Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 144
November 21, 2016
Anselm Kiefer review – an apocalyptic epitaph for the liberal age
White Cube Bermondsey, London
Kiefer’s warnings about the frailty of society now look scarily prescient, and his Wagnerian new works suggest the innate violence of nationalism
When critics feel like taking a pop at the spectacularly serious art of Anselm Kiefer, they tend to moan that he is a little bit melodramatic. Throughout his career in a peaceful, affluent, liberal post-1945 Europe, he has wallowed in nightmares from history. His art is loaded with the past, caked with the mud of battles, clogged with ashes of the murdered. He has even posed making a Nazi salute, as if addicted to horrors that some think would be better forgotten. Isn’t it all a bit de trop?
Related: When Orhan Pamuk met Anselm Kiefer
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November 18, 2016
Was wild Mapplethorpe just another guy with a camera?
Juergen Teller’s selection of Robert Mapplethorpe shots restores the shock. But some of these pairings are more Carry On than cool still life
I like taking photographs. I am actually starting to love taking them. I like looking at photographs, too, and sharing them. But I still can’t quite take photography seriously as art. When I walk into a gallery where photographs are the only thing on the wall, my heart sinks. Normally at an exhibition, I am the person looking longest, staring hardest. It seems impossible ever to give enough time to powerful art, to ever to fully fathom an installation by Richard Serra, let alone a painting by Rembrandt.
But in a room full of framed prints, I’m the one giving each picture just a quick look before moving on. I’m the shallowest person in the room. I can’t understand what is detaining people, what everyone can see in all these elegantly mounted pictures. I’m bored and I want to go home.
Related: 'He was a sexual outlaw': my love affair with Robert Mapplethorpe
Continue reading...Sensuality, apocalypse and map-making – the week in art
Colossal new Anselm Kiefer works arrive in London, while Juergen Teller curates the work of Robert Mapplethorpe – plus the rest of the week’s art happenings
Anselm Kiefer
The most powerful artist of our time unveils colossal new paintings about mortality and the end of the world.
• White Cube Bermondsey, London, 23 November-12 February
Five of the best… art exhibitions
Anselm Kiefer | Animality |The Vanished Reality | Rachel Maclean | Dickon Drury
The art of Anselm Kiefer is thick with history – and thick with paint, which he heaps up on his vast canvases along with ash, sunflowers and words. The connection of art and life is, for this self-consciously German artist, not some vague optimistic ideal but a tragically unavoidable fact. The Wagnerian grandiosity of north-European myth, tainted as it is by the Nazi era, returns in Kiefer’s art as a mirror of history, identity and feeling. In his new paintings he revives the image of Walhalla, the hall of the gods in Germanic and norse legend, in paintings about death, time and the end of the world.
White Cube Bermondsey, SE1, Wed to 12 Feb
November 17, 2016
Always believe in your soul: why gold can spell heaven or hell
As Donald Trump proves, gold attracts those drunk on power. But artists have shown it can point the way to the divine
Artists across history have woven astonishing and delightful designs from precious metals. The V&A’s new galleries dedicated to the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Collection, which opened this week, display ornate silver cups from Renaissance Germany, gold snuffboxes whose contents titillated the noses of 18th-century aristocrats, and even a superb silver swan made by Asprey of London in 1985.
Yet gold and silver glimmer through human history as both dream and nightmare. As I admired a cup made in the shape of a falcon with gold, silver and gems wrapped round a coconut that forms its body, a lovely thing made in Ulm in 1600, I couldn’t quite stop thinking of the image of Donald Trump meeting Nigel Farage in Trump’s realm of gold. Has he ruined this material, considered beautiful by human beings since prehistoric times?
Continue reading...November 16, 2016
Van Gogh's lost drawings: unconvincing, but does anyone care in a post-truth art world?
The Van Gogh museum says the 65 newly discovered drawings are fakes – these flaccid sketches certainly lack the spirit of the artist’s greatest period
“Post-truth” is on everyone’s lips when it comes to politics in the age of Trump and Brexit – , according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Are we also entering the age of post-truth art?
Related: Newly discovered 'Van Gogh' drawings labelled imitations by museum
Related: Van Gogh 'cut off his ear after learning brother was to marry'
Continue reading...November 15, 2016
The best exhibitions of Christmas 2016 | Jonathan Jones
It is the season of goodwill, and the great American artist Robert Rauschenberg was generous in every sense, from the richness of his works to his engaged involvement in politics and philanthropy. He also happened to be a genius. In the 1950s, Rauschenberg took painting off the wall to create free-flowing assemblages of stuff that exist between art and life and tell an epic history of the US. In the 1960s, he mourned JFK and celebrated the space race in eerie, whitewashed silkscreen collages. Whatever he did, he did it with a big, bold imagination that should make this a top art present to yourself.
From 1 December-2 April, tate.org.uk
Time the Turner prize grew up: why it needs to embrace the over-50s
In the 1990s, having an age limit on Turner prize nominees dovetailed with a young punk energy in British art. But it’s now a pointless and conservative rule
The Turner prize is looking old – and paradoxically, this is down to its obsession with youth.
Related: Turner prize 2016 exhibition review – bleak and baffling, but no bum deal
Continue reading...November 14, 2016
The vandals of Isis: Nimrud warns us of a unique barbarism
Nimrud, whose ancient sculptures and temples were destroyed by Islamic State in 2015, has been recaptured. Such violence against art and culture must be consigned to history
Another defeat for Isis, another ancient civilisation rescued from further acts of deliberate destruction. Nimrud, site of one of the great palaces of the Assyrian empire, has been taken by Iraqi forces after a fierce battle with Islamists. The liberation of its ruins follows the Assad regime’s recapture of what’s left of Palmyra earlier this year. Gradually, the vicious war that Isis has waged on antiquity is being rolled back. Damaged and denuded but still there, the ancient sites of the middle east are being reclaimed.
Related: Bull of Nimrud destroyed by Isis to be recreated in Rome
Continue reading...November 11, 2016
How to find solace in dark times: there's always art to look up to
If you feel like getting drunk and bingeing on TV this weekend who can blame you? I can, however, suggest works of art that may help with political grieving
I was thrashing around for something that could get me out of the shocked torpor I felt after the election results dropped. After my parents died a few years ago, it was rock’n’roll I turned to. Not now.
The Rolling Stones are out, obviously. I don’t think I can listen to You Can’t Always Get What You Want ever again after hearing it at the end of Trump’s victory speech. Springsteen? No – the stories his songs tell – of blue-collar guys desperate for a break – dramatize the kinds of rust belt sadness that made some people vote for Trump.
Related: Big Pink: Mexican architects imagine Trump's wall as Luis Barragán homage
You can’t build a wall to hide the stories of immigration that made America
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