Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 22

Martin Boyce review – ripping the beating heart of beauty from the banal and the bizarre

Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh
The Turner prize winner mourns the hellish destruction of Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art before sweeping you to heaven on a terrific tide of soulless tat and elegant craft

It’s hard to imagine a more evocative symbol of forlorn hopes and lost utopias in contemporary Britain than the destruction of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s magnificent building the Glasgow School of Art by not one but two fires. Every generous detail of the place expressed a buoyant vision of a shared artistic idealism that made it the greatest work of early modernism in the British Isles. In the most perturbing of three very different spaces in his outstanding exhibition at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Turner prize winner Martin Boyce, who attended the art school, mourns this tragedy and asks for answers.

Black and white photographs are laid out on a long padded table with the respectful formality of a forensic laboratory. Who has died here? There is no body, just soot-stained walls, a ruined roof under a plastic tent, fire-damaged artworks.

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Martin Boyce meditates, Angelica Kauffman returns and Enninful celebrates Mapplethorpe – the week in art

Everyday objects are imbued with beauty by the Glasgow artist, while France celebrates the 150th birthday of impressionism – all in your weekly dispatch

Martin Boyce: Before Behind Between Above Below
The Turner prize winner continues his meditations on 20th-century modernism and 21st-century life.
• Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, from 2 March to 9 June

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As France celebrates, it doesn’t seem like 150 years since the first impressionist exhibition

A major exhibition opens at the Musée d’Orsay and there are shows and festivals across the country

To look at Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise is to live in its moment. You are right there in Le Havre docks at sunrise, in the purple misty light, as cranes and ships vaguely materialise in the weak light of the sun’s low red disc.

You could also note what it does not have. It does not have firm borders or precise forms: the people in boats are just blue dabs, as are the boats. The sunlight and ship masts mirrored in the water are spattered, incoherent.

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William Blake’s Universe review – polymath’s paintings are outclassed by the Germans

Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
A wide-ranging exhibition on the English mystic makes unfortunate comparisons with his European contemporaries who, it turns out, are the far superior Romantics

If any artist was ever a one-off it’s William Blake. To start with, “artist” isn’t quite the right word for Blake who is also one of the greatest poets in the English language. His images and his words are intertwined in his (very) limited edition illuminated books, printed as he puts it in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell “in the infernal method, by corrosives … melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid”.

Putting on a good exhibition of this artist is no mean feat, for you have to give instant visual access to a mind whose original, often obscure ideas take 944 pages to express in my edition of Blake’s Complete Writings. Cambridge flunks it. The Fitzwilliam Museum gets so distracted by other artists that it never really takes you into Blake’s “Universe”, as the show’s title promises.

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Black identity, Blake’s intensity and how to dust David – the week in art

Plus splashy colourful paintings, Korean colour pencil drawings and Yoko Ono’s huge retrospective – all in your weekly dispatch

The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure
Lubaina Himid, Kerry James Marshall and Amy Sherald are among the artists in this survey of Black identity in painting.
• National Portrait Gallery, London, until 19 May

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Sargent and Fashion review – tragicomic travesty is a frock horror

Tate Britain, London
Sargent’s gloriously rich and subtle paintings can’t be reduced to dreary facts about hats, dresses and opera gowns. Sadly, that’s just what’s happened

This is a horrible exhibition. The American painter John Singer Sargent is a great artist of identity, fascinated with the nature of social being. He paints people not in isolation but as players in a social world in a way that is startling, modern and so truthful it hurts. Trained in 19th-century Paris, he brought brushwork tinted by Manet and Monet to portraying late Victorian and Edwardian British society, and was especially drawn to those who didn’t fit the old order – such as the young Jewish women joyously proclaiming their individuality in Ena and Betty, Daughters of Asher and Mrs Wertheimer. But was he, above all, a painter of fashion, as this show claims? No way – what on earth are they talking about?

This daring artist of modern life is turned into a stuffed shirt by a show that puts the dress before the face, the hat before the head and the crinoline before the soul in an obsessive, myopic argument. A painter with much to say to us becomes, here, a relic with no relevance.

