Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 16

Edinburgh art festival review – haunting return of the railway that robbed Africa

Various venues, Edinburgh
This thrilling festival features Ibrahim Mahama’s unmissable meditation on the railway that plundered Ghana, nuclear attack relics, and a stunning Chris Ofili tapestry

Time is a return ticket in Ibrahim Mahama’s Songs About Roses, which is on display at the Fruitmarket Gallery, far and away the best show in this year’s Edinburgh art festival. Mahama draws young men lugging rails in detailed yet suggestively poetic charcoal, but are they laying tracks for the British empire’s Gold Coast railway – or removing them?

My attention was grabbed the moment I stuck my head through the gallery door. For this Ghanaian artist has produced a show as extraordinary as a great magic-realist novel on a theme such a novel might address: the rise and fall of the railway the British government built between 1898 and 1923 in its Gold Coast colony. It would win independence and become Ghana in 1957.

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‘One of the most charismatic artists ever’: Piero della Francesca, adored by everyone from Hockney to Heaney

He transfixed Pasolini and painted Seamus Heaney’s favourite artwork – and now David Hockney is paying tribute to this very modern Renaissance master in a joint show

It’s raining inside the Uffizi. The downpour outside, cascading from the Florence skies, is getting in through the ceiling and staff are rushing around with buckets. At the centre of this watery quadrangle are two painted wooden panels mounted in a single gilt frame. It stands in the middle of the room, so you can see the triumphal chariots on the reverse as well as the portraits on the front. The leaks are creating a drumroll, adding to the drama, almost as if nature itself were telling us to pay attention to this masterpiece. Yet even without all that, these are the most arresting faces in the room. Why? This double portrait – of Battista Sforza and her husband Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino – is by Piero della Francesca, one of the most charismatic artists of all time.

Piero’s art is fleshy and personal, ethereal and cosmic. He paints azure skies and floating eggs, fancy hats and wide eyes, with wit and spontaneity, yet underpinned by geometric order. His people are as mysterious as they are ordinary. Battista looks pale and distant, for she was already dead when her portrait was finished in the 1470s. The gold frame separating her from Federico is the barrier between life and death. Across this gulf, the two contemplate each other. If her face is ghostly, his is fearsomely alive: a gnarled walnut painted in profile, not just to emulate emperors on Roman coins but to hide the socket of his right eye, lost in a joust. His disfigured nose is not concealed. Federico made his money as a mercenary, putting his profits into a graceful palace in Urbino where he employed Piero as court artist.

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Piero and Hockney eye to eye, Holzer logs in and Rothko heads to the beach – the week in art

A Renaissance master shows with a modern one, pioneering digital art and an abstract expressionist megalith arrives in St Ives – all in your weekly dispatch

Mark Rothko: The Seagram Murals
The greatest abstract paintings in Britain, commissioned for a New York restaurant but given by Rothko to the Tate, cast their dark spell all over again.

• Tate St Ives, Cornwall, until 5 January

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Ed Clark review – so ordinary he could almost be British

Turner Contemporary, Margate
Pity the poor sunbathers who wander from the beach into this weak and confusing show that proves not all abstract art is worth seeing

Margate beach in a heatwave is a sight to behold. The sands are seething with funmakers right out to the distant waterline, where silhouettes mark the silver waves like dabs from an artist’s brush. It could be an impressionist beach scene, or perhaps a photo by Weegee of Coney Island circa 1940. I wonder what percentage of this joyful summer multitude will make it to the big art shed at the end of the curving promenade?

There is a massive gulf between the raw rambunctious reality of Margate sands and the show inside this gallery, which could have been specifically chosen for its total lack of meaning or connection for anyone from that beach who wanders in here by mistake.

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‘Welcome to Wrexham!’ Is my old hometown about to become a hothouse of culture?

Our critic returns to the place of his birth to find the rough old town where he grew up has been transformed – and not just by Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds buying the football team

The actor Rob McElhenney, reclining and bare-chested, gives a come-hither look as you enter the Tŷ Pawb (“Everybody’s House”) art gallery/market in Wrexham, Wales. McElhenney, famously, co-owns Wrexham football club with Ryan Reynolds and, clearly, you can’t get away from their glamour in this small city. I’ve only just got out of the taxi and here they are.

