Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 14

Francis Bacon gets personal, the poetry of decay and a sensory wonderland arrives – the week in art

The modern master’s portraits take the genre apart, Mire Lee explores entropy in the Turbine Hall and Haegue Yang enlivens multiple media – all in your weekly dispatch

Francis Bacon: Human Presence
The cutting eye of Britain’s most brilliant modern artist is turned on the traditional genre of the portrait. There will be blood.

• National Portrait Gallery, London, 10 October to 19 January

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Impressionism-on-Thames, a star slacker and a disturbing double act – the week in art

Monet brightens up London, Mike Kelley’s teddies have their big day out and Goya goes head-to-head with Paula Rego – all in your weekly dispatch

Monet and London
One of the most hyped exhibitions of the year – and the hype is justified by this intense encounter with Monet in the smog.

• Courtauld Gallery, London, until 19 January

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London Standard’s AI imitation of Brian Sewell proves art critics cannot be easily replaced

Nonsensical article lacks Sewell’s authentic voice and is hateful way for paper to remember one of its best writers

Who knew the late art critic Brian Sewell was such a tediously cliched writer? Especially since some of the dead verbiage in the London Standard’s AI version of Sewell reviewing Van Gogh at the National Gallery has become common currency only since his death at 84 in 2015.

Give him credit, he had a voice. And it was a posh voice. Evidently the chatbot used by the Standard needs to be fed a lot more novels by Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, some Latin perhaps, and a mouthful of plums before it can begin to resemble the public school-educated, Courtauld-trained Sewell, who started his career as the protege of the upper-class art historian and Soviet spy Anthony Blunt.

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Uncanny Visions: Rego and Goya review – it’s Little Miss Muffet vs the horrors of war

The Holburne Museum, Bath
Goya’s disturbing etchings, full of terrors plucked from the edge of the abyss, leave Rego’s mildly subversive Nursery Rhymes looking like superficial sketches

Paula Rego hung her small collection of Goya prints in her bedroom, facing her bed. One in particular caught my eye in this attempt to set these two Iberian artists side by side. It’s Love and Death, from Goya’s series Los Caprichos. A woman who is wild and haggard with grief cradles the corpse of the man she loved: in doing so, she holds him up, willing him to stand like a living body. It reminds me of Rego’s disturbing masterpiece The Family, in which a woman holds up the doll-like form of her paralysed husband, her face ambiguous and musing.

The Goya print she owned is surely a source for this painting that autobiographically dissects Rego’s marriage to artist Victor Willing, who had MS. Looking at Goya’s Love and Death through Rego’s eyes, you feel the genuine connection between these artists. If only it were evident elsewhere, in a show that does a disastrous job of setting a modern master against a past one.

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Monet and London review – genius lurks behind the capital’s filthy light

Courtauld Gallery, London
Between 1899 and 1901, this passionate painter of beauty came to Britain’s polluted capital to experiment with ugliness. Through the smog emerged a great modernist

‘Only an eye – but my God, what an eye!” said Cézanne of Monet. But no artist is only an eye. Posing as an innocent, unquestioning painter of the light that came to him gave Monet a helpful privacy, a professional facade, behind which he could explore wild poetic thoughts. His early masterpiece Impression, Sunrise presents itself as a simple view of dawn in the Le Havre docks, but it’s a Romantic meditation, as tentative and emotionally growing as a Wagner prelude. Shown at the first impressionist exhibition in 1874 it became an icon of this movement’s passion for painting reality, fast. It was only when Monet visited the Savoy Hotel in London three decades later, as the Courtauld shows in 21 paintings in two very intense rooms, that he rediscovered other, buried artistic ambitions in the weird smog-filtered light of late Victorian and Edwardian London.

One of the most compelling canvases here is called Waterloo Bridge, Effect of Sunlight in the Fog, and it restages Impression, Sunrise. An intense orange sun sends blazing streaks of red slashing through the ethereal ripples of the Thames beneath a fuzzy fog tinged with bronze: as we make out the forms of boats and people, modern life becomes a misty morning dream.

