Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 20

Michelangelo and the most sublime declarations of gay love in art

Michelangelo announced his love for a young upper-class gentleman in verse and prose, but he also gave Tommaso de’ Cavalieri some of the greatest homoerotic drawings ever created – now taking centre stage at the British Museum

Tommaso de’ Cavalieri was the light of the age, unique in the world – at least in the eyes of the man who loved him. That ardent lover was Michelangelo, who described Cavalieri in these glowing words in a letter from 1532. If only a portrait of Tommaso survived we could have seen his face, which the fiftysomething artist claimed in a poem was so beautiful it gave him a glimpse of paradise itself.

Michelangelo did not just announce his love for this young upper-class citizen of Rome – who knew the pope and prominent cardinals socially – in verse and prose. He also gave Cavalieri some of the greatest drawings ever created. Up until this time, the mighty sculptor, painter and architect had used drawing as a tool to develop ideas: but the so-called “Presentation Drawings” he did for Tommaso aspire to be completed works of art. They star in the British Museum’s new exhibition of Michelangelo’s later graphic works, and demand a close look, for these are perhaps the most sublime declarations of gay love in art.

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Hairy paint, boozy sculpture and Michelangelo’s final years – the week in art

The Renaissance master dazzles, Rasheed Araeen goes for drinks and Peppi Botrop really mixes media – all in your weekly dispatch

Michelangelo: The Last Decades
Passionate and confessional drawings by one of the greatest artists of all time.
• British Museum, London, from 2 May until 28 July

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Expressionists review – the vivid premonitions of Europe’s wildest-eyed geniuses

Tate Modern, London
Tate Modern’s survey of Kandinsky, Münter and the rest of the avant garde Blue Rider group is an exhilarating riot of colour – but also abounds with anxieties about the coming conflicts of the 20th century

Within the bright colours of this exhilarating survey of the Blue Rider group of avant garde artists, who worked in Munich and the Bavarian Alps in the years before the first world war, horror lurks. Look at Wassily Kandinsky’s paintings of the medieval Bavarian town Murnau, and you might wonder if there’s any connection with the film director FW Murnau who made the silent vampire film Nosferatu? Yes – he took the town’s name after befriending the Blue Rider artists there. So welcome to the land of spectres.

Marianne von Werefkin’s eyes, for instance, blaze red from her self-portrait. Green, yellow and pink duke it out for dominance of her skin. Her ochre hat with a violet flower collides with a swirling vortex of turquoise and sapphire sky. She’s an expressionist and no mistake.

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Expressionists turn blue, Gormley gardens and Rauschenberg reaches out – the week in art

Pioneering German modernists, a stately new setting for Britain’s best-known sculptor and Rauschenberg’s utopian cultural exchange – all in your weekly dispatch

Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider
The passion and spirituality of a key movement in early 20th century German art jerks back to life like Dr Caligari’s creature.
• Tate Modern, London, from 25 April until 20 October

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The Last Caravaggio review – an unmissable and murderously dark finale

National Gallery, London
Rage, slaughter, death, regret … The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, believed to be Caravaggio’s last work, is so astonishing, it deserves to be a one-painting blockbuster

At the height of his fame in Rome, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio is known to have owned at least 12 books. We don’t picture Caravaggio as a reader. A streetfighter, a killer, yes – but not an intellectual. Yet his painting The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, which has come to the National Gallery from Naples, proves he could mine a book for its hidden diamonds.

The tale of Ursula, an early Christian princess from Britain who sailed off to marry and hopefully convert a pagan prince accompanied by no less than 11,000 virgins, is one of the religious fairy tales recounted in an incredibly strange medieval compendium called The Golden Legend. Caravaggio obviously studied this 13th-century source carefully because he sees something in it no one else had.

