Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 21

Artists of the future, Ghanaian kings’ robes and a tiny moth – the week in art

Amateur artists join the pros in Gateshead, Old Master pastiches go on show in London, and a bursary for young photographers is launched in memory of the Guardian’s Eamonn McCabe – all in your weekly dispatch

Jerwood Survey III
Well-known artists have each nominated their favourite beginner for this glimpse of the future of art, featuring Philippa Brown, Alliyah Enyo, Paul Nataraj and more.
• Southwark Park Galleries, London, 6 April to 23 June

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Artistic unicorns, protest ceramics and queer art from Morocco – the week in art

Greenham Common inspires a new generation, designer Enzo Mari gets playful and Perth Museum dedicates its first exhibition to a mythical beast prized since antiquity – all in your weekly dispatch

Unicorn
Medieval bestiaries, Renaissance art and narwhal horns make for a fascinating first exhibition in this impressive new Scottish museum.
• Perth Museum, Perth, 30 March to 22 September

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Perth Museum review – a magical display of rampant unicorns and naked Picts

City Hall, Perth
This is how to reinvent a local museum, with inspiring, fun exhibits from the Stone of Scone to a salmon boat celebrating a proud and unique history

It takes balls to transform a local collection of archaeology, art and stuffed salmon into a museum with ambitions on an international scale. And it so happens that balls are one of the new Perth Museum’s highlights, albeit prehistoric stone ones. Decorated with nodules large and small, these carved rocky spheres were a speciality of neolithic artists in Scotland. What do they mean? Nobody knows, but their carefully designed patterns evidently meant a lot to the people who lived in what is now called Scotland about 5,000 years ago.

A stone can say so much. Even a blank one. Compared with these intricately hewn prehistoric artefacts, the stone that is the centrepiece of this museum is visually dull indeed – but it is enlivened by a spectacular setting. The museum has been fashioned out of an old Edwardian city hall with an imposing classical exterior and a huge, galleried central chamber. Right in the middle rises a tall wooden tower inside which, after a dramatic build-up in a darkened antechamber, you are admitted to see Scotland’s Stone of Destiny.

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Intense photographic visions, a journey to Rome and a dealer-turned-painter – the week in art

A wealth of northern Renaissance drawings; photographers Julia Margaret Cameron and Francesca Woodman, and recognition for gallerist Betty Parsons – all in your weekly dispatch

Bruegel to Rubens: Great Flemish Drawings
Absorbing trip from Flanders to Rome and back with northern Renaissance artists whose drawings have a buttery richness.
• Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 23 March until 23 June.

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Bruegel to Rubens review – strange and humble Flemish art with almost edible detail

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
This rich, earthy show pays tribute to the genius of many northern European artists who were inspired by Italy’s powerful cultural pull

Welcome to the madcap world of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, where a giant disembodied head has a right eye like a smashed window, a gaping mouth full of people and a screaming man in a boat emerging from the bridge that has been hollowed out of its ear. Meanwhile, a monster fish balances on its bandaged forehead with people doing acrobatic, or maybe sinister, stuff inside its excavated stomach. This is just one phantasm in Bruegel’s drawing The Temptation of Saint Anthony, a homage to his Netherlandish predecessor Hieronymus Bosch who had also turned Anthony’s plight into a carnivalesque romp of outrageous creatures and absurd incidents. The difference is that he brings a more saddened, accepting eye to this world’s insanity.

Bruegel is in the title, and on the poster and catalogue cover, of the Ashmolean’s survey of Renaissance and baroque drawings from … where exactly? Today Flanders is a region of Belgium. In the 16th century it was part of a much more vaguely bordered Netherlandish region ruled by Spain; what is now Holland successfully rebelled against Spanish rule while the southern Netherlands, including the great cities of Brussels and Antwerp, stayed colonised and Catholic. There’s a panoramic drawing here of Antwerp, the key North Sea port where Portuguese merchants rubbed shoulders with artists fascinated by the monkeys and coconuts they traded, alongside locally caught fish. Maybe that material abundance of a burgeoning Atlantic economy is actually what makes the art here so characterful.

