Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 120
November 21, 2017
Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed – in pictures
A new exhibition positions Edvard Munch as a revolutionary whose personal tragedies peppered his work, and made him more than a symbolist scream
The Met Museum, New York, 15 November to 4 February, 2018Continue reading...
Modigliani review – 'a gorgeous show about a slightly silly artist'
Tate Modern, London
He took the drugs and had the sex. But when it came to painting, Modigliani wasn’t the barrier-breaking subversive this exhibition casts him as. Was there anyone he wouldn’t steal from?
She looks at me through leaf-shaped eyes with huge black pupils fringed by spiky lashes. Just these eyes alone say sex, without having to even look at the opulently rounded breasts, narrow waist and curvaceous hips of Amedeo Modigliani’s Reclining Nude on a White Cushion.
This is one of a spectacular array of paintings of models posing naked that Modigliani made in 1917, while war and revolution blazed in the world beyond his Paris studio. There’s a huge gathering of these women at the heart of Tate Modern’s highly enjoyable homage to modernism, beauty and love. Modigliani’s 1917 nudes, and a few later ones, all hang together in one scintillating gallery. Yet are these nudes really as radical and revolutionary – let alone feminist – as this exhibition makes out?
Continue reading...November 18, 2017
Culture highlights: what to see this week in the UK
From wartime race drama Mudbound to Phil Collins’s UK tour, here is our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance in the next seven days
Continue reading...November 17, 2017
Killer snakes, boozy beards and Da Vinci's record-smashing Christ – the week in art
Modigliani’s nudes hit Tate Modern, Gilbert and George celebrate 50 years together, and Facebook bans Christmas robins – all in your weekly dispatch
Modigliani
This short-lived painter, who combined Cubism with the Renaissance nude, put sensuality into modernism.
• Tate Modern, London, 23 November to 2 April.
November 16, 2017
John Piper review – One of Britain's greatest artists? Pull the other one!
Tate Liverpool
From his flaccid, semi-modernist daubs to his visions of Olde England, John Piper was about as refreshing as a cup of weak tea. But the war, and its bombed-out buildings, did give him his finest hour
John Piper’s art is a bit like being given a hanky and an Agatha Christie novel when you’ve got a cold. A drear and dark November is certainly the right time to open a survey of his Lemsip, soft-centred vision – if there is ever actually a good time to view his wan seaside resorts and sad ruins. Tate Liverpool’s attempt to reclaim this minor figure as a “great British artist” (that’s honestly what the publicity says) is like saying John Betjeman was the greatest poet of the 20th century. Both have their place, but let’s not push it.
Piper, who was born in 1903 and soldiered on until 1992, was a contemporary of such European giants as Picasso, Matisse, Duchamp, Mondrian and Ernst. During the age of modernism in the first half of the 20th century Britain was an artistic backwater. In recent years, art historians have lost sight of that. They keep weaving fantasies in which Matisse comes to see Henry Moore and says: “’enry, I ’ave no ideas, can you ’elp?” This exhibition takes that revisionist fashion to such absurd extremes that it may represent some kind of breaking point. Yes, there is a case for championing Moore, Hepworth or Nash. But Piper? Pull the other one, it’s got bells on it. Church bells, of course.
Continue reading...All the Da Vincis in the world: rated
As Salvator Mundi, his potent depiction of Christ, becomes the most expensive artwork ever, here’s our guide to every Leonardo painting in existence, from the masterpieces to the less-than-perfects
Continue reading...November 15, 2017
'We say what we want' … Gilbert and George look back on 50 years of filth, fury and in-your-face art
In pictures blazing with anger, they chronicled a changing Britain. Should they really be seen as national treasures? As two shows celebrate their often shocking work, the duo talk skinheads, gentrification – and settle some old scores
Half an hour into my interview with Gilbert and George, something unexpected happens: they disagree. Gilbert Prousch is talking about their urge to provoke and outrage. “We see all the other artists as somehow meaningless,” says the 74-year-old, his Italian accent still strong. Gilbert grew up in a tiny village in the Dolomites and attended art colleges all over Europe, before meeting George in London during the autumn of 1967, when they were both studying advanced sculpture at St Martin’s.
“They’re not asking any questions,” continues Gilbert. “We are quite disillusioned with that kind of art ourselves. We want an art that is in your face: aggressive. We are confrontational. Freedom of speech, we call it. To say what we want.”
Far from damaging their art, their dubious opinions have given it strength
Continue reading...November 11, 2017
Culture highlights: what to see this week in the UK
From the Taylor Wessing photo prize to Hedda Gabler’s UK tour, here is our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance in the next seven days
Continue reading...November 10, 2017
Russia's graphic revolution, a new Louvre and Van Gogh's insect invasion – the week in art
John Piper captures 1940s Britain on land and sea, Egyptian surrealists hit Merseyside and the Russian revolution delivers a lesson in graphics – all in your weekly dispatch
John Piper
This romantic landscape artist’s paintings of wartime ruins and storm-tossed ships are moving memorials to 1940s Britain.
• Tate Liverpool, 17 November to 18 March.
November 8, 2017
Ken Currie: Rictus review – grisly art games with a serious moral purpose
Flowers Gallery, London
True shock value is rare these days, but these gruesome yet skilled paintings of Hiroshima victims and macabre medical experiments will give you the shudders
It is getting hard for artists to shock anyone. Provocateurs such as Jake and Dinos Chapman seem sadly adrift in today’s deeply strange world when a sculpture of a suicide vest elicits only a brief shrug among the much more surreal stuff reality keeps chucking at us. Ken Currie deserves credit for breaking through this moribund mood with grotesque new paintings that genuinely nauseate. You’d have to be a stone to see these without a few shudders, and anyone with a weak stomach should avoid them like the plague – and I mean a plague that causes bubbling pustules bursting out of dead flesh.
Two colossal canvases, each more than four metres wide, face each other across a fairly small space. The Flensers (2016) is a nightmarish vision of the whaling industry 100 years ago, except it is more timeless than that. Flensing is the bloody work of skinning and gutting a whale to get at its commercially valuable blubber. Gigantic pink and purple intestines swarm like foul invertebrate creatures at the centre of Currie’s painting, while workers with horribly sharp and bizarrely shaped (but authentic) flensing tools go about their gruesome task. Vast strips of flayed whale skin, showing marbled red and white insides, hang above the meaty labourers as they wade among shiny guts.
Patients and doctors enact rituals that have little to do with real healing
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