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Art unlocked: critics on the one work that explains the great artists, from Turner to Basquiat

Expressionism, sculpture, video: the art world is so vast and varied it can be difficult to know where to start, even with its biggest names. Our writers suggest the one piece that can help you understand masters old and new

On 26 April 1937 the Basque town of Guernica was bombed by Hitler’s Luftwaffe and the Italian Legionary Air Force. Picasso, a Spanish artist settled in Paris, paid homage to the killed with this cubist history painting. Moments of revelation punch through the jagged mayhem to hit your heart. The baby cradled in a screaming mother’s arms hangs its head upside down, eyes blankly open, mouth obliviously gaping: it is dead, you realise as if for the first time. Picasso asks in each line of this figure what a child’s death means. He poses similarly agonising questions across the canvas: what does it feel like to be the woman in the burning house, arms outstretched to a God who is not showing any mercy today? And how does the universe permit the pain of that screaming horse, its newspaper body pierced and eviscerated? So long as this painting exists the bombing of Guernica will never end but will always be this infinite moment of wrong. Jonathan Jones
See it at: Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid

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Who killed Caravaggio and why? His final paintings may hold the key

A killer himself, Caravaggio died at 38 – desperate, disfigured and on the run from the Knights of St John. His greatest works – with which he bargained for his life – cast light on one of art’s darkest mysteries

The National Gallery’s haunting new exhibition The Last Caravaggio has at its heart a sepulchrally toned painting called The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula. Caravaggio includes himself in it as a witness to a brutal murder – a pale, bleak farewell of a self-portrait set against Stygian darkness. An extravagantly armoured man, the chief of the Huns, has been rejected by the beautiful young Ursula. His response is to shoot her with an arrow at point blank range. She contemplates the shaft between her breasts as if she can’t believe what she is seeing: her own death.

Soon after painting this, Caravaggio too would be dead. Sailing north from the Naples area to Rome in the heat of summer in a triangular-sailed felucca, he was arrested at a coastal stop and by the time he was released his luggage, including new paintings, had left without him. He seems to have run or hitched a ride along the coast to catch up with it and probably caught malaria. He was 38 when he died at Porto Ercole in southern Tuscany on 18 July 1610.

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Death-defying darkness, thought-provoking pop art and unrepentant nudes – the week in art

Caravaggio proves haunting, Yinka Shonibare brings colonial figures down to size and Monica Sjöö photographs the goddess feminism – all in your weekly dispatch

The Last Caravaggio
The despair and darkness of Caravaggio’s The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula will hold you transfixed.
• National Gallery, London, 18 April-21 July

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Yinka Shonibare CBE review – where Churchill finds his inner psychedelic dandy

Serpentine Gallery, London
From colonial leaders dressed in trippy patterns to a library of historical conflicts, this delightful show brings a welcome wit and rationality to today’s angry debates

It looks like a happy ending. After the disputes and all the agonising, Yinka Shonibare CBE offers a witty, weirdly beautiful conclusion to the debate over public statues that has raged since Edward Colston was toppled in Bristol four years ago. Except I don’t think Shonibare is interested in conclusions.

Queen Victoria, Winston Churchill, Kitchener – they’re all here, a gallery of famous and less famous icons of Britain’s imperial past. Their statues from public places in the capital have been reproduced, not monumental size but human height. They have also been removed from their plinths and brought down to earth. And each statue has been covered in the bright multicoloured Dutch wax prints that are Shonibare’s multicultural pop art trademark. These ravishing textiles, made in the Netherlands (and at one time Manchester) to sell in Africa since the 19th century and still doing a roaring trade, symbolise in Shonibare’s work the inauthenticity and complexity of culture and identity in a globalised capitalist world. Now they turn patriotic statues into something new and unimaginable to the dead people they represent.

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Marlborough Gallery to call it quits after nearly 80 years in a fast-evolving art scene

Stately gallery founded in 1946 in the age of high-minded modernism finally had to succumb to a new reality

The art world mutates faster than the human eye can take in. It resembles the fashion industry far more than it does, say, publishing or theatre or even Hollywood, which all seem gentle by comparison. It is not, then, such a great shock that the stately Marlborough Gallery, founded in 1946 in the age of high-minded modernism, has decided to call it quits after 78 years.

Marlborough comes from an age of Modern Masters, its undisputed greatness appearing to lift it above market fluctuations or changing tastes. Francis Bacon and Mark Rothko, surely the greatest artists since the second world war in figurative and abstract painting respectively, were both represented by this dealer, which exerted huge influence on both sides of the Atlantic.

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