Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 111
May 21, 2018
Antony Gormley: Subject review – this art thesis fails the viva
Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge
As the famous artist returns to his alma mater’s town, he could do with a rigorous professorial interview about his art
Antony Gormley floats in space with his eyes fixed on infinity. His arms and legs are straight and relaxed, his posture passive and meditative as he hangs about half a metre above the floor.
Wake up, it’s time for a tutorial. What does this cast-iron replica of your own body bolted to a wall by its feet mean, exactly? I don’t want to hear a lot of vacuous guff about “activating spaces” and “undermining our assurance about the stability of the world”, Gormley. Finals are in a few weeks and you urgently need to clarify your thinking.
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May 18, 2018
Incendiary Schiele, swaggering Schnabel and dynamic Dean – the week in art
Egon hits Merseyside, Julian reveals some splashy daubs and Phyllida Barlow celebrates 10 glorious years of Jupiter Artland sculpture park – all in your weekly dispatch
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Continue reading...What to see this week in the UK
From Deadpool 2 to Othello, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...May 15, 2018
Killed Negatives review – uncovering the dark heart of the Depression
Whitechapel Gallery, London
A small army of photojournalists were sent out to document America’s Great Depression. This exhibition reveals the pictures that were suppressed – with surreal and devastating results
The Great Depression inhabits modern memory like a malign shadow, always at the edge of our anxieties. Could things ever be that bad again? Are they, perhaps? The cataclysmic poverty and unemployment that swept the world after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 is a nightmare from history that warns that modernity does not always mean progress.
“There’s no way like the American way,” proclaims an upbeat poster photographed by Arthur Rothstein in 1937. Behind it stretches out an ashen wasteland strewn with beaten-up industrial sheds, a battered car and a facade far too sad for Edward Hopper to paint. Yet what finally kicks the last lethal shade of irony into Rothstein’s picture is a black hole that floats in the empty pale sky next to the poster. This deathly disc looks hungry, as if about to swallow the poster, the car, the sheds. It might be the Depression itself: a cancer in time, wasting hope away.
Related: Killed Negatives: censored 1930s America - in pictures
Continue reading...Modigliani's Nu Couché is a trite pastiche – and the buyers saw through the hype
Sotheby’s billed the $157m nude as a proto-feminist portrait of a sexually confident modern woman. In fact, she’s little more than a soft-hued rehash of paintings by more daring innovators
Modigliani is no Leonardo da Vinci. He isn’t even a De Kooning, a Cézanne or a Gauguin. All those artists have had paintings sell at auction for more than $200m. Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi looks set to hold its $450.3m world record for a good while to come, after Modigliani’s Nu Couché (Sur le Côté Gauche) achieved a “mere” $157.2m (£116m) at Sotheby’s in New York last night. Still a nice bit of cash, but far from the astronomical, record-beating sums that were being imagined.
I am not surprised. Even in the unreal world of art sales there has to be some relationship between hype and fact. Modigliani’s painting was being sold as something it is not, which some bidders were bound to notice. It was being praised not for its own merits but for a supposed place in cultural and social history that can’t actually be seen on the canvas.
Related: Modigliani nude fetches $157.2m at Sotheby's – setting auction house record
Related: Modigliani review – 'a gorgeous show about a slightly silly artist'
Continue reading...Isn't this just posh dinnerware? William De Morgan: Sublime Symmetry review
Guildhall Art Gallery, London
The Victorian ceramicist wanted to create a utopian art of abstract symmetries. But his mirrored plates – full of mermaids, dragons and peacocks – are more home decor than high art
Mathematics has been inspiring art ever since a Neolithic designer drew a circle on the ground with a stick and it became the basis for an arrangement of stones on Salisbury Plain.
So Victorian ceramicist William De Morgan was hardly the first artist to embrace geometry and calculation – but he did have a better grasp of advanced mathematics than most. The Guildhall Art Gallery’s promising exploration of a potter’s mind reveals that numbers were in De Morgan’s blood. His father, Augustus, was one of the most acclaimed mathematicians of his age, advancing algebra and tutoring Ada Lovelace, who went on to invent the idea of computer programming.
Continue reading...May 11, 2018
Cold war dadaism, symbolic Scots and dreadful dentistry – the week in art
The unseen side of the Great Depression, the metal side of David Nash and the dirty side of Richard Long – all in your weekly dispatch
Data protection laws are changing in the UK, under an initiative called GDPR. Make sure you continue to receive our email roundup of art and design news by confirming your wish here.
Continue reading...What to see this week in the UK
From Revenge to Rita Ora, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...Richard Long review – modern primitive sees the cosmos reflected in mud
Lisson Gallery, London
The wandering artist’s perennial walks have led him to contemplate sun, moon and stars with the devoted awe of mankind’s early ancestors
Mud is not a promising medium to draw with. It is dull, thick, unpromising stuff. A muddy drawing sounds like a vague and boring one. Miraculously, however – or maybe just because he’s spent 50 years making art in and of the land – Richard Long’s huge new mud drawing Gravity Crescent is hypnotic, full of complex 3D curves that snare the eye.
It looks as if eels are nesting in the wall. They writhe and wriggle, each tubular body created by a swerve of Long’s mud-stick. The raw wet earth with which he created this towering work, on a pristine white wall in London’s Lisson Gallery, comes from the river Avon, so perhaps the material is haunted by the river’s flashing, silver-scaled creatures. His muddy swirls mass in an engrossing swarm. The flow and life of the river seems caught in this whirlpool of mud.
Continue reading...May 4, 2018
Performing stones, a murderous puppet and the psychedelic 60s – the week in art
Stones become art, a horse takes fright and The Revolutionary Suicide Mechanised Regiment Band march us back to the 60s – all in your weekly dispatch
Data protection laws are changing in the UK, under an initiative called GDPR. Make sure you continue to receive our email roundup of art and design news by confirming your wish here.
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