Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 129
June 16, 2017
Caravaggio's dark genius and Sargent's sensual watercolours – the week in art
Inter-war art from Germany, the fight against Thatcher in the 80s, and dazzling Turkish abstraction – all in your weekly dispatch
Beyond Caravaggio
This rapturously enjoyable detour through the candlelight and shadows of 17th-century art is one of the most beautiful exhibitions of recent years. Caravaggio’s paintings are shining daggers of profundity and truth. The works of his much less famous followers, from Artemisia Gentileschi to Georges de La Tour, are fascinating and moving. Don’t miss this.
• Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, 17 June – 24 September
'He took sex to the point of oblivion': Tracey Emin on her hero Egon Schiele
His work was once dismissed as porn. But the pain, anger and sexual frustration in Egon Schiele’s writhing nudes electrified Tracey Emin’s adolescence – and gave her a purpose that has never waned. She talks our writer through his stormiest work
“That’s quite rude,” says Tracey Emin as we look through the drawings of Egon Schiele. “She’s laying on her elbows with her mouth on her arm, almost like she’s got to bite her arm to keep her mouth shut, and she’s got her arse in the air and her legs are open. She’s got her dress falling down over her breast, her hair’s tousled ... Having sex to the point of oblivion, so there’s no return. That’s what that looks like. And that’s what makes it really good.”
This is a tale of two artists. One is an Austrian expressionist in Sigmund Freud’s Vienna at the start of the 20th century, who managed to shock even its refined erotic sensibilities with the stark sensuality of his images. The other is a teenager in 1970s Margate, whose first encounter with said artist, Schiele, was one of the most inspiring events of her life.
It was about showing emotion. ‘I am drawing this in a different way, because I see it through the eyes of pain.’
Continue reading...Beyond Caravaggio and Simon Patterson: this week’s best UK exhibitions
The entrancing work of the 16th-century realist comes to Edinburgh, while one of Britain’s leading conceptual artists reassesses 25 years of his own output
The sensual immediacy of Caravaggio’s art pierces your mind like a shaft of light in a prison cell. This painter of sex and death, bright white flesh and the depths of night not only left behind some of the greatest paintings on Earth when he died in 1610, but also inspired followers Europe-wide to emulate his potent realism. Artemisia Gentileschi’s baroque feminism and the paintings of Caravaggio’s probable boyfriend Cecco are among the surprises in this entrancing show.
Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, 17 June to 24 September
June 9, 2017
A sci-fi odyssey, subversive curiosities and a medieval genius – the week in art
Benedict Drew explodes free-market ideas via Hollywood and Max Ernst, while Arthur Jafa meditates on black lives in the US – all in your weekly dispatch
Giovanni da Rimini
This close look at the art of a forgotten master is a trip to the very birth of the Renaissance. Giovanni da Rimini’s masterpiece Scenes from the Lives of the Virgin and Other Saints (1300-05) is a window on the moment when Italian artists rejected the stiffness of Byzantine painting and started to look at reality with fresh eyes. It is an encounter with medieval genius.
• National Gallery, London, 14 June to 8 October
Raphael and Balenciaga: this week’s best UK exhibitions
Passion and sensitivity shine through in the Ashmolean’s celebration of the Italian Renaissance, while surreal art meets high fashion at the V&A
In 1920, the surrealist photographer Man Ray took a picture of a huge piece of glass lying on the floor of his friend Marcel Duchamp’s studio, covered in dust. The glass panel was in fact part of Duchamp’s masterpiece-in-progress The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even, deliberately left to gather dust as part of Duchamp’s creative process. The photograph, entitled Dust Breeding, is a gothic celebration of decay that literally finds beauty in the dirt. Here it is the starting point for a history of modern dust involving such artists as Gerhard Richter, Walker Evans and Jeff Wall.
Whitechapel Gallery, E1, to 3 September
June 2, 2017
Dust on a Duchamp, Grayson's pots and radical painting – the week in art
Richard Wright beguiles Glasgow, modern art takes London, and a dog urinates in New York – all in your weekly dispatch
A Handful of Dust
The oblong and winding road: Mondrian's tortured journey to gridlock genius
Visitors to the Hague’s blockbuster show should not be put off by his early flowers and windmills. They are the key to understanding this geometric master who found rectangles in everything
Is it a skull or a flower? The rounded white shape that sags on a listless stem in the painting is the dying bloom of a chrysanthemum, yet it eerily resembles a human head stripped to the bone. A ghostly eye socket seems to peer out of it. What can Piet Mondrian have been thinking when he painted this morbid image called Metamorphosis in 1908?
It is a decadent bloom of late Romanticism, passionate and inward-looking and completely out of time. When Mondrian completed it, Matisse was the talk of Paris and Picasso had blown up artistic tradition with his 1907 masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. In Amsterdam, however, the aesthetic ideals of the 19th century were alive and well. The 36-year-old Mondrian was painting what the conservative local art market wanted – flowers and windmills, sunsets and farmhouses. No one could have predicted he would die an avant-garde hero in New York in 1944 and be remembered in the 21st century as one of the greatest of all modern artists.
His Paris studio was a visionary work of art in itself … its floorplan carefully mapped into working and thinking areas
Continue reading...Richard Wright and Grayson Perry: this week’s best UK exhibitions
The Scottish minimalist unveils a beguiling environmental artwork, while rude pots and satirical wall hangings are the focus of the ceramicist’s new show
Scotland’s minimalist Michelangelo creates another beguiling environmental artwork. Wright uses paint, drawing, gilding and stained glass to shape delicate, suggestive, site-specific installations that simultaneously revel in tradition – recreating the lost arts of fresco and Renaissance perspective – and express the throwaway modern moment. Most of his works are destroyed after being exhibited, but since winning the Turner prize he has created more permanent pieces.
The Modern Institute, Glasgow, to 26 August
May 29, 2017
Raphael: The Drawings review – a magnificent, mind-opening exhibition
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
The Renaissance star has always been held up as a model of formal perfection but this outstanding show reveals the artist’s warmth and tenderness too
A woman is running towards us, mouth open in a scream, a baby cradled in her arms. The violence around her seems to part and give safe passage through the slaughter. What the open pathway through the heart of the horror really gives, however, is a heartbreaking visual connection between our eyes and her pain. To look into that terrified face is to feel the full pity of her plight. It is impossible not to be gripped by compassion.
There are three drawings of this harrowing New Testament scene, The Massacre of the Innocents, in the Ashmolean Museum’s outstanding exhibition of Raphael’s drawings. They were done in Rome in about 1509-10, when the artist was in his mid-20s. In each – from rough sketch to finished design – the same woman rushes through the crowd. Yet the details vary: the expression on her face, the pose of the baby. In the most poignant, the baby’s eyes are little dots and it lolls as if dead in her arms. Her eyes are hollow dark pits of despair.
Continue reading...May 26, 2017
Raphael's drawings, Judy Chicago's Beatles mural and Istanbul street dogs – the week in art
A Renaissance master comes to Oxford, Judy Chicago’s Fab Four artwork and Andrea Luka Zimmerman’s socially engaged films – all in your weekly dispatch
Raphael: The Drawings
You can’t get much better than this. Raphael (1483-1520) has been recognised since his own lifetime as one of the world’s greatest artists, and no fashion or passing cultural mood is ever going to change that.
• Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 1 June-3 September.
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