Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 130
May 26, 2017
Tate Britain could be our greatest museum – if it only loved its treasures
Its current displays aren’t just terrible. They turn the story of British art into one long joyless slog through brown and grey sludge. The proposed rehang won’t fix that
In its 17 years of existence, Tate Britain has practically killed British art history. Drawn from the biggest collection of British art in the world, the gallery’s permanent displays – or, more accurately, incredibly impermanent displays – have achieved such a rare cocktail of superficiality, pretension, ugliness and willed ignorance that, after a couple of hours there, it is hard to feel any enthusiasm for the story of British art.
I was at Tate Britain the other day, looking hard at the collection displays. I have no choice, as I’m writing a history of British art. I would not take what the gallery currently calls its Walk Through British Art for fun. Even when you’ve good reason to go, it’s a slog. I left with a depressing sense that British art since the Tudor age was just one big brown and grey sludge, barren of beauty, bereft of genius.
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Judy Chicago, Canaletto and Marc Quinn: this week’s best UK exhibitions
The renowned feminist artist celebrates 50 years of Sgt Pepper’s, Venice is brought to life and a collection of macabre Georgian sculptures take over Sir John Soane’s Museum
David Octavius Hill was already well established as a Scottish painter when he met the chemist Robert Adamson in Edinburgh in 1843. Adamson had started experimenting with the new science of photography and he and Hill started using the camera to make serious portraits. They started with Edinburgh dignitaries but soon went on to photograph the fishing community of Newhaven. Their haunting images are the first masterpieces of social reportage.
Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, 27 May to 1 October
May 22, 2017
Hokusai Beyond the Great Wave – review: a genius imprisoned by his greatest hit
The Japanese master’s youthful works are sublime. So why is the British Museum’s show obsessed with his twilight years?
There is a moment in this exhibition when, without any fanfare or drama, you see the birth of modern art. It happens as naturally as a sudden gust or a spring shower. Afterwards people go on carrying bundles over bridges or chatting in the pleasure district, but everything has changed. A new kind of beauty is born.
Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) was one of the most renowned of Japan’s woodblock print artists, whose influence on European avant garde in the age of Vincent Van Gogh is famous. Yet these brilliant designers who emerged from the pleasure district of Edo (now Tokyo) in the 18th and 19th centuries remain curiously enigmatic. What were they really like as individuals? How did Hokusai develop, and how does his art express his life?
Related: Hokusai: the Great Wave that swept the world
Continue reading...May 19, 2017
Ice cream, flayed statues and The Great Wave – the week in art
Hokusai’s poetic landscapes arrive at the British Museum, while Canaletto’s Venice cityscapes also go on show – all in your weekly dispatch
Hokusai
The man who painted The Great Wave is one of the world’s most passionate and poetic artists. This promises to be a captivating encounter with his genius.
• British Museum, London, 25 May–13 August
Is this Basquiat worth $110m? Yes – his art of American violence is priceless
An untitled Jean-Michel Basquiat work has sold for $110.5m, becoming the most expensive American painting ever – thanks to a combination of romance and sheer nightmarish vision
It is a painting that bleeds history. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (1982) portrays a black skull scarred with red rivulets, pitted with angry eyes, gnashing its teeth, against a blue graffiti wall on which someone has been doing their sums. Perhaps the street mathematician was calculating how many Africans died on slave ships in the 18th century, or how many people lived in slavery in America, or how many young black men have been killed by police guns in the last few years.
Related: Jean-Michel Basquiat skull painting sells for record $110.5m at auction
Continue reading...Hokusai and Graham Fagen: this week’s best UK exhibitions
The British Museum goes beyond the Japanese artist’s famous wave print, while slavery is considered from the point of view of an 18th-century African
While Constable, Turner and Goya were at work in the west, exhilarating Japanese printmaker Katsushika Hokusai was creating indelible images of mountains, the sea, a gust of wind and, above all, people. Hokusai’s art combines a passion for natural beauty with an eye for human comedy in a way that makes him one of the most engaging of all great artists. He is ironic without being cruel, colourful without being decorative and sees philosophical depth in the smallest of moments.
British Museum, WC1, 25 May to 13 August
May 12, 2017
Pink Floyd, Jane Austen and virtual reality – the week in art
The V&A’s blockbuster Pink Floyd show opens, along with Mat Collishaw’s recreation of an 1839 photography exhibition – all in your weekly dispatch
Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains
From psychedelic odysseys to melancholy musings on the rock star’s fate, the relics of Pink Floyd’s epic story are laid out.
• V&A, London, 13 May–1 October
Pink Floyd, Bruce Conner and Anthony Caro: this week’s best UK exhibitions
The story of the psychedelic 1960s group that evolved into a wealthy business has a fable-like quality that Pink Floyd recognised themselves. They told the story of what they saw as big-time rock’s corruption and potential for alienation in songs such as Wish You Were Here and Comfortably Numb. These melancholy musings were given spectacular visual settings by arty stunts including flying an inflatable pig over Battersea Power Station and building a wall in front of the band as they played. See the props, Gerald Scarfe’s marching hammers and the ashes of a very English dream here.
Victoria & Albert Museum, SW7, 13 May to 1 October
May 8, 2017
Giacometti review – a spectacular hymn to human survival
Tate Modern, London
In the 1930s, his dildos and violent bronzes marked him as a nightmarish surrealist. Then war transformed Alberto Giacometti, and his art, forever
Midway through this exhibition, emotion hits you like a blast of heat from a furnace. The chill of irony thaws. The intellectual and erotic games are over. There is only one thing worth making art about, Alberto Giacometti has decided, and that is our common humanity.
What a slender thread humanity must have seemed in Europe in the 1940s. The thin figures that emerged like wisps of smoke out of Giacometti’s conscience in the second part of that murderous decade seem barely to exist. They are not so much statues as mirages of people glimpsed far away, shimmering on a horizon of ash. The human form, starved, bereft, but somehow standing tall.
Continue reading...May 5, 2017
Giacometti, Thunderbirds and a fish-and-chip shop – the week in art
Tate Modern’s major retrospective of Alberto Giacometti opens this week, while Bruce Conner’s early video art is resurrected – all in your weekly dispatch
Giacometti
The sculptor who started as a surrealist, then turned to compassionate portrayals of the isolated human figure after the second world war, is one of the 20th century’s defining artists.
• Tate Modern, London, 10 May–10 September
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