Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 212
October 15, 2014
Nightmare at the Picasso Museum | Jonathan Jones
The greatest museum of Picassos works has been engulfed by scandal and crisis. Closed for the past five years, it is finally ready to reopen its doors to the public. But has the bitter struggle for Picassos legacy been resolved?
The Picasso Museum in pictures
On 30 June 1972 Pablo Picasso created his last self-portrait. He had depicted himself many times before, but never like this. His face looked like a skull with stubble. Its colour was greenish-grey. The mouth was a straight slit. Only the lines under his eyes proved his features were flesh and not raw bone, which seems to protrude from his head at the left of the picture, where it is set against red fire, blood, or a setting sun.
From his youthful self-portraits to his bare-chested appearance, at the age of 75, in Henri-Georges Clouzots 1956 film The Mystery of Picasso, the artist, so fit and long-lived, enjoyed showing off his muscular body. But in his last images of himself, the shoulders that were still so powerful when he displayed them in Clouzots adoring film had shrunk to the dried flatness of a mummy. This was his 91st year. Picasso looked at himself without illusions, underlining the true state of things with heavy black lines.
Anne Baldassari was a total menace. She was loathed by Picasso scholars. She was no help whatsoever
Picasso can do what few contemporary artists have achieved, to tear out your heart and twist your viscera
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October 14, 2014
Mirrorcity review reflections on a relentless rush of nonsense
Hayward Gallery, London
This art show for the digital age is a catastrophic mix of the harebrained and the talentless and it heralds disaster for Londons artistic ambitions
What will the art of the future look like? In JG Ballards book Vermilion Sands, femme fatale sculptors create bizarre sound art that resonates inhumanly in the empty warmth of a California-like brain-free zone. I wish I was there. Ballards pop desert sounds like very heaven compared with the truly catastrophic science-fiction montage that is the Hayward Gallerys Mirrorcity.
Whats it about? Well. The poster promises artists from London meditating on fiction and reality. However, it quickly becomes clear that Mirrorcity is not about London, or storytelling. It is about the digital age. All the artists evoke the information overload, the flood of images and the very short attention span of the technological future weve already arrived at.
Continue reading...October 13, 2014
Richard Tuttles Turbine Hall flying machine is lovely and forgettable
The American artists massive winged sculpture is beautiful to look at, but has all the depth and profundity of a Christmas garland
Welcome to the fold: US artist Richard Tuttle drapes Turbine Hall with fabric
Richard Tuttles installation in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall is lovely and forgettable. This is the first sculpture for several years in the famous series of interventions in this immense space by important international artists. It is also the first big three-dimensional creation there by a North American sculptor. As such, it occupies space in a very different, very American way. It is not grandiose, not histrionic. It just lives in the sky and embraces the light.
Two huge wings shaped from wood dominate half the length of the tall, grey Turbine Hall. They are hung with shreds of orange cloth, like giant bits of tissue paper glued to an unfinished balsa model plane. Between the wings dangles a massive construction that reaches from high up nearly down to the ground, covered with red fabric. It is organic, lumpen, and a delight to look at.
Continue reading...October 12, 2014
Rembrandt: The Late Works review triumph in masters tragedy
This brilliant, brave journey through the tragedy of his fall reveals the true Rembrandt a man at the end of his tether
Rembrandt is so high in the ranking of great artists that our amassed reverence has sunk like syrup into the brown and gold surfaces of his paintings.
There he is in the first room of this startling exhibition, gazing back from his self-portraits, a sage and infinitely gentle soul: Rembrandt the master. Then the curators pull a hidden lever and the floor disappears.
Continue reading...October 10, 2014
Frieze framed, Tuttle takes Tate, Rembrandt returns, week art
In this weeks edition of the only art newsletter youll ever need, the National Gallery shows off the late works of Rembrandt, while Frieze kicks off its annual art market party in Regents Park
Rembrandt: The Late Works
An encounter with one of the most timeless, universal and profound of artists.