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A colossal artistic joke – Flaming June at the Royal Academy review

Royal Academy, London
A clever, titillating work offering easy visual thrills – Look at all that orange! Notice the nipple! – Frederic Leighton’s iconic painting is back in the UK while its Puerto Rico home undergoes repairs

Some artworks are iconic the moment they are created, such as the Mona Lisa or Warhol’s soup cans. Others become famous in more twisty ways. Frederic, Lord Leighton’s late 19th-century painting Flaming June was forgotten and lost for much of the 20th century, and when it did turn up in the 1960s no one wanted it except Andrew Lloyd Webber, who claims he tried to borrow £50 from his granny to purchase it, and the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico, which leapt in where young Lloyd Webber failed. It is now lending its treasure to the Royal Academy for nearly a year while it remains closed following an earthquake. The RA has announced this loan as a triumphant return of a British masterpiece, and it has also been shown with great excitement by other museums around the world, an overnight success at last.

It’s easy to see why it was a hit when it was first shown at the Royal Academy in 1895: it let Victorians enjoy a sneaky sensual peak. Flaming June is supposedly a symbol of Summer. With her red hair and fiery garment, a model curls up on a marble seat, allowing us to look at her while she has her eyes closed. Respectable onlookers could not fault its mild aestheticism. But while Dr Jekyll smugly approved, any Mr Hydes visiting the exhibition might notice the nipple that’s firmly visible through her dress, and the way the tight, glowing fabric reveals the fleshy ampleness of her upraised thigh.

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Sensuous socialites, beautiful disasters and a flaming orange ‘masterpiece’ – the week in art

John Singer Sargent’s ironic fashion portraits go on show, Lord Leighton’s famous Flaming June is back in the UK and Edward Burtynsky’s large-scale photos capture a planet in crisis – all in your weekly dispatch

Sargent and Fashion
The sensually ironic social portraiture of John Singer Sargent is a modern artistic miracle, and this sideways approach could be a brilliant key to his enigma.
• Tate Britain, London, from 22 February to 7 July

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Saul Leiter review – glorious survey of an impressionist with a camera

MK Gallery, Milton Keynes
Leiter looked at the street life of Manhattan and beyond with precise ideals of beauty and an infectious joy

We call photography “art” with casual unthinkingness now. In Florence there’s a Selfie Museum just round the corner from the museum containing Michelangelo’s David. Can we really describe both as art? But maybe it’s the wrong question. As EH Gombrich put it: “There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists.” And the exquisite exhibition at MK Gallery of Saul Leiter’s pictures of postwar New York is a masterclass in demonstrating how a photographer can be an artist.

The artist, not the lens, took his pictures. They are no more spontaneous than a Constable landscape – even though both appear unplanned and immediate. But like a plein air painter who’s put in years of looking at landscape masterpieces before taking brushes out into the fields, Leiter looked at the street life of Manhattan with an eye shaped by artistic knowledge and precise ideals of beauty.

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Threatening to dissolve masterpieces in acid is a pathetically banal stunt for our shallow times

Russian artist Andrei Molodkin will destroy works by Picasso, Rembrandt and Warhol if Julian Assange dies in prison. It’s an unoriginal idea born of art-historical ignorance

The security at the National Gallery in London gets more oppressive each time I visit. Now, there are new airport style scanning gates and extra searches: I recently saw someone’s art materials apparently being confiscated on entry. It seems heavy handed until you remember that last autumn Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus, a subtle and complex painting of a naked woman who has her back to us while we can see her thoughtful face in a mirror, was attacked here with hammers. Easy to forget, because attacks on art have become routine. When the Mona Lisa had soup chucked at it recently I wrote a quick piece without even bothering to make my disapproval clear because this is how it goes when the outrageous becomes normal – we learn to accept it with knowing irony.

Now Russian dissident artist Andrei Molodkin is taking it up a notch – or is he? Molodkin claims to be sealing original works of art by Picasso, Rembrandt, Warhol, Sarah Lucas, Andres Serrano and more in a safe designed to destroy them all with acid. Their destruction will be triggered should WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange die in prison. Serrano, Franko B and others have freely given their own works for the project: Picasso was presumably not asked. But is this art-erasing device real, and are the “masterpieces” being held hostage, which Molodkin refuses to specify, really as special as all that?

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