Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 128
July 12, 2017
The Encounter: Drawings from Leonardo to Rembrandt review – so where are they all then?
National Portrait Gallery, London
While Holbein’s portraits are electrifying, this show’s title is something of an overstatement. Couldn’t they have managed more than one apiece?
The National Portrait Gallery is one of the oddest museums in the world. Its peculiarity is evident in the labels of its sporadically compelling exhibition of Renaissance and Baroque portrait drawings. The name of the sitter – when known – comes first and the artist second. That’s how it is always done at this museum of great British characters. Walk through it, and you encounter many important people but few artistic masterpieces. In fact, there are just two great pictures in the entire permanent collection – Hans Holbein’s life-size drawing of Henry VIII and John Singer Sargent’s 1908 portrait of Conservative prime minister Arthur Balfour, both studies in the sexuality of power.
Recently, all that has been changing. Along with its portrait awards and fashion retrospectives, it keeps putting on exhibitions of actual art. We’ve had Giacometti and Picasso, with an important exhibition of Cézanne coming soon. Meanwhile, here is a tastefully selected survey of Old Master drawings. Holbein is the star. His drawing of an unknown Tudor woman entitled Woman Wearing a White Headdress (c.1532-43) stares at you with a cool disdain and self-possession that is arresting: was this the kind of look with which Anne Boleyn bewitched Henry VIII?
Related: Rare old master drawings to be shown at National Portrait Gallery
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July 11, 2017
Soul of a Nation review – the sorrowful, shattering art of black power
Tate Modern, London
Searing artistic responses to the agony of America’s racial struggle sit alongside powerful abstracts by forgotten artists. This compelling show puts the battle for civil rights in a brutal, brilliant new light
Sam Gilliam’s 1969 painting April 4 is an epic cascade of purple tears, a huge curtain of sorrow. Agony stains it. Melancholy seeps through its delicate clouds of colour. You don’t need to know what its title means to be moved by it.
When you know it was painted to mark the first anniversary of the murder of Martin Luther King on 4 April 1968, this abstract painting becomes a funeral elegy for assassinated hopes. It is one of the most powerful things in an exhibition that unconvers an entire lost history of American art.
Related: 'The ghetto is the gallery': black power and the artists who captured the soul of the struggle
Continue reading...July 7, 2017
Portrait power, black power and flower power – the week in art
Old masters spill their secrets, America makes a fist of its history and New Order say it with roses – all in your weekly dispatch
The Encounter
This exhibition of portrait drawings made from life by the likes of Holbein, Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt is a chance to get close to the creative processes of some of the greatest artists in history. It homes in on the magical way great portraits preserve people who lived long ago.
• National Portrait Gallery, London, 13 July – 22 October.
Whales at the Natural History Museum: this week’s best UK exhibitions
Skeletons and skulls reveal the secret lives of the biggest animals on Earth. Plus: the influence of surrealism and the legacy of Bonnie Prince Charlie
Nothing gets you closer to an artist than the intimacy of a drawing. To look at one by Da Vinci is to see his mind and hand at work. This exhibition of portrait drawings by some of the greatest ever artists is an encounter both with genius and the faces of people who lived up to 500 years ago. Hans Holbein’s drawings of Tudor Britons are spookily exact, like Renaissance photographs, while Rembrandt’s make you cry. The stuff of magic.
National Portrait Gallery, WC2, 13 July to 22 October
June 30, 2017
Realism makes a splash, Joseph Beuys lashes out and 160 Mancunians sashay – the week in art
Realism returns, women surrender to surrealism, and Joseph Beuys pulls on the boxing gloves – all in your weekly dispatch
True to Life: British Realist Painters of the 1920s and 1930s
British artists who shunned the avant garde between the wars are resurrected in this interesting survey of such individualists as Meredith Frampton and Laura Knight. Read our review of the show.
• Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, 1 July – 29 October.