National Gallery, London WC2, from 15 October until 18 January
October 9, 2014
Set up a Google Art Project gallery
Curate your own virtual gallery and fill it with paintings and other works of art from some of the finest collections around the world
Dont feel guilty about what you miss: advice for (real-life) gallery-goersZoe Williams tries taking three children round the TateTips for visually impaired art-loversThe most important art gallery is the one you carry around with you - in your head, in postcards, in books, or conversations. There are many ways to cultivate such a musée imaginaire of the art you really love. One of the most convenient and aesthetically stunning is Google Art Project, a bold venture that offers an ever-growing digital archive of the worlds greatest art, which you can browse wherever you are and out of which you can assemble your own personal gallery online, a fantasy collection of your favourite art.
Many of the worlds finest museums cooperate with the project, and no wonder. The internet is loaded with images of art of hugely varying qualities, many simply scanned out of old art books. It would be nice if there were other similar projects out there but Google has, characteristically, monopolised this one, and set a gold standard for art reproductions online.
Continue reading...October 8, 2014
It would be churlish for Britain to turn down Churchills paintings | Jonathan Jones
It has all the makings of a radical rant. Thirty-eight paintings by Winston Churchill have been offered to the nation in lieu of death duties, after the death of his daughter, Lady Mary Soames, in May. So once again the rich find a loophole in the system. Churchills descendents get to palm off his chocolate box daubs, pretty-pretty pieces of amateur impressionism with no place whatsoever in the history of modern art, on a credulous country and walk away cash in pocket while ordinary people struggle to make ends meet.
But before firing off that blast against Churchill-worship and the easy breaks that seem to fall so readily to the upper crust, hold on a minute. This looks like a reasonable offer to me. It is not exactly the Picasso donation. Then again, without Churchill the painter of Guernica might have spent decades rather than three years of his life passively resisting a Nazi empire.
Continue reading...October 6, 2014
Tracey Emin: The Last Great Adventure is You review a lesson in how to be a real artist
White Cube, Bermondsey
The body screams in Emins latest show, which moves from crumbling, fleshy paint to tortured bronzes, and shakes the tradition of the female nude to the core. She is now clearly the most important British artist of her generation
Drawing is a cruel art. Like any skilled medium with a long history, it imposes rules, traditions and standards that an artist cannot simply ignore. To make a drawing is to try to get something right, just as much as playing a piece of music is.
In short, you can either draw or you cant draw.
Continue reading...October 3, 2014
Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination an epic tour through the dark corners of desire
British Library, London
This perversely enlightening exhibition of gothic ephemera, from Sadean dresses to possessed ventriloquists, is not so much about art as it is an inquiry into the liberation of the mind
The strangest and most beautiful moment in this perversely enlightening exhibition at the British Library comes among photographs of people made up like death, driving hearses and posed like Mr and Mrs Dracula for the annual Whitby Goth Weekend. While these modern goths flaunt their macabre styles, a pale white dress floats nearby like a phantom. It is a gothic dress made in 1816.
This fantastic sartorial survivor from the era when Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein enabled its wearer to consciously dress up as a heroine in one of the gothic novels that were then all the rage. She would have attracted as many curious glances towards her tightly tapered, spire-like sleeves and Sadean waist as someone wearing the black lace Alexander McQueen Dante dress that is also in this exhibition. Goth fashions, past and present, express all that makes the gothic so fascinating and sexual.
Emin returns, Polke pops and Serra steels the show the week in art
Tracey Emin returns with the fruits of her last few years at the White Cube, while Howard Hodgkin exhibits gorgeous prints and Richard Serra shows off four steel monuments all in the best weekly art roundup out there
The best of the Young British Artists of the 1990s? Emin recently proved the staying power of her art when My Bed stole the show at Christies and became a modern icon all over again, soon to be installed in the Tate. Here is a chance to see a large array of her recent work.
White Cube, London SE1 from 8 October until 16 November
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