly superior the Courtauld’s own works are?
The bland title of this show reads a bit like a confession, in terms of how little it has to say. Goya to Impressionism – so? Why do we need to see the troubled Spanish painter of war and witchcraft juxtaposed with soft scenes by Renoir and Sisley? No reason, except they all belong to a collection whose home in Winterthur, Switzerland, is closed for renovation, meaning the Courtauld can borrow them as a job lot. The trouble is that the Oskar Reinhart Collection is too similar to the Courtauld’s own to be an overly exciting proposition.
Both hoards were gathered in the early-20th century by wealthy private collectors with a penchant for French art of the late 1800s, yet by and large Samuel Courtauld got the best stuff. Reinhart’s Manets are minor compared with the dazzling masterpieces owned by the Courtauld. This is also true of Renoir. The Courtauld owns La Loge, Renoir’s scintillating early painting of modern love, but Reinhart’s row of soppy, second-rate Renoirs live down to every stereotype of this big impressionist softy.
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February 11, 2025
Henri Michaux review – the delirious artist who took mescaline so you don’t have to
Courtauld Gallery, London
He lived an avant-garde life in Paris, recording his intense drug-induced visions on paper. Our critic sees a spine, a hand, an owl, a sea monster – or does he?
Psychedelic art has an image problem. Picture it and you may see tie-dyed fabrics, muzzy portraits of Jimi Hendrix, endless vistas of magenta. By the end of the 1960s, the wave of drug experimentation that started with Aldous Huxley and the beat generation had inspired a lot of great music – but very little good art.
The writer and artist Henri Michaux had several advantages that helped him transcend all that mediocrity. He was born in Belgium – not California – in 1899 and lived an avant garde life in Paris where in the 1920s he was photographed by Claude Cahun and hung out with the surrealists. He inherited a tradition of bohemian drug experimentation that went right back to poet Charles Baudelaire and his fellow members of the Hashish Eaters Club, Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas.
Continue reading...February 7, 2025
Turner: In Light and Shade review – bathe in the redemptive power of landscape art
The Whitworth, Manchester
Combining prints culled from Turner’s studio and watercolours from the Whitworth’s own collection, this show celebrates 250 years of our greatest artist
This spring will see the 250th birthday of Britain’s favourite painter. Joseph Mallord William Turner was born on 23 April 1775 among the rakes, beggars and other Georgian caricatures of London’s Covent Garden where his father kept a barber’s shop. In the 21st century, there seems to be a consensus that he was our greatest artist. Remainers and Reform voters, Mike Leigh and the Bank of England all agree. Everyone loves Mr Turner.
Well, almost everyone. There have always been holdouts. Turner lived until 1851, getting ever closer to abstract art, mocked by some for chucking yellow “mustard powder” around. The biggest and best book about him, John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, was written to put them right. Nowadays, fans of Turner’s contemporary John Constable still argue their hero is the more truly observant and authentic artist: isn’t JMW a bit vague with his blazing skies, boiling seas, luminous vapours?
Continue reading...Mescaline visions, Turner’s 250th and Manchester’s dada genius – the week in art
Art-punk surrealist Linder Sterling springs surprises, classic landscapes get a fresh look and Henri Michaux gets high – all in your weekly dispatch
Linder: Danger Came Smiling
This promises to be an exciting show as Manchester’s punk and dada genius Linder Sterling gets her first London retrospective.
• Hayward Gallery, London, from 11 February until 5 May
February 3, 2025
Ithell Colquhoun: Between Worlds review – ravishing sensuality from an unsung surrealist
Tate St Ives
This thrilling, visually hypnotic exhibition beautifully captures the delightful energy of the painter’s work, even if it does treat her belief in the occult with too much reverence
The natural surrealism of the St Ives seaside, barnacles and limpets clinging to suggestively shaped rocks, is the perfect context for the surrealist art of Ithell Colquhoun. While sea shells, corals and translucent green water are far from her only subjects, she did paint them with a ravishing, hypnotising sensuality.