True to Life, Howard Hodgkin and Joseph Beuys: this week’s best UK exhibitions
National Galleries of Scotland explore British realism, The Hepworth focuses on the painter’s works on India, and boxing as art comes to Waddington Custot
British art has a penchant for painting reality. From John Constable to Lucian Freud, you could even claim that it’s the national genius. This exhibition explores a much less well-known generation of meticulous picture makers who portrayed British life between the world wars. It includes the spookily precise portraits of Meredith Frampton, whose brittle, icy pictures of high life slip over into a kind of society surrealism. Other artists include Laura Knight, Winifred Knights and James Cowie.
At Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, 1-29 October
June 23, 2017
Royals hit back at Brexit and a modernist takes to the trenches – the week in art
Three princesses bring enlightenment, Canaletto finds beauty in sweat, and the pumping house that defied Thatcher gets listed – all in your weekly dispatch
Enlightened Princesses
Well, here’s a change from Diana’s dresses at Kensington Palace – this ambitious exhibition surveys the intellectual and cultural world of the 18th-century Enlightenment through the lives of Caroline of Ansbach, Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, and Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, German princesses who married into Britain’s Hanoverian dynasty. As well as featuring excellent art by Gainsborough, Zoffany and Yinka Shonibare this may be a royal blow against Brexit, revelling in the Germanic nature of our monarchy and the glories of our European heritage.
• Kensington Palace, London, until 12 November
Royal Academy and Fahrelnissa Zeid: this week’s best UK exhibitions
Tate Modern showcases the work of the late abstract painter from Turkey, while the RA’s summer show celebrates art of all styles
Black British artists in the 80s defied the Thatcherite age with courageous experimental work that seems increasingly influential in reinventing national identity and the nature of British art itself. Sonia Boyce was portraying herself and her place in history in paintings, drawings and photo-collages. The tensions of the time are captured in Black Audio Film Collective’s Handsworth Songs; while the Turner-nominated Lubaina Himid’s paintings pulse with expressionism. These and works by other important artists, including Isaac Julien and Mona Hatoum, make this two-centred show a fascinating recovery of the recent past.
South London Gallery, SE5, to 10 September; MIMA, Middlesbrough to 8 October
June 22, 2017
Portraying a Nation: Germany 1919-1933 review – art at its most deliberately obscene
Tate Liverpool
Thought Liza Minnelli in Cabaret was the peak of Weimar decadence? Think again. A pungent new exhibition reveals a world of chaos, corsets and bloodstained crosses that the Nazis were about to sweep away
When Hana Koch died in 2006, she left her family a modern German treasure hidden in an old altarpiece in her Bavaria home. Koch had survived the extremes and the violence of Germany in the previous century and through it all kept with her an extraordinary artistic document of innocence and love. For Koch was the stepdaughter of the great artist Otto Dix and, in 1925, when she was five years old, he made her a beautiful, handpainted picture book full of his joyously original visions of German folktales, biblical stories and comical monsters.
The Bremen Town Musicians – from the Brothers Grimm – and Saint Christopher carrying Christ are among the traditional German childhood images Dix reinvents in his Bilderbuch für Hana (Picture Book for Hana). It went on public view in Germany for the first time last year and is now at Tate Liverpool.
June 19, 2017
Summer 2017's finest art, design and photography
Tapestry goes into space, Matisse and his subjects take over the Royal Academy, black power is on the rise, the V&A gets some va-va-voom and Manchester goes mad for New Order. Here are the pick of the shows
• Summer arts preview 2017: TV | Comedy | Film | Pop | Classical | Theatre
“Liverpoole is one of the wonders of Britain,” wrote Daniel Defoe in 1715. “What it may grow to in time I know not.” He might be relieved not to have lived to see some of the city’s more dubious town planning decisions, but this proud port has a history of dreaming big and bold – sometimes too bold to be realised. Launching the region’s new architecture centre, RIBA North, this exhibition shines a fascinating spotlight on the history of Liverpool’s unbuilt grand plans, from rival designs for the two cathedrals to the drunken cultural cloud of the Fourth Grace by Will Alsop, planned for the very site where the RIBA’s gallery now stands.
• Until 9 September, RIBA North, Liverpool.
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