Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 134
March 4, 2017
Dali's enigma, Picasso's protest: the most important artworks of the 1930s
For surrealists, modernists and montagists alike, it was a labyrinth of monsters and physical horrors: no decade has ever been so lucidly portrayed by its artists
What the Great Depression reveals about our futureSalvador Dalí’s The Enigma of Hitler is a ghostly farewell to the 1930s. Painted in the last year of the decade, when Hitler’s invasion of Poland finally brought the years of appeasement to an end, its image of a melting telephone suspended above a photograph of the Führer torn from a newspaper and lying on a plate (otherwise empty except for a few dry beans) recalls the long-distance conversations of barren diplomacy, the anxiety of hearing the latest shocking news, the dread of waiting for war.
An umbrella that could easily belong to the prime minister Neville Chamberlain hangs impotently in the ether, fading away – as colourless as the bleak landscape with which Dalí holds a mirror to his age.
Continue reading...
March 3, 2017
Gender resistance, Italian merchants and Mumbai – the week in art
The National Portrait Gallery in London opens its exhibition setting the work of French surrealist Claude Cahun against English conceptualist Gillian Wearing – plus more in your weekly art dispatch
Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun
The powerful, eerie, gender-resisting surrealist photography of Claude Cahun is juxtaposed with the work of Turner prize winner Gillian Wearing.
• National Portrait Gallery, London, 9 March-29 May.
The American art scene is dying of philistinism | Jonathan Jones
In the UK, the art scene’s ability to reconcile high culture and pop sensibilities is in stark contrast to the US, where a crisis in art galleries is growing
A crisis at America’s greatest museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, has elicited mournful handwringing over the malaise of high culture in a pop-cultural age. What led to the financial woes that have forced the resignation of the Met’s director, Thomas P Campbell? An op ed in the New York Times laments that “much of the museum’s encyclopedic collection now means little to younger viewers. It feels foreign and remote and unsociable in a way that contemporary art, with its familiar references, does not.”
I keep seeing similar opinions, ad nauseam, on the arts pages of US papers. “Can the old masters be relevant again?” asked the New York Times last year – and the answer given was far from reassuring. I don’t know if young Americans are really as ignorant as these media moaners claim, but there is certainly a scary mood of philistinism emanating from cultural commentary itself stateside. “The musty paintings of old masters feel entirely out of touch to a youth eager for sexuality, irony and diversity,” according a recent article on Salon. What could The Starry Night possibly contribute to the the life of a 21-year-old woman of colour who is working as a hostess while finishing a computer science degree?”
Continue reading...Tony Cragg to Madonnas And Miracles: this week’s best UK exhibitions
The eccentric sculptor’s work goes on display in Yorkshire, and an exhibition sheds light on the purpose of art in Renaissance Italy
The spinning, tottering eccentricity of this playful British sculptor’s unpredictable abstractions mirrors modern scientific understandings of space and time. Cragg maps out mathematical yet unruly forms that suggest matter collapsing into a black hole or the quirks of the quantum. Just as string theory posits beauty and order underlying the cosmos, Cragg’s convolutions create satisfying shapes out of apparent chaos, revealing inner nature in Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s open landscape.
Continue reading...March 1, 2017
De Stijl turns 100 – but still cannot touch the greats of abstract act
Piet Mondrian and the rest of the De Stijl movement were admirable idealists, but their work is constipated compared with the wild moods of their American peers
Modern art centenaries are piling up. There are (at least) three big ones this year: the Russian revolution with its impact on the avant garde, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, and the Dutch art and design movement De Stijl, founded by Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg in 1917.
De Stijl is the most colourful – if you like red, yellow and blue. The celebrations in the Netherlands include a giant Mondrian on The Hague’s town hall, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam exploring De Stijl’s influence on contemporary artists such as Isa Genzken and The Hague’s Gemeentemuseum showing all 300 of its Mondrians in a colossal retrospective.
