Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 124
September 21, 2017
Poor Art | Arte Povera review – the show that proves Britain's on the blink
Estorick Collection, London
What can we learn from these British responses to arte povera, the subversive Italian movement from the 1960s? That it’ll take more than fur sculpture and a daisy cross to outclass the Europeans
The bilingual title of this exhibition is more than a little unfortunate. The term arte povera, the 1960s Italian movement so christened by the critic Germano Celant, translates as “poor art”. And, as it happens, most of the British imitations of arte povera at the Estorick Collection are very poor indeed. This is a great advert for immediately abandoning Brexit. As part of the EU, we can share in the great artistic heritage of Italy which includes, as this show reminds us, not only Michelangelo Buonarroti but also Michelangelo Pistoletto, not only Caravaggio but also Mario Merz. What can Britain boast? On this evidence, a couple of daft Eric Bainbridge sculptures covered in fur and some solipsistic nonsense by Gavin Turk.
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September 19, 2017
Basquiat review – the hungry chronicler of broken America
Barbican Art Gallery, London
This dazzling retrospective reveals the savage sweep of Jean-Michel Basquiat, an artist whose blood-spattered mouths and grinning human skulls captured the tragic arc of American history
If the brilliantly promising artist whose paintings delight and dazzle the eye and mind in this retrospective were still alive, he’d be celebrating his 57th birthday come December. What kind of middle-aged artist might Jean-Michel Basquiat make? It’s hard to imagine him getting any older than 27, the age when drugs took his life. It is like trying to picture a Van Gogh who never shot himself, a Keats who recovered from tuberculosis and lived to be poet laureate.
The young face of Basquiat looms large in this exhibition, in giant photographs and videos. He sits with Andy Warhol, who has his arm around his protege, in a clip from Warhol’s TV show. They talk about New York clubs, but what if the picture were reversed? Instead of an old Warhol embracing a young Basquiat, I’d like to see old man Basquiat dispensing advice to the young. More to the point, I think it might be good advice.
Continue reading...September 18, 2017
Degas from the Burrell review – the great voyeur
National Gallery, London
His work is often seen as safe and sexless. But this unsettling exhibition, which puts nude bathers alongside ballet dancers, shows the dark and daring side of Degas
A young woman stares at you through binoculars at the beginning of this exquisite selection of drawings and paintings by Edgar Degas. She holds them firmly against her face, obscuring its upper half and casting her mouth and chin in shadow. Instead of her eyes looking back at you, a pair of glistening dark lenses protrude from her skull like the huge eyes of an inscrutable insect.
Degas distills so much into the experience of looking that it becomes erotic and sublime, a kind of religious rapture
Continue reading...September 17, 2017
Dalí, Duchamp, Basquiat and beards: the best art of autumn 2017
Modigliani seduces, the Turner hits Hull, Rebecca Warren shakes up St Ives – and Gilbert and George have a close shave with facial hair
• Autumn arts preview 2017: Stage | Music | Film | TV
The subway invaded the art gallery in 1980s New York. Basquiat, who died in 1988 aged 27, crystallised this moment, embodying a new youthful attitude that helped make today’s art what it is. He left behind a legacy of scrawled and slashed paintings that punch themselves into your mind. His angry electric style seems even more relevant now than it did then.
Continue reading...September 15, 2017
Pope painting by Francis Bacon to go on sale after 45 years hidden away
Estimated to be worth £60m, the painting depicts a slumping pope whose formless body is capped by a drunk’s red nose
The pope’s body is a spiralling heap of sausages wrapped in white and pink robes. Go closer, and even stranger physical images arise: brown smears over his fleshy hands look disturbingly faecal. You could almost believe it, if this were not a £60m – or more – masterpiece soon to go on sale in the opulent setting of Christie’s London auction house.
Francis Bacon’s Study of Red Pope 1962. 2nd Version 1971 is as close to a new painting by the great Soho bohemian painter who died in 1992 as we are ever likely to see.
