Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 133
March 17, 2017
Techno, people power and seahorse sex – the week in art
New works by Gillian Ayres go on show, Tate Modern hosts 10 days of art in the Tanks and the Hepworth is the height of fashion – all in your weekly art dispatch
Gillian Ayres
New paintings and woodcuts by the 87-year-old abstract artist are accompanied by her phenomenal 1972 work Untitled (Cerise), a nearly six-metre wide epic of suggestive colour.
• Alan Cristea gallery, London, from 16 March-22 April.
From Imagine Moscow to Ten Days Six Nights: this week’s best UK exhibitions
An avant-garde display marking the centenary of the tragedies of the Russian revolution, plus the rock festival of art exhibitions at Tate Modern
Continue reading...March 13, 2017
Michelangelo and Sebastiano review – of gods and men
National Gallery, London
Placing Michelangelo’s work alongside that of his plodding friend highlights the artist’s astounding and visionary creativity
Halfway through the National Gallery’s exhibition about artistic friendship you can read a letter from Sebastiano del Piombo (1485-1547) to Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) in which he describes a conversation with Pope Leo X. The pope was nice about Michelangelo’s incomparable talent, he says, but less so about his forbidding personality. “But he is terribile, as you see,” complained Leo: “one cannot deal with him.”
Pope Leo X’s word for Michelangelo has echoed down the centuries not just as a characterisation of the man but his art. Terribile means “terrible” in the sense of awe-inspiring, sublime, daunting. The triumph of this exhibition is to make you feel, with mounting astonishment and wonder, the true terribilità of Michelangelo’s art – its transcendental mystery and sublime power.
This is the closest any art gallery can get to recreating the thrill of standing in the Sistine Chapel
Continue reading...March 10, 2017
Michelangelo's friend and Canada's punk conceptualist – the week in art
The ambition of Renaissance Rome, Rodney Graham paddling into Gateshead, revolutionary Russian architecture and South African sensuality – all in your weekly art dispatch
Michelangelo and Sebastiano
A fascinating closeup on Michelangelo’s genius in the years when he competed with Raphael and collaborated with his friend Sebastiano del Piombo in the intensely ambitious atmosphere of High Renaissance Rome.
• National Gallery, London, 15 March-25 June
From Michelangelo to Rauschenberg: this week’s best UK exhibitions
The world-famous artist’s brief yet productive collaboration, plus the renowned American painter’s dazzling and ingenious creations
This exhibition is a micro-history: a detailed exploration of a short period in the life of Michelangelo Buonarroti when he collaborated closely with a painter far less famous than he was. It is a tale that takes you to the heart of High Renaissance Rome, with stunning exhibits including a rarely seen Michelangelo statue of the risen Christ and a convincing replica of an entire frescoed chapel.
Continue reading...Michelangelo and Sebastiano to Robert Rauschenberg: this week’s best UK exhibitions
The world-famous artist’s brief yet productive collaboration, plus the renowned American painter’s dazzling and ingenious creations
This exhibition is a micro-history: a detailed exploration of a short period in the life of Michelangelo Buonarroti when he collaborated closely with a painter far less famous than he was. It is a tale that takes you to the heart of High Renaissance Rome, with stunning exhibits including a rarely seen Michelangelo statue of the risen Christ and a convincing replica of an entire frescoed chapel.
Continue reading...March 9, 2017
Howard Hodgkin: farewell to a matchless master of colour
The brilliance and subtlety of Hodgkin’s intensely emotional works about love and loss made the artist a Turner for the modern age
Howard Hodgkin was a great artist of sex and death. Like the handful of British modern painters who are his peers – Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and David Hockney – he rebelled against the austerity of abstract art and instead put the human self, in all its desire and suffering, at the centre of his universe.
Unlike Bacon, Freud and Hockney, though, he did this in a poetic, indirect, allusive way that can be superficially mistaken for the very abstract art that he rejected, body and soul. That made Hodgkin too difficult and strange ever to be a painterly pop idol, and he was regularly left out of the daft media game of naming the “greatest living British artist”.
His wafts of colour resemble translucent gossamer fabrics in the breeze
He was Proust with a paintbrush, an artist whose work seems to evoke – and communicate with – all times
Continue reading...March 8, 2017
The beauty of art can counter Islamophobia – but it won't be easy
A Qatari-funded Arab and Islamic art museum is opening in New York to ‘challenge misconceptions’ – but has the US already made up its mind?
What kind of Islamic art has the power to open American hearts and minds, at a time when Donald Trump has relaunched his attempt to ban entry from several Muslim-majority nations?
In May, a new Institute of Arab and Islamic Art, set up by Qatar’s Sheikh Mohammed Rashid Al-Thani, will open in downtown Manhattan. The timing is not accidental. Al-Thani is trying to humanise Islam and broaden perceptions of it in the US. He hopes the institute will “not only showcase the breadth of art and culture from the Arab and Islamic worlds, but also challenge certain stereotypes and misconceptions that hinder cross-cultural understanding”, he told the Art Newspaper.
Continue reading...March 7, 2017
Pop art's American dream is over – and a zombie culture has begun
The British Museum’s latest show brings together great pop and abstract expressionist images from the US. In the age of Trump, they seem like relics from a lost civilisation
The ruins of a lost civilisation are unveiled in the British Museum’s latest blockbuster. It fills the same huge gallery that recently housed colossal Egyptian statues and has previously displayed the wreckage of a Viking ship. The world it uncovers feels just as vanished and remote, yet the archaeological fragments on view are not amphorae, battle axes or Celtic brooches, but pieces of the American Dream.
Here is a US flag, faded to grey. Here is a diagram of an Apollo rocket, icon of the far-off age when President John F Kennedy sent Americans to the moon. Here is the Great American Nude – not to mention great American candy, gas stations and movie stars.
Related: The American art scene is dying of philistinism | Jonathan Jones
Continue reading...March 6, 2017
Put away the gallery guides – art is best when shrouded in mystery
A new app, Smartify, allows you to point your phone at artworks and instantly know everything about them. But while facts can enrich enjoyment, it is the shock of the unknown that really makes art resonate
Looking at art should be like walking in the countryside. You may not know exactly where you are, or what bird is making that peculiar sound, or what the hill ahead of you is called, but that’s part of the fun of it. You don’t need to know those things to feel the poetry of nature. Being slightly lost and adrift in a landscape can only deepen its power.
Of course, if you do know your birds, trees and local history, a walk might be still more entrancing. Yet such knowledge comes gradually. It is picked up through experience. A true knowledge of nature cannot just be got through an app on your phone – and if it could, it would mock sensitivity with shallow instant factoids. Imagine pointing your phone at the hill on the horizon and getting a load of info on screen. Would that enrich your dreamy walk or ruin it?
Continue reading...Jonathan Jones's Blog
- Jonathan Jones's profile
- 8 followers
