Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 171
January 25, 2016
Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse review – thrillingly cosmic
Royal Academy, London
This exhibition of psychedelic modernist pastoral art is a ravishing joy and takes Monet out of the chocolate box, revealing one of art’s great humanists
I am falling. I am drowning in beauty. Perhaps this is what it feels like to teeter on the edge of a black hole. Except it’s art that is pulling me into the void. Claude Monet’s Agapanthus Triptych (1916-19) reaches out to embrace the viewer in a shimmering world where soft reflections move on a bankless pond; a vast mirrored universe with lilies like supernovae.
This cosmic masterpiece, its three components owned by a trio of American museums and reunited here to overwhelming effect, is the final disorientating thrill in an exhibition of psychedelic modernist pastoral art that is a ravishing joy from start to finish. If you think an exhibition about gardens sounds a bit cosy or that Monet is just a pretty painter, then start at the end, with this painting that disrupts time and space as experimentally as any installation.
Related: Flower power: the gardens that caused modern art to bloom
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January 22, 2016
Why it's great news that Frances Morris will run Tate Modern
The Tate veteran has already made her mark, transforming Louise Bourgeois’s reputation and championing female and non-European artists
The first time I met Frances Morris she was trying unsuccessfully to get a model aeroplane factory working. Now she is to run a power station that has become one of the world’s leading galleries of modern art.
Morris’s appointment as the new director of Tate Modern has thrilled the art world. Tate supremo Sir Nicholas Serota describes her as “a brilliant and imaginative curator”, while the praise from those outside the gallery is, if anything, warmer. She is “just a lovely person”, “very decent”, “fiercely intelligent and very generous with it”, the experts enthuse.
Related: Frances Morris to become new Tate Modern chief
Continue reading...Monet's garden, Segal's house and Emin's penis bracelet – the week in art
The former YBA launches a jewellery line, the Musée d’Orsay calls the cops and London Art Fair showcases the difference between men and women
Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse
What were the first abstract paintings? Monet’s late paintings of his waterlily pond put in a good bid for the prize. The RA revisits them in this blockbuster show that also includes garden paintings by Manet, Van Gogh, Cézanne and Klee – a pastoral gathering of modern giants.
• Royal Academy, London, 30 January-20 April.
Edward and Nancy Kienholz review – rough, angry satires on American life
Sprüth Magers, London
From a concrete TV to a shocking depiction of small-town violence, these raw installations are all the more potent for being rooted in a love of Americana
Not many paintings can kill you but The Medicine Show, created by Ed Kienholz in 1958-59, has both the will and weapons to do just that. Sharp, jagged pieces of wood protrude far from its stained, resinous, coagulated surface, threatening to impale anyone who gets too close or takes a fall in its vicinity. One too many drinks and you’ve got a work of art in your guts.
Continue reading...January 20, 2016
Tracey Emin's luxury penis bracelet works like a charm on me
Emin’s latest venture – a designer jewellery line – reveals in miniature her strengths as an artist who always has something new and eloquent to say
Tracey Emin is a British great. I keep surprising myself with how much I admire her work. Recently I was wandering a big painting exhibition at White Cube in Bermondsey. Three artists in the show really stood out in my eyes: Picasso, Lucian Freud and Emin.
Emin’s unique touch works on a big scale, in her huge drawings, paintings and embroideries, but it communicates just as well in tiny, exquisite forms, for instance a charm bracelet, which is one of the pieces she has created in collaboration with Stephen Webster for her new venture into designer jewellery.
Continue reading...January 19, 2016
Miró’s Studio review – hallucinatory shop window for the surrealist's later works
Mayoral gallery, London
Recreation of the painter’s Mallorca studio is a tasteful homage, showing Miró moving beyond political dissent to something less cutting-edge – cosy even
First there was Euro Disney. Then there was Legoland. Now comes a new kind of European theme park for art lovers – a recreation in London of the great surrealist Joan Miró’s studio, complete with biomorphic dodgems, a political rollercoaster and mirrors that make you look like a line, a dot and a star.
Well, not quite. In fact Miró’s Studio is basically just an art exhibition. Mayoral gallery in St James’s has “recreated” the studio that Miró had built for himself in Mallorca in the 1950s. The Catalan architect Josep Lluís Sert was behind Miró’s grand design – a big, luminous, private space where Miró worked happily and fruitfully until his death in 1983. Yet far from a postmodern simulacrum of Sert’s coolly adventurous architecture (he and Miró had been friends since Sert designed the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition, for which Picasso painted Guernica), this is a tasteful homage.
Continue reading...Sophie Taeuber-Arp: it's about time the radical dada star got a Google doodle
Today’s Google doodle celebrates the birthday of the radical artist who brought joy to dada, when Switzerland was a revolutionary hotbed of culture
You must remember the place where punk began. The most subversive, dissident and revolutionary centre of modern art. The planet Ziggy Stardust came from. That’s right – Switzerland. Today’s Google doodle celebrating the birthday of Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943) is a nice plug for one of the most radical – but far from best known – women in modern art.
Continue reading...January 18, 2016
No sex in this city: the bare-faced cheek of Paris's most sensual museum
The Musée d’Orsay – which displays some of the most outrageous nudes ever painted – called in police on a nude performance artist in an act of prudery more worthy of Victorian England than Edouard Manet’s France
The top 10 male nudes in artThe top 10 female nudes in artThe Musée d’Orsay in Paris was wrong to call in police when performance artist Deborah de Robertis posed nude next to Manet’s Olympia, a painting often seen as a depiction of a naked prostitute.
Related: Naked artist Deborah de Robertis arrested for posing nude next to Manet's Olympia
The Musée d’Orsay may have cloaked itself in the law but morally it stands naked
Related: The top 10 female nudes in art
Continue reading...Light, time, legacy: Francis Towne's watercolours review – the romance of Rome in ruin
British Museum, London
A romantic poet with a watercolour brush, this 18th-century artist offers an astonishing vision of a city lost in time and space
In 1780, a watercolourist and art teacher named Francis Towne set out to see Rome. It was not an original destination for a cultural pilgrimage. Every artist and aristocrat in 18th-century Britain had to make the journey across the Alps at least once to see the splendours of the classical tradition. Some artists even made a living out of portraying posh English people in Italy, or even turned antique dealer to rip them off.
Towne, then, was just another traveller on a well-worn tourist route – even if that route, with its shoddy roads, malaria and bandits, was genuinely dangerous. Yet the watercolours he painted in Rome are astonishing: a compelling vision of a city lost in time and space; a forgotten landscape of ruins where nothing happens and the future is swallowed up by the past.
Continue reading...January 15, 2016
Annie Leibovitz, Angela Merkel and a new Tate Modern chief – the week in art
The American photographer only has eyes for the German chancellor, the Pritzker architecture prize goes to Chile, and Frances Morris is to take over London’s art powerhouse – all in your weekly art dispatch
Francis Towne
Towne’s watercolours of Rome done in 1781 are little known treasures of the British Museum. He left his immaculate depictions of Rome’s ruins to the Museum in 1816 at the time when the Elgin Marbles were intensifying interest in classical archaeology. Now, 200 years on, they are still compelling.
• British Museum, London, 21 January-14 August.
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