Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 121
November 6, 2017
Living With Gods review – 40,000 years of religious art, and this is it?
British Museum, London
Heavenly objects in a sterile limbo: the British Museum’s collection of faith-based artworks fails to convince – perhaps it works better on Radio 4
After a few minutes in the exhibition that accompanies Neil MacGregor’s new BBC Radio 4 series on the power of religion, my skin started to sizzle and my blood to boil. I truly felt branded inside, marked out as a reprobate, for the premise of the show is that belief in God(s) is such a universal human trait that if you lack it, you may not be human.
The premise here is that belief in religion is such a universal human trait that if you lack it, you may not be human
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November 4, 2017
Culture highlights: what to see this week in the UK
From the return of Bananarama to a new play by the writer of Doctor Foster, here is our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...November 3, 2017
Alan Turing is decoded, Hastings bags a prize and Gilbert & George go wild – the week in art
A new way to crack Turing’s genius, a mighty pier in Hastings, and Scotland rewinds to 1540 – all in your weekly dispatch
Ken Currie
Troubling images of disfigurement and war by the visceral Glasgow expressionist painter.
Flowers Gallery, London, 8 November to 9 December.
October 29, 2017
Impressionists in London review – how not to tell the origin story of modern art
Tate Britain, London
This pea souper of a show nearly achieves the impossible feat of making Monet seem dull, while illuminating little about British links to impressionism
This exhibition turns art history on its head. For more than a century it has been assumed that modern art began in Paris. We’ve heard so much about how the bohemian atmosphere of the French capital, with its druggy poets and dirty novels, inspired the impressionists.
Now Tate Britain shows that it was the smog of Victorian London and not the lights of Paris that inspired Claude Monet and his contemporaries. In a very important sense, the most French of all art movements turns out to be British.
Related: Pissarro in Norwood, Monet at the Savoy: what the exiled impressionists saw in London
Continue reading...October 28, 2017
Culture highlights: what to see this week in the UK
From the Wildlife Photographer of the Year show to Beowulf on stage, here is our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...October 27, 2017
Keep it simple! Art goes monochrome, plus London's impressionist past – the week in art
London’s National Gallery is colour ground zero, the excellent Susan Philipsz tells stories in Edinburgh and Marcel Broodthaers gets bizarre – all in your weekly despatch
Impressionists in London
The first modern art movement had a special connection with London, where its founders took refuge during the Franco-Prussian war. Monet would later return to paint the greatest canvases of the capital.
• Tate Britain, London, 2 November to 7 May.
October 25, 2017
Age of Terror: Art Since 9/11 review – a chilling show for dark times
Imperial War Museum, London
A provocative exhibition pulls together artistic responses to our era of global chaos – from eerie drawings of dying cities to Grayson Perry’s glib painted pots
In the main hall of the Imperial War Museum, London, the outline of a drone has been marked out in white lines by the artist James Bridle. Yet this ghostly image of 21st-century war immediately exposes the intellectual weakness of the exhibition it announces.
Do we really live in an age of terror? Looking around I am not convinced. Towering above the drone drawing is the museum’s most frightening and stupendous “treasure”: a V2 rocket. Next to that is a V1 flying bomb. Compared with the first half of the 20th century, when two world wars ravaged humanity, ours is still – for all its fears and troubles – comparatively fortunate.
Continue reading...October 22, 2017
Susan Philipsz: A Single Voice – sci-fi sound and emotional mystery
Baltic, Gateshead
The Turner prize-winner’s hypnotic new installation uses a camera, a violinist and a series of speakers to shed a wondrous light on music’s science and sorcery
What a miraculous thing art is. Just when you thought you knew what it was, it becomes something else. Perhaps transformation itself is the essence of art – or perhaps it has no essence at all, but is simply a name we give to whatever heightens life and reveals its beauty. Apologies for these wandering thoughts but the work of Susan Philipsz induces contemplation and reverie, provoking the mind as it enthrals the soul.
A Single Voice is her most obviously art-like work of art yet, in that it gives you a film to look at. Philipsz won the 2010 Turner prize with a room that was empty except for sound, and her work is primarily aural, even if her recent Tate Britain installation remembering the first world war did feature a collection of battered musical instruments.
Continue reading...October 20, 2017
The Chapmans go to war, photographers turn feral and Cézanne blows us away
Gateshead has a dream, Paris gets a sex sculpture and digital artists hack the gallery system – all in your weekly dispatch
Cézanne Portraits
The searching and profound portraits of Paul Cézanne are the greatest painted in modern times.
• National Portrait Gallery, London, 26 October to 11 February.
Culture highlights: what to see this week in the UK
From Armando Iannucci’s Soviet satire to Metallica live, here’s our pick of the best films, gigs, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance in the next seven days
Continue reading...Jonathan Jones's Blog
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