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Damien Hirst’s shark changed my life. Now he has taken a chainsaw to his glorious past | Jonathan Jones

In creating sculptures backdated to the days when his art electrified the world, the former YBA has cast doubt on his youthful legacy and destroyed our belief in his creative future

Perhaps we should have pity for Damien Hirst. Artistic decline is a terrible fate, even if you have immense wealth to cushion the blow. What artist, what person, wants to think all the good stuff, the fireworks and inventiveness, is in the past? But Hirst apparently does think that. He could hardly confess it more clearly than by pre-dating formaldehyde animal sculptures made in 2017 to the 1990s, as whistleblowers have revealed to the Guardian.

The young Damien Hirst lived fast and thought constantly about death. At 16 he posed for a photo with a severed head in a Leeds morgue. As an emerging artist he came up with a totally new spin on the ancient theme of the memento mori by putting dead animals, including a 14ft-long tiger shark, in tanks of formaldehyde and exhibiting them as art. Dry, dusty disputes over whether ready-made objects can be art paled into irrelevance before Hirst’s reminders of our fleshy fragility – and for a generation that had grown up with Jaws it was a nightmare come to life.

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Play-Doh photos, Emin’s studio show and Munch-drunk love – the week in art

Plus 500 years worth of children land in Derbyshire and a baroque zealot flatters his King in oil paint – all in your weekly dispatch

We Do Not Sleep
Tracey Emin and friends in a group show at her Margate studio complex and school. Lindsey Mendick and Vanessa Raw are among the artists exhibiting alongside Emin.
• TKE Studios, Margate, until 19 May

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‘A ball of mighty, miraculous life’ – Picturing Childhood review

Chatsworth House, Derbyshire
From Lucian Freud’s unsentimental depiction of infant Bella to Raphael’s intimate observations and an 18th-century pram designed to be pulled by a goat, this exhibition is full of fun and insight

Trust Lucian Freud to look at his own infant child with the same rigorous eye he turned on his paintings of adults. The baby’s head is huge – a bulbous punch of brown, cream and grey – in his 1961 portrait of Bella Freud. In fact, it is big enough to loom at you down a long gallery at Chatsworth House and draw you magnetically towards it to get a look at how the ridged, rucked and scrunched up features are rendered larger than life as Bella sleeps on a sofa, fists formidably clenched. Her left eyelid is very slightly open, revealing a yellow eyeball.

Unsentimental it may be, but Bella is a ball of mighty life. You sense the artist is amazed by the autonomy, energy and will this little creature exhibits. She is a giant in his eyes. Babyhood, toddlerdom, childhood, adolescence – they slip away so fast, as we try to catch the ever-changing miracle of a growing person. Picturing Childhood, the title of Chatsworth’s eye-opening show scattered through its immense baroque halls and chambers, is something we mostly do today with our phones. How lucky to be a Freud, able to portray your child with such monumental profundity.

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A tropical storm, an ancient sisterhood and Toni Morrison sculptures – the week in art

Postcolonial architecture in Ghana, fresh responses to an all-female medieval community and sculptures inspired by radical writing – all in your weekly dispatch

Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence
An atmospheric look at how high modernist architecture was reinvented as the style of postcolonial Ghana and India in the 1950s and 60s.
• V&A, London, until 22 September

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Perfect parabolas of spurting blood! Did Galileo teach Artemisia the science of gore?

Her savage masterpiece Judith Beheading Holofernes shows in gruesome detail what happens when a man is butchered alive. But how did Gentileschi manage to be so accurate? Our writer explores a centuries-old mystery

Florence is a city of great artistic violence. In its grand public square, Piazza della Signoria, statues variously hold up a severed head, grasp a screaming victim, and grab a doomed man by the hair as a sword is raised. A medieval alley off the piazza is named after the Baroncelli family, one of whose members was sketched as a dangling corpse by Leonardo da Vinci after he was hanged for his part in a conspiracy. Yet there’s no bloodier work of art in Florence than Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, which hangs in the Uffizi Gallery. Painted for the ruling Medici family, this masterpiece of slaughter depicts two women in the process of decapitating a huge man who is clearly still alive with his head partly sawn off.

As well as the gore, the painting contains a scientific mystery. This is Gentileschi’s second version of Judith’s bloody revenge on the invading Assyrian general. In an earlier, starker version, painted while a teenager, Gentileschi had shown the lifeblood of Holofernes flowing out in rivers over white bedsheets. But in her enhanced, enriched Uffizi canvas, she works a lot harder to show what the blood would really do if you sawed through the carotid arteries. As well as darkly soaking the bed, she depicts crimson blood bursting upward in powerful jets, curving in space to fall in perfect, eye-catching parabolas.

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