Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 115
February 28, 2018
The tomb-raiding Spaniard who cheated death – Murillo: The Self Portraits review
National Gallery, London
A lot of Murillo’s work is pious, soft-focus gibberish. But this judicious exhibition recasts the 17th-century Spaniard as a profound artist whose defiantly joyous paintings still have something to say
When the 17th-century Spanish painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo was in his 30s he imagined what he might look like if his forgotten tomb was discovered in hundreds of years.
In the first of his two surviving self-portraits, done in 1650–55 and now owned by New York’s Frick collection, Murillo gazes out from an oval picture that is held within a mouldering grey stone slab. This piece of timeworn rock rests at an angle, as an old monument dug out of a crowded graveyard might lean against the cemetery wall.
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February 26, 2018
All Too Human review – brutal, tender and bizarre, this is life, not art
Tate Britain, London
Here in this dazzling survey of modern figurative painting are works that truly matter, in their humanity, courage, feeling and truth.
I’d love to say it was David Bomberg’s arresting landscapes or Francis Bacon’s existentially challenged popes and apes that got me addicted to Tate Britain’s brilliant and brave new exhibition, but in truth it was a breast. In Lucian Freud’s early painting Girl With a White Dog (1950-51), his first wife, Kitty Garman, sits in a lime-green dressing gown with a dog resting its long snouty face on her lap. She has one breast exposed while the other is hidden under fluffy fabric. Somehow, as I looked, I felt the mystery of a beating heart, the pulse of her being, in the way she places her hand on her covered breast. Freud, it hit me, is an artist who – like Caravaggio – delivers the shock of the real, the disturbing sense that you are looking at life, not art.
Related: Frank Auerbach: a painter's painter of horrors and joy
Continue reading...February 24, 2018
BBC looks beyond the west to retell the story of civilisation
Civilisations – note the plural – reworks the classic 1969 TV series into a truly global history of art
The meeting had already eaten up the morning when Michael Jackson, executive producer of the BBC’s new art epic, Civilisations, challenged me to explain why Michelangelo needed to be in a world history of art for a 21st-century audience.
I gave, I thought, a passionate explanation: that Michelangelo invented the very idea of the artist as an imaginative genius, that without him, not to mention the European Renaissance that he epitomised, we wouldn’t see artists as heroes or even be interested in art itself as a special, magical thing but would just see it as a bunch of luxury craft objects or religious decor.
Related: Civilisations: new BBC series 'goes to the heart of human creativity'
Continue reading...What to see this week in the UK
From I, Tonya to Julius Caesar, here is our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance in the next seven days
Continue reading...February 23, 2018
The world according to Jet magazine and a century of bodywork – the week in art
Bacon, Freud and Rego paint from life, Lorna Simpson dips into old magazines and Jasmina Cibic builds a nation – all in your weekly dispatch
All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life
The genius of Lucian Freud and his meaty friend Francis Bacon seen in a context of British “figurative” art from Sickert to Paula Rego and beyond.
• Tate Britain, London, 28 February to 27 August
So Neanderthals made abstract art? This astounding discovery humbles every human
Scientists say cave paintings in Spain, thought to have been by our ancestors, were actually by Neanderthals. So did they teach us everything we know?
If you go to the painted caves of Spain and France, crawl through narrow passages and keep your balance on slippery rock floors, you reach the hidden places where ice age hunters made their marks tens of thousands of years ago. Nothing seems more startling than the way they placed hands against the cold rock and blew red ochre out of their mouths to leave fiery images. Of what though?
Up to now we called it the human presence. “The print of the hand says, ‘This is my mark. This is man’,” declared the scientist Jacob Bronowski when he visited caves in northern Spain in his classic TV series The Ascent of Man. Simon Schama visits those same caves in the BBC’s new epic series Civilisations and raves about those same handprints. For what could communicate the curiosity, self-assertion, intelligence, and above all self-consciousness of our unique species Homo sapiens, more clearly that this desire to literally leave our mark?
Related: Neanderthals – not modern humans – were first artists on Earth, experts claim
55m years ago
Abstract painting? My Neanderthal great great grandad could do that!
Continue reading...February 16, 2018
A glowing cosmic spectacle – Anthony McCall Solid Light Works review
Hepworth Wakefield
JMW Turner meets Isaac Newton and JG Ballard in this psychedelic show of smoke machines, light vortices and luminous mists that map roads into the unreal
In a darkened, cavernous space, projectors draw strong white lines on black walls. The animated sketches they beam out form squiggles that grow into ovals and circles then collapse and start again. Meanwhile, smoke machines pump out a fine mist that floats into the cones of light and fills out their geometries to create an effect the artist calls “solid light”.
So far, so interesting, but when you walk inside that solid-seeming light and turn your eyes back towards the projector, strange things start to happen. The circles, ovals and triangles of light beaming around you form corridors and gothic arches, spooky tunnels and apocalyptic vortices of silvery whiteness where clouds of smoke stream by in an ever-changing stormy spectacle. It is like being inside a painting by JMW Turner, enclosed in cascades of luminous mist, revealing endless vistas of skies and seas that melt and merge in a glowing cosmic spectacle. Step out of the beam, and it vanishes in an instant. Run your fingers through the light and you can draw with shadows, like putting your hand in a running stream to see the water dance.
Continue reading...Revolutionary Flemish painting and Richard Serra's dark thoughts – the week in art
Anthony McCall’s psychedelic light sculptures, Van Gogh’s arrival at the Tate Britain and a celebration of Virginia Wolf – all in your weekly dispatch
Continue reading...February 14, 2018
David Milne review – One of Canada's greatest painters? Come off it!
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London
From the glitz of New York’s gilded age to the horror of the trenches, Milne had plenty to work with. So why does our critic prefer his photos?
This exhibition of a supposedly “great” Canadian artist who was unsuccessful in his own lifetime and is little-known outside his own country today is called David Milne: Modern Painting. I don’t know what definition of modern painting they used, but it isn’t in any of my books. Milne’s paintings are only modern if by that you mean a wishy-washy vagueness, depressed colours and complete lack of shock. This is the cough of the new, modern art with a yawn.
There is very little sign of development in Milne’s art, and as you navigate his backwoods the monotony of his subdued palette of russets, pale greens, blacks and muddy browns becomes embarrassingly repetitive.
Continue reading...February 12, 2018
Portrait of Obama: 'This will not tell the future ages what made him special' | Jonathan Jones
There’s a boardroom blandness to Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of the ex-president. But Amy Sherald’s painting of the former first lady, unveiled at the same time, is a haunting, billowing revelation
Kehinde Wiley’s keenly awaited portrait of the 44th president of the United States is a disappointment. It says much less about Barack Obama than Pete Souza’s photograph of the president bending down to let a little boy touch his hair. And it is unlikely to be remembered in the same way as Shepard Fairey’s Hope poster.
Related: Official portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama unveiled
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