Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 116
February 10, 2018
What to see this week in the UK
From Black Panther to Virginia Woolf, here is our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance in the next seven days
Continue reading...
February 9, 2018
The world's darkest building and Virginia Woolf triumphs at the seaside – the week in art
Mark Dion weaves through rainforests and rubbish dumps, the new Kettle’s Yard builds up steam and a Picasso is renamed after a nightclub – all in your weekly dispatch
Mark Dion
Science and history become dreamlike in Dion’s surrealist collections of found stuff.
• Whitechapel Gallery, London, 14 February to 13 May
February 5, 2018
Picasso's 'Annabel' – the rights and wrongs of renaming paintings
Richard Caring – owner of Annabel’s – has decided to retitle the artist’s Girl with a Red Beret and Pompom after his Mayfair club. It’s an arrogant move, but we shouldn’t be religious about the names we pin on art
Is it possible that Richard Caring, owner of Annabel’s in Mayfair, understands art history better than scholars who have ?
Caring has called the scintillating 1937 masterpiece he bought for £20-£30m under the title Girl with a Red Beret and Pompom by a new ludicrously self-serving title: Annabel. Fake art history! – cry the experts. But hang on. Caring is something of a nominalist philosopher, exposing the often arbitrary nature of the names we give art.
Continue reading...February 3, 2018
What to see this week in the UK
From Phantom Thread to Bridget Riley, here is our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance in the next seven days
Continue reading...February 2, 2018
Journeys With The Waste Land review – 'If only they'd picked Cats instead!'
This attempt to connect TS Eliot’s great modernist poem with paintings by Hopper, Twombly and more ends up feeling like a stilted stagger through the shards of a masterpiece
TS Eliot would have loathed this exhibition. The English language’s great 20th-century poet was a proud elitist. His 1922 masterwork The Waste Land is full of contempt for what he saw as the vulgar culture of jumped-up commoners:
“He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.”
The stillborn attempts at thirdhand cubism hit you like a wet fish
Continue reading...Cézanne bows out and Turner, Nash and co meander in Margate – the week in art
Iceland’s Ragnar Kjartansson brings Italian pop to Cardiff, ocean liners cruise into the V&A and the Ashmolean is simply divine – all in your weekly dispatch
Journeys With The Waste Land
TS Eliot is the inspiration for a meandering river of an exhibition that includes gems such as JMW Turner’s painting The Golden Bough and a portrait by Peter Blake of Tracey Emin playing chess with Marcel Duchamp.
• Turner Contemporary, Margate, 3 February to 7 May.
January 31, 2018
Why have mildly erotic nymphs been removed from a Manchester gallery? Is Picasso next?
Hylas and the Nymphs is no masterpiece. But if it has to be removed from a gallery, will the nudes of Titian and Picasso be next? My, what a utopia
Manchester Art Gallery says it has removed JW Waterhouse’s 1896 painting Hylas and the Nymphs from its displays “to prompt conversation”. Yet the conversation can only really be about one thing: should museums censor works of art on political grounds?
There can only be one answer if you believe in human progress.
Picasso contains a jaw-dropping amount of salivating sexist visions
Continue reading...January 27, 2018
What to see this week in the UK
From Lady Gaga to Macbeth, here is our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance in the next seven days
Continue reading...January 26, 2018
Why would Trump turn down a golden toilet? Because he already has one
The 18-karat loo offered to the US president by the Guggenheim is a modern masterpiece – as the 100,000 people who have used it can testify. The White House should plumb it in pronto
Art can be a terrific way of insulting the powerful. It is the ultimate smirking courtier, seeming to suck up while in reality, gesticulating rudely behind the king’s back – or, in the case of Donald Trump and the golden toilet, under his backside.
Continue reading...Glorious art from a dreadful king and the cosmos in a plastic cup – the week in art
The RA’s perverse Charles I show opens, Tara Donovan makes the ordinary extraordinary and Velázquez paints a nobody – all in your weekly dispatch
Charles I: King and Collector
Great paintings by Mantegna, Titian, Rubens, Holbein, Durer and Tintoretto feature in this perversely hagiographic homage to a king who drove his subjects to rebel. Read our review.
• Royal Academy, London, 27 January to 15 April.
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