Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 114
March 23, 2018
Damien Hirst goes wild in the country and Facebook unfriended – the week in art
Flayed unicorns land at a Norfolk stately home, Langlands & Bell take on the internet giants, and punk artist Linder conjures an eerie world – all in your weekly dispatch
Damien Hirst
This surreal encounter between Damien Hirst and a perfectly preserved 18th-century Palladian stately home is hugely entertaining. Read our review of the show.
• Houghton Hall, Norfolk, 25 March to 15 July
March 22, 2018
America’s Cool Modernism review – soulful struggles against a skyscraping new world
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
From proto-pop artists mocking capitalism to Georgia O’Keeffe’s bleak cityscape, these paintings from the jazz age grapple with a future that had already arrived
No one had ever seen anything like Andy Warhol’s soup cans. Precisely but flatly painted, and copied from the packaging of mass-produced commodities, these revolutionary works of art were unveiled in 1962 and changed the way we look at the world. Or so the fairytale goes.
But when you see Stuart Davis’s painting Odol, the story of pop art is turned upside down and inside out. Odol was – and is – a mouthwash. Davis painted a bottle of it in clear precise lines and dry inexpressive colouring, just as Warhol was to depict his cans of Campbell’s. Yet Davis paid his homage to mouthwash in 1924, when Louis Armstrong was the latest sound and F Scott Fitzgerald was writing The Great Gatsby.
Continue reading...March 17, 2018
What to see this week in the UK
From The Square to Brighton Rock, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...March 16, 2018
Moody modernist masters and a world of gender-fluid glamour – the week in art
Edward Hopper lights up America’s jazz-age, while the Barbican celebrates a refuge for transvestites and the Tate welcomes Anthea Hamilton – all in your weekly dispatch
America’s Cool Modernism
The desolate urban vision of Edward Hopper contrasts with Charles Demuth’s futurist hymn I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold in this survey of American art in the jazz age.
• Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 23 March to 22 July.
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Continue reading...March 10, 2018
What to see this week in the UK
From You Were Never Really Here to Sigrid, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance in the next seven days
You Were Never Really Here
(15)
(Lynne Ramsay, 2017, Fra/UK/US) 85 mins
March 9, 2018
Tacita Dean's triple threat and a meaty display of Francis Bacon – the week in art
Dean gets set for exhibitions at two national galleries, Edinburgh serves up important paintings by Bacon and Tate Modern pays tribute to boundary-breaking performance artist Joan Jonas – all in your weekly dispatch
Tacita Dean
Not one but two national galleries (with the RA joining in later in the spring) celebrate this intelligent and poetic British artist.
• National Gallery, London, 15 March to 28 May; National Portrait Gallery, London, 15 March to 28 May.
March 7, 2018
Jonathan Jones on Sondra Perry and Ian Cheng at the Serpentine Gallery
Serpentine Gallery, London
Two exhibitions at the London gallery both use technology, with startlingly different results
★★★★☆ /★☆☆☆☆
The sea churns and swirls around me, vast, foam-flecked, lurid. It is not made of water but paint. As I move along the video walls that cover three sides of the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, the colours of this mighty ocean – yellow, red, greasy brown, forming a thick, warping surface that bubbles with unhealthy blobs like nodules of hard bacon fat – it is abundantly clear that Sondra Perry’s installation has something to do with the art of JMW Turner.
For her first solo exhibition this side of the Atlantic, this young African American artist has reinvented Britain’s greatest painter for the digital age, transforming one of his most powerful paintings into an apocalyptic, seething video spectacle of stormlight and doom-laden waters. Yet there is more to it than that. This is not merely any Turner seascape she has animated. Her installation is called Typhoon Coming On, and is an uneasy 21st-century remake of Turner’s 1840 masterpiece, often known simply as Slave Ship, but called by him Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On.
Related: Pirates, explorers, empire-makers, slavers: how great works of art tell story of Britain’s past
Continue reading...March 3, 2018
What to see this week in the UK
From Game Night to Pablo Picasso, here is our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance in the next seven days
Continue reading...March 2, 2018
Picasso's tumultuous year of love and the Mona Lisa's doing a runner – the week in art
Britain awaits Picasso’s greatest works, Da Vinci’s masterpiece could leave the Louvre and the photographer who shared a joint with Jim Morrison – all in your weekly dispatch
Picasso 1932: Love, Fame, Tragedy
Picasso said his art was his diary and this exhibition takes that literally to investigate one year of his creative and personal life.
• Tate Modern, London, 8 March to 9 September
March 1, 2018
Victorian Giants: the Birth of Art Photography review – the triumph of the female gaze
National Portrait Gallery, London
This captivating show proves that the most exciting thing happening in Victorian art was photography, and the bold and revolutionary Julia Margaret Cameron was the greatest British artist of her day
Two young women stand side by side in the bright light of a window. One looks dreamily into the light, the other stares back at us, arms folded. She is confrontational, challenging. It is a bold, modern image. Are they suffragettes or is this a photo from the age of punk?
Related: Victorian giants and mountain nymphs: when photography became art - in pictures
Continue reading...Jonathan Jones's Blog
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