Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 112
April 27, 2018
Abstraction in photography and nature in fashion – the week in art
Photographic experiments from Man Ray to Thomas Ruff, a philosophical cabinet of curiosities, and Parliament Square’s first female statue – all in your weekly dispatch
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What to see this week in the UK
From Avengers: Infinity War to Kamasi Washington, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...April 26, 2018
James Cook: The Voyages review – eye-opening records of colliding worlds
British Library, London
Work by ill-fated illustrators aboard Captain Cook’s first journey to the Pacific sit alongside revelatory images by a Polynesian high priest in this haunting exhibition
Sydney Parkinson drew the weird animal in a clear sharp line, looking at it carefully, then looking again, erasing his mistakes until he had an image that was beautifully recognisable. He wondered what to call this creature that was so utterly unlike anything back home in Britain. He found out by speaking with local people and making a brief dictionary of their language. You can picture, from the British Library’s moving and absorbing account of a moment when worlds apart suddenly met – how they communicated by pointing at parts of their bodies: words like belly, hand, foot.
Continue reading...April 23, 2018
'Astonishing, ravishing, sublime' – Rodin and the Art of Ancient Greece review
British Museum, London
The Frenchman made some of the best loved sculptures in the world. But his magnificent work is still no match for the Parthenon Marbles. My god, what art!
The British Museum’s astonishing, ravishing, sublime new exhibition – I could add a lot more superlatives and still be understating it – brings you face to face with the most revolutionary sculptures ever created. It also has some fine works by Auguste Rodin.
The wonder hits you as soon as you enter and find yourself confronted by Rodin’s The Kiss sharing a pedestal with two goddesses carved two and a half millennia ago. The Kiss is, well, it’s The Kiss – one of the most sensual and captivating masterpieces of modern times, a provocatively erotic blast of free love that shook Paris in 1882. It is one of the best-known, best-loved sculptures in the world. And those old Greek goddesses blow it away.
How modern, how alive, how strange and dreamlike the Parthenon marbles look when we see them through Rodin's eyes
Continue reading...April 22, 2018
Blue blooms: Matisse is having a fashion moment this spring
Sixty-four years after his death, the French artist is this season’s style inspiration
In Dior’s spring 2018 campaign, a model poses on a floor marked with flowing black line drawings of idealised faces. You can’t mistake the origin of these designs – Henri Matisse. Of course, these sketches are not actually by Matisse, any more than JW Anderson’s Moon Face earrings or Victoria Beckham’s Fluid shirt (which sold out quickly upon their autumn release) were designed by the man who painted the blazingly carnal Dance in 1910. In fact, Dior’s collection was inspired by the artist Niki de Saint Phalle, with references to her brightly coloured sculptures and mirror mosaics featuring heavily throughout. The overall takeaway from the brand’s SS18 advertising campaign, however, was pure Matisse. Because, 64 years after he died, the French artist is having a fashion moment.
Continue reading...April 20, 2018
What to see this week in the UK
From Funny Cow to Julian Opie, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...Revolutionary Rodin and Tahiti before Gauguin – the week in art
The great sculptor meets his ancient Greek inspirations, as Glasgow International kicks off and Anne Hardy presents dark images of a ruined future – all in your weekly dispatch
Rodin and the Art of Ancient Greece
The revolutionary meets the classic in this blockbuster encounter between the great sculptor of the impressionist age and the Hellenic art he loved.
• At the British Museum, London, 26 April-29 July.
April 16, 2018
Joseph Beuys review – a show steeped in fat, felt and fiction
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London
The German artist may have lied about being shot down in a stuka in world war two – but he took his mythology seriously
He always wore a hat. Like everything else he touched, it became a totem drenched in personal meaning, the symbolic headgear of a self-appointed shaman. In reality, according to those who knew him, the hat covered scars from a Stuka crash, in which rear gunner Beuys was seriously wounded, on the eastern front in 1944.
That much is true. Probably. Yet the story Beuys later made up about his wartime experience has been discredited since his death in 1986 by people who bothered to check the Third Reich documents. Beuys claimed he was rescued, barely alive, from the burning Stuka by Tatar nomads and swathed in fat and felt to resurrect him. It was a tale that explained not just his survival but his rebirth as a radical visionary out of the ashes of his youth in the Nazi era. The trouble was, it was a lie. Does that matter? Is it still a useful fable, part of his crazy vision, or should we suspect that his entire artistic output is similarly dishonest, or even that it is tainted by a past he never truly rejected or explained?
Related: Fat, felt and a fall to Earth: the making and myths of Joseph Beuys
Continue reading...April 14, 2018
What to see this week in the UK
From Custody to Joseph Beuys, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...April 13, 2018
Beuys keeps swinging and Brazil burns bright – the week in art
The visionary artist’s most powerful sculptures go on show while a new landmark floats on a London lake and Newcastle surveys Bomberg – all in your weekly dispatch
Beatriz Milhazes: Rio Azul
Dazzling abstract explosions of colour that update the modernism of Sonia Delaunay to 21st-century Brazil.
• White Cube Bermondsey, London, 18 April-1 July.
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