In her 1938 painting Scylla, two rocky pinnacles rise from a translucent green-blue sea – except these geological formations are not stone, they are flesh. Knobbly pink sausages intertwine to form towering pillars. Their summits are rounded like the ends of two erect penises – that’s the artistic intention, not my dirty daydreaming. Colquhoun, as she said, is in the bath beholding her own thighs. Between them sprouts a red coral for pubic hair. A sharp-prowed boat is heading towards the opening.
Continue reading...January 31, 2025
Seaside surrealism, a techno Man Ray and new paintings from Billy Childish
Tate St Ives hosts an intriguing show by occultist and artist Ithell Colquhoun, the Warburg Institute explores tarot and the Barbican exhibits Noah Davis’s dreamlike paintings of everyday Black life – all in your weekly dispatch
Ithell Colquhoun: Between Worlds
Seaside surrealism gets a show by the picturesque shores of St Ives, in an intriguing survey of this British occultist and modern artist.
• Tate St Ives, Cornwall, 1 February to 5 May
January 28, 2025
Louvre’s decision to move Mona Lisa is a misguided act of snobbery
Crowds give life to the Paris museum and the painting is a silent, compelling mystery at the heart of the hubbub
What a wonderful headache for a museum to have. The Louvre in Paris gets so many visitors it is taking drastic measures to cope, which include moving its most famous treasure to a dedicated space where fans can visit without entering the main museum at all. It will no longer suck the oxygen from other art.
Nearly 9 million visitors a year stream through the Louvre and it’s believed 80% of them are looking for Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo, better known as La Gioconde, better still as the Mona Lisa.
Continue reading...January 27, 2025
Lives Less Ordinary review – is this really a fair view of the British working class?
Two Temple Place, London
On show in one of London’s swankier mansions, this exhibition features some great art – but betrays a clichéd view of what authentic working class expression really is
They’ve certainly picked a surprising venue for it. Lives Less Ordinary, an exhibition that critiques and claims to rectify the representation of British working-class life, occupies the wood-panelled, gothic-windowed mansion Two Temple Place, built in the 1890s as a London pad for millionaire William Waldorf Astor. Photos and paintings of common people are hung around a hall that looks like the grand staircase of the Titanic.
It’s a curious sight and even curiouser exhibition. The British working class, says the press release, are seen in art “through the reductive and distorting lens of the middle-class gaze. Working-class subjects have been … stereotyped or sensationalised. Working-class artists have been misinterpreted, pigeonholed, or overlooked altogether”. Which artists are they accusing? Richard Billingham, I suspect, whose photobook Ray’s a Laugh portrays drunken squalor inside the council flat where he grew up, and Martin Parr, whose pictures of seaside life tend to be toe-curling. Yet both are lyrical, memorable artists of real British life. Just not with a sufficiently positive attitude.
Continue reading...January 24, 2025
Pop hits, ordinary wonders and perfumed parables – the week in art
Sixties art stars reconsidered, 70 years of working-class British life on camera and a multisensory meditation on Indonesian art – all in your weekly dispatch
Iconic: Portraiture from Francis Bacon to Andy Warhol
An excellent visual essay on painting, photography and fame in the 1960s that makes you see pop art with fresh eyes. Read the five-star review here.
• Holburne museum, Bath, until 5 May
Brasil! Brasil! review – no fun and no funk in this baffling morass of mediocrity
Royal Academy, London
Brazil produces incredible artists, too few of whom appear in this deluded show, which sadly fails to live up to its own hyperbolic guff
What words would you use to describe the design of this exhibition of Brazilian modernist art? “Chic bombast” perhaps. The biggest room in the main galleries of Burlington House is painted bold yellow with the names of its two featured artists in huge black graphics and, for visitors to sit on, funky curving furniture. But there’s a mismatch between this ostentatious layout and the small canvases lined up on the walls, in greys, greens and browns. This is the kind of exhibition where everything is “trailblazing” and every artist a “pioneer”. But the art completely fails to match that hyperbolic guff.
“Anita Malfatti was a trailblazing artist whose modernist paintings shocked the Brazilian establishment,” claims a huge wall text that’s much bigger than her works. They must have been easily shocked. Malfatti’s paintings that date from the first world war include cubist studies of the nude, fauvist portraits and expressionist landscapes. Before 1914, she had studied art in Germany and her paintings draw on what she saw and learned. They are fine, just not very original or revolutionary.
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