This is my first visit in years to the place where I was born. My earliest memories are set in these redbrick streets: standing on a carnival float costumed as an astronaut, going to the cinema for the first time to see Sleeping Beauty, visiting a cafe in the High Street for a rum baba. Later on, my dad would find me asleep in my seat in Wrexham football club’s Racecourse Ground, in the year we’d got season tickets in a final attempt to fill me with a love of The Game. It was money wasted – doubly so as he was an Everton fan.

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Mind-altering montage, Taylor Swift’s costume crawl and Constable goes west – the week in art

A major retrospective of Peter Kennard’s dissenting images, the V&A goes for Swifties and The Hay Wain arrives in Bristol – all in your weekly dispatch

Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent
The veteran montage artist and activist gets a retrospective of his incisive images.

• Whitechapel Gallery, London, until 19 January

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It’s the art Olympics! The 20 greatest ever sporting artworks

From ancient fist-fighters to futurists on bikes, from starchy archers to a naked runner frozen in time … as the Games kick off in Paris, our critic ranks the finest depictions of sport in art

Sport, in particular athletics, gives artists great opportunities, as well as huge challenges. Running, jumping, throwing, fighting, swimming – these ways of using the human body offer much to sculpt, paint, photograph or film. And that has been true since ancient times. The Olympic Games were not just about bringing the different Greek states together in friendly competition: athletics was also central to discovering how to portray people in motion, often in revolutionary ways. Although the ancient Egyptians played ballgames and other sports, depictions of these in their tombs are flat and static. Greece’s Games, by contrast, inspired a great artistic leap forward as sculptors and vase painters learned the language of speed.

The revival of the Olympics at the end of the 1800s coincided with the birth of modern art – and, just as classical artists were inspired by athletics, their modern counterparts have seen the physically elite through eyes liberated by cubism and besotted by pop. Here are the 20 greatest results, the best sporting artworks of all time.

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Oscar Murillo: The Flooded Garden review – my inner Pollock could not be contained

Tate Modern, London
Is it love or just a summer fling? Oscar Murillo has invited the public to add their own paint to his canvas – but I wouldn’t be tempted. Would I?

Look at me – I’m Jackson Pollock! Doing action painting in the Tate Turbine Hall!

I usually dread interactive art. I prefer to look at art silently, passively and, assuming it’s good enough, to absorb its nuances and meanings slowly. Why do some artists insist on making us doers rather than observers? Queuing with my family to enter the oval arena that Oscar Murillo has set up for us, the masses, to paint his latest work, I even started questioning the financial side. Murillo is a successful artist who will also open a doubtless lucrative show with Gagosian this summer. And he expects people, especially children, to paint his latest hit for free? Seeing his own fussy works on display in Tate’s Tanks, I suppose he needs all the help he can get.

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Modernist Paris, a Monet adventure park and the death of life drawing – the week in art

Oscar Murillo turns Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall into an epic painting garden, while Goshka Macuga delves into ancient archeology, and the Paris of 1924 is revisited, which is the last time it held the Olympics – all in your weekly dispatch

The Flooded Garden
An art adventure playground for all ages, inspired by Monet’s water lily garden and conceived by painter Oscar Murillo.

• Tate Modern, London, until 26 August

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‘Is this what a second Trump presidency will be like?’ – our art critic on the chilling shooting image

In the heat of the assassination attempt, the bloodied ex-president’s defiance created a picture that echoes works of frontier heroism and religious resurrection. Could it be a warning of what is to come?

This breaks your heart. Or at least it does if you oppose the politics of Donald Trump. For with one image, he may have won the 2024 US presidential election. Photographer Evan Vucci captured it, and has rightly won praise for it, but we should acknowledge that it was Trump who made it. And he made it with presence of mind and courage.

Red blood pools on his ear and stains his face. No wonder some people on social media want to pretend to themselves that the shooting was faked. For the reality, which any rational observer can clearly see, is that in this moment Trump is defying death. He can’t completely know that he’s OK. A bullet has drawn blood from his ear, close to his brain. As he rises from where he initially took cover, with black-clad sunglass-wearing Secret Service agents trying to enfold him, he makes an eloquent gesture of defiance: a clenched fist raised in the air, his arm straight up like a flagpole. His mouth is open in a shout: the words he uttered were “Fight, fight, fight,” words that seem chosen as if they might be his last. Who is he telling to fight? Against what?

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