Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 113
April 7, 2018
What to see this week in the UK
From 120 BPM to The Last Ship, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...
April 6, 2018
Magical Monet and Tracey Emin's message for travellers – the week in art
Emin has a warm welcome for everyone arriving at St Pancras station, as the National Gallery probes Monet’s mind and Linder Sterling roughs up Chatsworth House – all in your weekly dispatch
Monet & Architecture
This exhibition is a beguiling journey into the mind of Monet that reveals the serious purpose behind his visual brilliance.
• National Gallery, London, 9 April-29 July.
April 5, 2018
Monet & Architecture review – glorious pleas for humanity show Monet in a new light
National Gallery, London
He is known as a joyful painter of lilies and picnics. But this thrilling show recasts Monet as an artist aghast as the world hurtled towards calamity
In 1918, an artist who was in his late 70s gave the French state a spectacular gift. Claude Monet, who happened to be an old friend of the prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, offered a series of dizzying paintings of his waterlily pond as a national symbol of peace, to mark the end of a murderous world war. To this day, they hang as he intended in enfolding elliptical spaces at the Orangerie Museum in Paris.
This gesture always puzzled me, until I saw the National Gallery’s game-changing exhibition of one of the world’s most joyously accessible artists. It seemed so strange that Monet – the thoughtless painter of fleeting light, the hedonist recorder of bourgeois picnics – should make such a serious public statement. How many visitors to the Orangerie even connect his sensuous lilies with the slaughter of Verdun?
March 31, 2018
What to see this week in the UK
From Isle of Dogs to Rhinoceros, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...March 30, 2018
Tate insider touches the soul of painting and Freud flees Vienna – the week in art
Romantic backroom boy picks his favourites, Rembrandt and Dürer shine in black and white, and the Victorians discover photography – all in your weekly dispatch
Ken’s Show
This is a passionate selection of soul-touching art by veteran Tate art handler Ken Simons. Romantic works by Richard Wilson, JMW Turner and Samuel Palmer rub shoulders with abstract masterpieces by Rothko and Mondrian in a moving, thought-provoking way.
• Tate Liverpool, until 17 June.
Ken's Show review – sublime choices from a non-expert put the pros to shame
Tate Liverpool
Ken Simons has been hanging artworks in the gallery for 30 years. The decision to let him select his favourites from the vaults has resulted in an inspiring, unfashionable and richly connected show
No curator at any Tate gallery is allowed to touch a work of art. That has to be done by art handlers, whose skills are a mixture of conservation science and DIY ingenuity. Until his retirement last year, Ken Simons was art handling manager at Tate Liverpool.
It’s 30 years since the gallery opened and Simons was a key part of its team from day one. So to mark the anniversary, the museum had the sweet idea of getting him to curate an exhibition of his favourite works, drawn from all the art he has handled through the decades.
March 28, 2018
Van Gogh and Japan review – the painter as tortured apprentice
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
There is no doubting Van Gogh’s reverence for the Japanese masters such as Hiroshige, but his attempts to re-create their calm artistry surely added to his personal torment
Art history has gone global. Gone are the days when the likes of EH Gombrich and Kenneth Clark could tell the story of art as if it was exclusively European. The BBC’s new series Civilisations is merely following today’s museums and academics in insisting instead that western art is just one part of a world history in which the most dynamic forces are exchanges, influences and sometimes acts of daylight robbery linking one part of the world with another.
The artistic relationship between the European avant garde and Japan in the 19th century is one such cross-cultural flow. There’s plenty of evidence that the (mostly French) artists who laid the foundations of modernism were obsessed with the images of Hokusai, Hiroshige, Utagawa Kuniyoshi and other masters who took popular, brightly coloured woodblock printmaking to a zenith of sophistication in 18th and early 19th-century Japan. In Édouard Manet’s 1868 portrait of the radical novelist Émile Zola, a picture of a wrestler by Utagawa Kuniaki II is pinned up on his study. Manet’s associate Whistler brought the cult to Britain in paintings like Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge that are manifestly inspired by Japanese prints.
You'd have to stand very far back and squint to think Van Gogh's versions of Hiroshige resemble the originals
Continue reading...March 26, 2018
Linder: The House of Fame review – too punk for a Turner?
Nottingham Contemporary
A gatherer of dark treasures, Linder Sterling’s retrospective contains wondrous, surreal, menacing dreams
Linder Sterling was still a student at Manchester Polytechnic in 1977 when she made a set of erotic masks out of cut-up lingerie for her friend Howard Devoto, of local punk band the Buzzcocks. Now they’re in a case in an art gallery, and Linder herself is a famous artist. Yet the way she has staged her retrospective at Nottingham Contemporary proves that punk’s not dead – not in her imagination anyway.
Linder doesn’t want to be an art star. Imagine that line set to one-note guitar and thudding drums. She doesn’t wanna be a cultural totem. Instead of an exhibition about herself, she has staged her retrospective as a survey of her influences and enthusiasms, in which she shares the stage with heroes, ghosts and – it sometimes seems – everyone she has ever admired.
Related: 'Do you have any ectoplasm? Is it vaginal?' The return of punk artist Linder
Continue reading...March 24, 2018
What to see this week in the UK
From The Third Murder to Friendly Fires, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...March 23, 2018
Damien Hirst review – a breathtaking spectacle (with some art on show, too)
Houghton Hall, Norfolk
The flayed unicorns are good fun, the ping-pong balls hypnotic. Yet it all pales amid the fairytale grandeur of its surroundings
In the servant’s hall, two dead hares in vitrines look perfectly at home among the antler trophies. No, wait – they are at home. These are not artworks by Damien Hirst but a small part of the atmospheric decor of one of England’s most astounding stately homes.
It is just one more victory for Houghton Hall in its head-to-head aesthetic contest with our wealthiest living artist. Hirst plays the house and the house wins. However surreal and attention-grabbing his efforts, Houghton Hall consistently outdoes them, absorbing outsized anatomical statues into the dreamlike expanse of its landscaped estate, putting spot paintings in the shade with rococo tapestries and fairytale beds.
Related: Damien Hirst to show new spot paintings at 18th-century mansion
Hirst's painting has no life, no poetry. No matter – I get to use the gothic toilet, with sketches by Sargent to look at
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