Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 119
December 8, 2017
Iggy Pop goes nude, the Turner grows up and Cecily Brown gets wrecked – the week in art
The legendary singer poses for a life drawing class, Lubaina Himid wins art’s top prize and it’s shipwrecks ahoy at the Whitworth – all in your weekly dispatch
From Life
The tradition of drawing from life is explored through history and in the art of today, including a life class staged by Jeremy Deller with Iggy Pop as nude model.
• Royal Academy, London, 11 December to 11 March.
December 7, 2017
Charles II: Art and Power review – crowning glories of a royal passion
Queen’s Gallery, London
Portraits depicted him as a grotesque figure but the king loved art and amassed a magnificent array of works that celebrate his love of theatre – and Nell Gwyn
Charles II had the face of a corrupt satyr. His portraits resemble the one Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray kept in the attic. Every sin seems etched into the work as a grotesque wrinkle. His heavy black eyebrows and ungainly nose add to the ugliness. In a popular print that was pinned up in about 1661 in a pub or coffee house (it still has the pinholes), these features are exaggerated into an almost devilish mask.
He may not have minded looking like a stage villain, because he loved and supported the stage. When Charles was invited to claim the British throne in 1660, plays had been illegal for nearly two decades. They were banned for their “lascivious Mirth and Levity” in 1642 by the Puritans, who won the English civil war. Their religious bigotry was one of the reasons crowds hailed Charles II so enthusiastically when he returned from exile in the Low Countries, after the death of the Puritan dictator Oliver Cromwell.
Continue reading...Arguing over art is right but banning it is the work of fascists | Jonathan Jones
A failed petition to remove a controversial Balthus painting from the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the latest worrying attempt to censor a work of art
In 1989, Republican senators Jesse Helms and Alfonse D’Amato launched an attack on artistic freedom. They railed against Piss Christ, a photograph by Andres Serrano of a cheap crucifix in a tank of the artist’s own urine. The red and yellow tints of Serrano’s piss give this modern Baroque artwork a spookily spiritual quality, redolent of the light in old churches, yet for these culture warriors of the conservative right it was just a desecration and an insult, exhibited, outrageously, using money from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Related: New York art museum refuses to remove painting of girl after 'voyeurism' complaint
Related: By bowing to the braying internet mob, the Guggenheim forgot its purpose | Rupert Myers
Continue reading...December 6, 2017
From Matisse to Picasso: the best works by artists over 60
As the art of 62-year-old Turner prize winner Lubaina Himid shows, age melds wisdom and recklessness to remarkable effect
There’s a magic elixir than can keep you for ever young. It’s called being an artist. Yesterday, 63-year-old Lubaina Himid won the Turner prize, making her the oldest winner of the award – but that’s nothing.
Louise Bourgeois was in her 80s when she created a terrifying giant spider that was the start of a creative roll still sparking with perverse thrills when she died aged 98. Renaissance painter Titian similarly worked to the end of his life, when he was somewhere between 86 and 96. In his great autumnal blast of sensuality and pain, The Death of Actaeon, which he left unfinished, he suggests what makes a mature masterpiece different and special. The colours are browned and yellowed by experience, yet the brushwork is amazingly free and loose. In other words, age brings both wisdom and recklessness. That is a recipe for artistic dynamite.
Continue reading...December 2, 2017
The best art shows this Christmas
From Dalí’s religious hallucinations and Waqas Kahn’s Sufic mysticism to Susan Philipsz’s take on Bowie’s Starman, here are five exhibitions to revive your spirits in the event of a mince pie meltdown
More to see: Theatre | Carols and concerts | Dance | Comedy | Film | Outdoor funIf you celebrate too hard and find your head swimming, your eyes unfocussed and the world wobbling and melting as you stagger home, you will have entered Salvador Dalí country. The phantasmagoric world of this artist who didn’t need stimulants to see double has never looked better than it does here. Paintings by Dalí, from his youthful work Girl at a Window, which convincingly shows what a technical talent he was, to his eerie 1951 religious hallucination Christ of St John of the Cross, demonstrate amply that however kitsch and silly he could be he was one of the 20th century’s wildest dreamers. His friend Marcel Duchamp was a still greater visionary. Duchamp’s readymades, including his snow shovel and bottlerack, are shown in all their philosophically discombobulating glory, along with original notes and sketches that let you into his beguiling thoughts. This is a joyously mind-expanding art explosion for the holidays.
• Royal Academy, London, to 3 January.
Culture highlights: what to see this week in the UK
From Michael Haneke’s Happy End to Marilyn Manson’s latest tour, here is our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance in the next seven days
Continue reading...December 1, 2017
Scottish pop stars, Egyptian surrealists and pastiche from Obama's painter: the week in art
Modern art takes the high road, the desert Dalís cringe before Paris, and Barack Obama’s portraitist puts black fishermen centre stage – all in your weekly dispatch
Charles II: Art and Power
The Restoration in 1660 saw a rapid return of royal finery after the republican rule of Oliver Cromwell. Even the crown jewels needed remaking. Yet far from a frozen mask of reimposed regal authority, the new king, who had picked up some dissipated ways in his years of exile, created a libertine court. The sensualist royal painter Peter Lely captured all the decadent opulence perfectly.
• Queen’s Gallery, London, 8 December to 13 May.
November 29, 2017
Rose Wylie review – childlike bursts of freedom and joy
Serpentine, London
With her colourful dollops and scrawled captions, the late-blooming painter channels the liberation of childhood to point a way forward for British art
This is how Rose Wylie paints the sun. She does a big yellow circle. Then she adds straight yellow lines around it. Underneath she does a couple of palm trees that are brown sticks with dollops of green on top. On the sea, she adds an outline of a ship with black smoke puffing out of it.
The teacher gave her a gold star and pinned it on the classroom wall. His name is Mr Hans-Ulrich Obrist and the nursery is called the Serpentine Sackler Gallery. The exhibition is called Quack Quack. Oh, and young Rose is 83.
In this country we still expect painters to do a proper, hard-working job. Well, painting is not a job, it’s a joy
Continue reading...November 27, 2017
Was there more to Egyptian surrealism than suggestive mosques and rotten meat?
The Tate wants to wrestle surrealism away from the clutches of the west. But this show’s dream visions and bodily contortions can’t change the fact that everyone cringed before the might of Paris
The BBC’s Civilisations will be the most ambitious cultural television series since the run of classics that began in 1969 with Civilisation and climaxed with The Shock of the New in 1980. It will also be the most truly global history of art ever told. As a consultant on this epic project, I’ve wrestled with what the concept actually means. How do you tell a story of art that encompasses the entire planet without either producing an incoherent Babel of unconnected images, or a false and fictitious history full of glib relativism?
To see how Civilisations achieves this, you’ll have to wait. But as I watch it come together, I get the feeling this is going to open eyes and minds in a way that does for world art what the new generation of nature documentaries has done for bioluminescence.
Continue reading...November 25, 2017
Culture highlights: what to see this week in the UK
From Malian band Songhoy Blues to the Natural History Museum’s show about venomous beasts, here is our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance in the next seven days
Continue reading...Jonathan Jones's Blog
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