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Silk Roads review – mesmerising show turns world history upside down

British Museum, London
Following China’s epic ancient trade routes through fabulous oases, desert palaces and burial mounds will radically change the way you feel about borders

Not many exhibitions turn the history of the world upside down. The British Museum’s mesmerising Silk Roads does, by showing how Asia, Europe and north Africa shared their cultures more than a millennium ago. Far from developing in isolation, let alone in a “clash of civilisations”, east and west were once mutually connected by epic trade routes known as the Silk Roads that carried China’s precious discovery, silk, across the then-known world. If that sounds dry, the British Museum turns it into a fairytale of magic and beauty, as you follow the merchants’ routes to fabulous oases, desert palaces, synagogues, mosques and burial mounds.

You reach the first oasis by clay camel, to be precise a two-humped Bactrian camel of painted ceramic, nearly a metre tall, rearing its head in a bellow you can almost hear. This superb eighth-century statue comes from a tomb in Henan Province, China. Tied to its saddle are bolts of silk that were worth crossing worlds to sell or exchange.

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Silk Road treasures, Turner hopefuls and the wisdom of Jeremy Deller – the week in art

Mind-blowing artefacts that travelled the ancient trade route, Michael Craig-Martin’s conceptual tree and a sliced-up engine – all in your weekly dispatch

Silk Roads
This epic survey of cultural connections between Asia and Europe more than a millennium ago should be mind-blowing.

• British Museum, London, from 26 September until 23 February

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Teresa Margolles’s fourth plinth review – haunting rack of faces memorialises transgender victims of violence

Trafalgar Square, London
The former forensic pathologist from Mexico has created a stirring artwork that mixes the mystery of an excavation with a call for compassion and empathy

Look up at the latest fourth plinth sculpture and you’ll see ranks of human faces floating in the sky. They are concave receptacles of shadows – and they look so fragile. These inside-out life masks cast in plaster seem destined to be ruined by rain, pollution and pigeon droppings. The artist wants it that way.

Teresa Margolles, from Mexico, is former forensic pathologist who often makes art using the physical traces of the deceased, especially victims of murder. Her sculpture for the fourth plinth takes its form from a gruesome Aztec masterpiece, a 15th-century tower of skulls known as the Huey Tzompantli that was excavated in Mexico City. More than 600 skulls have been found cemented into it, a spectacular reminder of Aztec power and ferocity.

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Michael Craig-Martin review – sorry, but these lamps and filing cabinets just aren’t that interesting

Royal Academy, London
His early conceptual work inspired the likes of Damien Hirst, but the RA has inexplicably focused on his cool and clinical representations of the ordinary stuff of modern life

It’s an achievement to stretch a single idea as thinly as this retrospective of Michael Craig-Martin does. You start by laughing with him, in his clever classics of 1970s conceptual art. You end by laughing at him and the Royal Academy for thinking that his later, gapingly empty paintings and videos can really fill up the main galleries at Burlington House with their re-workings of the same exhausted theme.

That theme is objects. Craig-Martin has spent decades drawing and painting things, the more modern and ordinary the better: safety pins, forks, iPhones, wheelie suitcases. He depicts them with a designer’s precise perspective in a cool, clinical style with clear lines and neon-bright colours.

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The Cumbrian barn-stormer: is Kurt Schwitters’ last masterpiece finally about to be restored?

The dada artist fled the Nazis and settled in a Lake District barn, which he turned into an astonishing work of art. We meet the replica-making craftsman hoping to make it whole again – and create a colony of artists in its luscious lakeland surroundings

Adam Lowe has created extraordinary replicas of great works from around the world, including one of Tutankhamun’s tomb and a full-size bronze replica of Dippy the diplodocus at the Natural History Museum in London. But he has now taken on a very different challenge: a barn in Cumbria. More specifically, he wants to recreate and preserve the legacy of Kurt Schwitters, the great German dada artist, nonsense poet and experimenter in sound, who died in exile in the Lake District in 1948.

Lowe, through his non-profit Factum Foundation, has taken over the Cylinders Estate in luscious Elterwater, where Schwitters created his final unfinished masterpiece: the Merz Barn. This enigmatic work is a unique mixture of dry-stone walling and biomorphic plaster forms, encapsulating the private art that Schwitters created in exile. It has been championed by Damien Hirst and other leading artists as one of Britain’s secret treasures.

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