Related: Dutch city celebrates Mondrian with sky-high replica on city hall
Continue reading...February 28, 2017
Factum Arte: the art copyists giving the Renaissance a renaissance
With their immaculate replicas of everything from Tutankhamun’s tomb to Italian architecture, this Madrid company is bringing ancient civilisations to life
The curator at the National Gallery could not contain her wonder. Calling me over to the replica of the Borgherini Chapel that has been installed as part of the gallery’s Michelangelo and Sebastiano exhibition, she pointed out a surreal detail. Not only has this reproduction of a piece of Renaissance architecture got hyperrealistic reproductions of the frescoes, marble decor and a half-domed alcove – it even has a modern plug socket sunk into the plaster.
That immaculate eye for detail is typical of the work of Factum Arte, a Madrid-based studio whose combination of digital analysis with assiduous craft is transforming the way we see art. I have been watching their work develop for nearly a decade. I am now convinced it is the most important thing happening in 21st-century art – because it can quite literally save civilisation.
Continue reading...February 24, 2017
Myths, dangerous ideas and the best of the Bluecoat – the week in art
The Serpentine hosts John Latham as well as an exhibition responding to his work, while Jim Dine also arrives in London – all in your weekly art dispatch
Speak
Artists of the 21st century respond to the iconoclastic legacy of the late British conceptual visionary John Latham. Douglas Gordon, Laure Prouvost, Tania Bruguera and Cally Spooner prove that his dangerous ideas live on.
• Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London, 2 March-21 May
Andy Warhol should be made a saint – he makes every day sacred
Andy Warhol died 30 years ago this week, and his Catholic piety, care for the poor and sheer mystical vision mean he remains a transcendent talent
Thirty years have passed since Andy Warhol’s death. Surely it is high time for him to be made a saint.
There was something prescient and slightly spooky about the way he said goodbye to life on Earth. This spring, in Milan, his final works are going on display again in an exhibition called Sixty Last Suppers. It recreates the eerie final act of his life. For Warhol painted his Last Suppers in homage to Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (Il Cenacolo) in Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, and they were unveiled in this city with its long Christian history in January 1987. Within a month, Warhol was dead, aged 58, following a gallbladder operation.
Related: Andy Warhol's Mad Men era: 'He found New York at this incredible moment'
I was so scared today
There was blood leaking through my shirt
From those old scars from being shot
And the corset I wear to keep my insides in was hurting
And I did three sets of 15 pushups
And four sets of 10 situps
But then my insides hurt
And I saw drops of blood on my shirt and I remember
The doctors saying I was dead
Speak and Bacon To Doig: this week’s best UK exhibitions
The Serpentine celebrates conceptual artist John Latham, while the panache of modern British art is revealed through the likes of Freud and Hockney
The Wall Street crash cast a long shadow on the American imagination. In the 1930s, Walker Evans photographed the faces of poverty and Grant Wood painted images of a spartan American identity. Younger artists were saved from starvation by Roosevelt’s ambitious social programme and widespread commissioning of public art. Jackson Pollock and his generation would be inspired by these public murals to paint abstractions on a grand scale. This should be a fascinating insight into the difficult birth of modern American art.
Royal Academy, W1, 25 February to 4 June
February 23, 2017
Damien Hirst gives first glimpse of new Venice art – but can he win back critics?
With mysterious underwater objects hinting at monsters and ancient civilisations – including a $4m Medusa – Damien Hirst could be about to reverse years of creative decline
The old sensation is coming back. Blood pumping, heart pounding. Like swimming underwater and seeing the silhouette of a shark. In April Damien Hirst, who in recent years has seemed mostly occupied with curating his own art collection and building an award-winning gallery for it, will unveil a big exhibition of new works in two grand spaces in Venice called Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable. So is he about to rekindle the passion that turned me into an art critic?
Continue reading...Jonathan Jones's Blog
- Jonathan Jones's profile
- 8 followers
#/media/File%3ADuchamp_Fountaine.jpg){kind=link}