Related: Francis Bacon's painting gloves are going to auction – praise be!
Continue reading...Degas's potent pastels and Basquiat's furious daubs – the week in art
Käthe Kollwitz rages against poverty, Latino creativity blossoms in LA and Siberian nomads charge into battle – all in your weekly dispatch
Drawn in Colour: Degas from the Burrell
The intensity and sensuality of Edgar Degas, the great voyeur of late 19th century art whose pastels are as potent as his paintings, should scintillate in this exhibition of his works from Glasgow’s Burrell Collection.
• National Gallery, London, from 20 September until 7 May.
Degas and Martin Boyce: this week’s best exhibitions in the UK
The National showcases the erotic imagination of the solitary Parisian, while the Turner prizewinner recreates the reality of modern cities
Jean-Michel Basquiat replaced the jazz improvisations of Jackson Pollock with scrawled, death-haunted messages from the street. This raw style made him a sensation in 1980s New York. His death in 1988 at the age of just 27 only intensified that reputation. Now, with the US plunged into political and social disunion, Basquiat looks like a prophet of the country’s woes. He also looks like a remarkable painter who showed how youth and rebellion can electrify art.
At the Barbican, EC2, 21 September to 28 January
September 12, 2017
Move over, Nelson! These are the statues modern Britain needs
From colonialists to Confederates, the debate over who should be honoured is raging around the world. We asked Guardian readers to nominate deserving figures yet to be carved in stone. Here, we make the case for people ranging from David Attenborough and JK Rowling to Peter Tatchell and Britain’s first Asian MP
Iconoclasm never fell out of fashion, but it has almost always been metaphorical: if you wanted to find the last time monuments were destroyed to significant political effect in this country – adding a mohican haircut to a statue of Churchill doesn’t count – you would probably have to reach back to the English civil war. Then came 2015’s Rhodes Must Fall campaign, which lit on the statue of Cecil Rhodes in the University of Cape Town as a flashpoint in a wider movement to decolonise South African education. The contagion was swift, arriving at Oriel College, Oxford, by the end of the year.
The arguments have the adamantine quality of the statues themselves. Those defending statues, whether that’s Donald Trump saluting the big beasts of slavery, or Chris Patten telling students to admire Cecil Rhodes for the sake of “freedom of thought” – do so on the basis that they are a part of history. To remove or destroy them is to deny or erase history. Those wanting to tear them down argue that it is not history that they want to erase, but a manipulated version of it, in which the villains are valorised and the victims erased.
Continue reading...Scythians review – wine, weed and war as the Siberian nomads charge into battle
British Museum, London
From horse armour to the tattooed skin of a warrior and a tent for smoking hemp, this beguiling exhibition unearths the intimate relics of an entire nomadic culture
When the composer Igor Stravinsky and the artist-archaeologist Nicholas Roerich sat down to create a primeval ballet of prehistory and human sacrifice in 1911, they found inspiration in the strange world of the ancient Scythians. The Rite of Spring, the ballet unleashed in Paris two years later, draws on Roerich’s own excavations to paint its scything musical picture of the violent Scythian past. His set included paintings of their burial mounds.
Continue reading...Why we can’t escape the rise of ‘plop art’ | Jonathan Jones
The sculptor Rachel Whiteread has come up with a new art term: “plop art” What can it mean? Is she cocking a snook at the American artist Paul McCarthy, whose controversial sculptures include a giant inflatable poo, perhaps? You wouldn’t want one of those plopping down in front of your house.
But no, Whiteread was talking about arbitrary acts of public sculpture in a more general sense. “I’m not a great fan of what I call ‘plop art’, where you plop a piece of work down where it doesn’t bear any relationship to anything else,” she said as her cast of the inside of a chicken shed went on display outside Tate Britain. Too much public art in Britain is, she suggests, “ill thought-out and put in places that it shouldn’t necessarily be.”
Related: Rachel Whiteread exhibition review – the secret life of things
Related: Toppling statues? Here’s why Nelson’s column should be next | Afua Hirsch
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