Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 109
June 15, 2018
The cult of Kahlo and some company for the Serpentine ducks – the week in art
Frida Kahlo’s life is laid bare, oil barrels pile up on the Serpentine, and Alex Prager takes an eerie journey through America – all in your weekly dispatch
Christo and Jeanne-Claude
The celebrated site-specific artist who once wrapped the Reichstag floats a giant sculpture made of oil barrels on the Serpentine.
• Serpentine lake and Serpentine Gallery, London, 18 and 19 June until 9 September.
What to see this week in the UK
From Hereditary to Frida Kahlo, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...June 13, 2018
The blazing masterpiece that could change the royal family's image | Jonathan Jones
A magnificent self-portrait by Artemisia Gentileschi, who refused to let rape destroy her, has never seemed more relevant. This 17th-century work should hang in the National Gallery – and the Windsors could make it happen
Stand By Me has finished echoing through St George’s Chapel, the radical sermon is forgotten and the royal family are back to looking up at flypasts and waving. Did it all mean anything?
I’ve got a simple, cheap and painless way for the monarchy to prove it is serious about all those nice new vibes. It is to give up a single painting from the Royal Collection. This painting has so much relevance to the modern world that it needs urgently to be placed in the National Gallery so it can provide inspiration, right old wrongs and shatter history’s glass ceiling.
Gentileschi transforms allegory into muscular reality. She is not a symbol of painting but a real woman who paints
Continue reading...The blazing masterpiece that could change the royal family's image
A magnificent self-portrait by Artemisia Gentileschi, who refused to let rape destroy her, has never seemed more relevant. This 17th-century work should hang in the National Gallery – and the Windsors could make it happen
Stand By Me has finished echoing through St George’s Chapel, the radical sermon is forgotten and the royal family are back to looking up at flypasts and waving. Did it all mean anything?
I’ve got a simple, cheap and painless way for the monarchy to prove it is serious about all those nice new vibes. It is to give up a single painting from the Royal Collection. This painting has so much relevance to the modern world that it needs urgently to be placed in the National Gallery so it can provide inspiration, right old wrongs and shatter history’s glass ceiling.
Gentileschi transforms allegory into muscular reality. She is not a symbol of painting but a real woman who paints
Continue reading...June 12, 2018
Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up review – forget the paintings, here's her false leg
V&A, London
By focusing on Kahlo’s life and her suffering rather than her art, this memorabilia-stuffed exhibition stifles her blazing visionary brilliance
This feels wrong. I am looking at Frida Kahlo’s prosthetic leg. There is a glamorous red boot on it. The matching boot is also in the display case, yet the woman who wore the leg and boots is long gone. She died in 1954, when she was 47. Would she want her artificial limb to outlive her like this?
Related: Frida Kahlo and the birth of Fridolatry
Continue reading...June 8, 2018
America crumbles, Astérix invades and Grayson Perry reinvents summer – the week in art
Two views of the US, a celebration of the great Gaulish warrior and the RA summer show gets a long overdue revamp – all in your weekly dispatch
Royal Academy Summer Show
Grayson Perry leads a long overdue and brilliantly effective reinvention of this 249-year-old annual exhibition. Full of surprises and stimulants.
• Royal Academy, London from 12 June to 19 August.
Make America decay again – Thomas Cole and Ed Ruscha review
National Gallery, London
Putting Cole’s 19th-century series The Course of Empire next to Ruscha’s Course of Empire reveals the despair that has always streaked the American dream
American art was invented by a young man from Lancashire who emigrated from Liverpool in 1818, and by 1825 – still in his early 20s – was being hailed in New York as an “American genius”. There had, of course, been painters in America before Thomas Cole. Yet no artist before him created what can be called a truly American vision, that mapped the grand possibilities of a still barely known continent. Cole’s landscapes glow with weird and wonderful American colours, hues more intense and raw than anything ever seen in European landscape art. In his 1830 painting Distant View of Niagara Falls, it’s not just the vast foaming arc of the falls that amazes, but the flaming leaves of an autumn day: blazing cherry-red, singed orange. The new colours of a new world.
Cole painted the dawn of the American dream. Ed Ruscha paints its wreckage. Since the 1950s, this deadpan ironist has chronicled the cityscape of Los Angeles in photographs, prints and artist’s books, as well as paintings whose cool bleakness is the emotional opposite of Cole’s Romantic rapture. LA in his eyes is simultaneously banal and apocalyptic. The 10 acrylic canvases he’s showing at the National Gallery form a cycle called Course of Empire. Far from imperial grandeur and its fall into decadence, these paintings chart changes that don’t seem to mean anything at all, in a cityscape of anonymous chaos. There’s a sense of doom in the black storm clouds that blossom over flat rooftops. “TOOL & DIE”, says the name of a workshop making dies and moulds for industry. Yet the words demand to be read differently against that tempestuous sky – tool up and die, fighting on the streets.
Continue reading...What to see this week in the UK
From Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom to Taylor Swift, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
(JA Bayona, 2018, US) 128 mins
Continue reading...June 5, 2018
Summer Exhibition/The Great Spectacle review – a Grayson revolution
Royal Academy, London
By jumbling up established names such as Banksy and Hockney with total tat, Grayson Perry has saved the Summer Exhibition from its stultified self on its 250th anniversary
There’s an orgy going on at the Royal Academy. People are tumbling over each other, cavorting in ecstasy, revealing all. Who knew the summer show could be so subversive?
Continue reading...June 4, 2018
Whitstable Biennale review – art with a fish-and-chips flavour
Various venues, Whitstable, Kent
The coastal town plays host to a biennale with a brain, where dreams take over and home is a place that may not exist
In the 1930s there was a genre called seaside surrealism. Such artists as Eileen Agar and Paul Nash beachcombed for strangely shaped driftwood, and Picasso created dream pictures from sand.
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