Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 110
June 3, 2018
Indian winter: Howard Hodgkin's final frames
A 2016 trip to Mumbai resulted in what would be Howard Hodgkin’s last paintings. Throbbing with colour and feeling, they are a vivid and furious epitaph
Howard Hodgkin would sometimes lose heart and his partner Antony Peattie would say: “Shall I get the scissors?” They both knew what he meant, says Peattie, as we look at Hodgkin’s final paintings in a back room at the Gagosian gallery in London. It was a joke about the great colourist Henri Matisse, who started snipping paper cutouts when illness and age left him too weak to paint.
In fact, although he used a wheelchair in his final years, Hodgkin never needed the scissors. He was to die practically brush in hand. In 2014, sitting in his skylit studio close to the British Museum, the painter told me: “I know that once I can’t paint any more, they should start measuring for my coffin.” An exhibition of his final, powerful paintings at the Gagosian shows how true those words were. Even as his health failed, Hodgkin found a way to paint. When he stopped, it was to go to hospital for the last time.
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June 1, 2018
Whitstable makes waves and Howard Hodgkin's last work - the week in art
Whitstable Biennale teams up with Deborah Levy and Shonibare curates African diaspora art – all in your weekly dispatch
Whitstable Biennale
Performances and installations inspired by the writings of Deborah Levy.
• Venues around Whitstable, 2-10 June.
Whitstable makes waves and Howard Hodgkin's last work – the week in art
Whitstable Biennale teams up with Deborah Levy and Shonibare curates African diaspora art – all in your weekly dispatch
Whitstable Biennale
Performances and installations inspired by the writings of Deborah Levy.
• Venues around Whitstable, 2-10 June.
What to see this week in the UK
From My Friend Dahmer to Beyoncé and Jay-Z, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...May 30, 2018
Meet Jacob Burckhardt, the thinker who invented 'culture' | Jonathan Jones
The visionary Swiss historian helps us understand our world just as much as his contemporary Karl Marx
The bicentenary of the birth of a Swiss historian might not seem the most glamorous of anniversaries. Unlike his contemporary Karl Marx, also born in 1818, Jacob Burckhardt never inspired any revolutions and doesn’t get his face on T-shirts. Yet some of us are celebrating the 200th birthday of Jacob Burckhardt lavishly. This week a British Academy conference reinterprets his intellectual legacy with contributions from leading international scholars and me, kicking off with a public event tonight at the Warburg Institute.
What’s all the fuss about? Take a look at the names of the Guardian’s online sections: opinion, sport, culture ... why culture? Once upon a time, newspapers used to have arts sections. Today, they’ve caught up – very belatedly – with Burckhardt. The use of the term culture to mean a broad and changing flow of forms from opera to video games may seem like an innovation of the postmodern age, but it actually goes back to Burckhardt’s 1860 book The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy.
One day, someone will write the history of headphones and podcasts. And that historian will owe everything to Burckhardt
Continue reading...May 25, 2018
Animals to the rescue as an arte povera hero hugs a tree – the week in art
Margate gets some animal magnetism, Guiseppe Penone brings his tree sculpture to Yorkshire and Patrick Heron’s abstracts take over St Ives – all in your weekly dispatch
Animals and Us
This survey of animals and art from ancient Egypt to a video of cats playing Schoenberg that Cory Arcangel compiled from YouTube clips is by turns cute, moving and thought-provoking.
• Turner Contemporary, Margate, until 30 September.
What to see this week in the UK
From Zama to Tacita Dean, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...May 24, 2018
Animals and Us review – four-legged insights give artists paws
Turner Contemporary, Margate
From YouTube cats tickling the ivories, to Joseph Beuys trapped with a coyote, to octopus hoarders, this delightful show questions the notion that humans are uniquely gifted creatures
I’m not sure what Cory Arcangel’s video Drei Klavierstücke Op. 11 says about our relationship with animals – except that we think it’s funny when a cat plays the piano. So many people have posted so many YouTube videos of cats pawing the ivories that Arcangel has been able to edit a constellation of cute clips, so the cacophony of cats coheres into a brilliant staccato rendition of Arnold Schoenberg’s 1909 expressionist masterpiece Drei Klavierstücke. The pussycats stumble, crawl and gingerly tap keys in a montage that must have taken stupendous effort to create. What is the true art – Schoenberg’s composition, Arcangel’s re-creation of it, the YouTube videos – or the piano-playing of the cats?
Turner Contemporary’s delightful exploration of the borderline between human culture and the rest of the animal world is full of such mind-expanding moments. Cuteness and horror, love and cruelty nuzzle side by side. A series of noble photographic portraits of dogs by Charlotte Dumas is arresting. When you find out that all are veteran rescue dogs who comforted survivors and workers at the World Trade Center site in September 2001, they become more heroic still. These dogs have such kind faces. Do they know what they did, the part they played in history? They are studies in goodness.
Continue reading...May 23, 2018
Life in Motion: Egon Schiele / Francesca Woodman review – an absurd pairing
Tate Liverpool
The Austrian painter and US photographer are great artists who explored frank sexuality and deserve retrospectives – separate ones, that is
There are no sharks in Liverpool’s Albert Dock, as far as I know. The deep, still water overlooked by Tate Liverpool, which opened in a sensitively converted warehouse here in 1988, is devoid of dorsal fins. Yet perhaps there are pelagic predators lurking after all, for this gallery has chosen to mark its 30th anniversary by jumping the shark – or whatever image you prefer for a staggering lapse into the absurd.
Life in Motion, an exhibition that for no good reason asks us to compare the two extremely different artistic visions of the Austrian draughtsman Egon Schiele and the 1970s US photographer Francesca Woodman, is an exhibition so shallow and patronising that it suggests Tate Liverpool has lost all respect for its audience.
Related: 'He took sex to the point of oblivion': Tracey Emin on her hero Egon Schiele
Continue reading...May 22, 2018
For Robert Indiana, LOVE was the message | Jonathan Jones
The undying fame of Indiana’s artwork is proof that love still has blazing energy as a political force
Love is just a four letter word – and it was a much ruder one when Robert Indiana, who has died aged 89, first thought up the work of art that was to define him and an entire decade. Indiana’s 1966 pop masterpiece Love originally said Fuck. Even after he changed it to the more heartwarming and universally acceptable word – he would spend the rest of his life turning it into sculptures and even adapting it to Hope to support Barack Obama – there was a secret meaning to this artwork.
Love is power declaimed Bishop Michael Curry in an address at the royal wedding that invoked the spirit of the 1960s
Related: Pop artist Robert Indiana, creator of LOVE, dies aged 89
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