Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 255

Jay-Z and Marina Abramović rekindle art's relationship with pop

There was Ai Weiwei, Anish Kapoor and, of course, Yoko Ono. Now Abramović has become the latest artist to breach pop's increasingly open borders

The renowned performance artist Marina Abramović danced with Jay-Z at a New York art gallery this week as part of the rapper's latest video shoot. It is the latest in a series of crossovers between art and pop that at first glance seem unlikely. As if Ai Weiwei and Anish Kapoor performing Gangnam Style and Weiwei also recording a heavy metal album were not enough, here is Abramović, a legend of contemporary art, dancing to Jay-Z's Picasso Baby. Meanwhile Yoko Ono's Plastic Ono Band got rave reviews in London this summer.

This latest subgenre in the long history of art/pop hybridisation is different and new. It's not just another example of the mutual seduction of pop and art that goes back to Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton designing Beatles album covers. For one thing, these artists are participating directly in music – making it or dancing in public to it. For another, and this makes them different from the legions of young artists who are in arty bands, they are mature people, stepping into mainstream pop. Abramović is in her late 60s, Ai Weiwei well into his 50s. Yoko Ono, one half of art and pop's ultimate marriage, is 80.

Is their embrace of mainstream pop music a symptom of the same disintegration of age boundaries the Rolling Stones enacted at Glastonbury? Surely, this is a truly definitive time in the story of modern culture.

Since 1950 the most important and powerful phenomenon in cultural history has been the blurring, even dissolution, of boundaries between high and low. Those divisions have long since virtually vanished but one barrier remained: that of youth and age – a barrier created by the very rise of pop after the second world war. Pop was, until now, "youth culture".

Its fans and makers aged, but that myth of youth lived on. Until now. For the first time, age literally doesn't matter. Artists often see what is happening before it happens (as can Mick Jagger, apparently). Today, these artists are asserting that pop culture now belongs to everyone and unites the world, beyond all categories – including age.

Marina AbramovicAi WeiweiAnish KapoorJay-ZThe Rolling StonesMick JaggerUrban musicHip-hopR&BPop and rockNew YorkUnited StatesJonathan Jones
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Picasso – separating truth and fiction

Art historian Tim Clark wants us to stop confusing Picasso's art with his life. Biographer John Richardson doesn't. How to judge?

Picasso loved a bullfight. He liked to sit in the arena in Nimes and see blood saturate the sand. So he might enjoy the intellectual bullfight that has just broken out over his art and life.

There I go, painting a falsely intimate biographical image of Picasso as a bullfight aficionado – as if celebrity photos of the old man at the arena, in evocative 1950s black and white, tell us anything about Picasso as an artist.

"Abominable" – that's the word the art historian Tim Clark applies to such writing about the 20th-century art hero in his new book Picasso and Truth. He condemns almost all writing on Picasso, "its prurience, its pedantry" and the prevailing obsession with biography.

Picasso's most eminent biographer, John Richardson, whose epic life of the artist currently runs to three volumes and has yet to reach Guernica, takes the dismissal personally, reports The Times. Richardson says Clark's book is an obvious attack on his work: "It's wholly aimed at me."

Clark told The Times that Richardson's claim is "pathetic", and that his book has just a couple of pages that take issue with biography as a way of understanding Picasso. But when Clark mocks, in Picasso and Truth, "the pretend intimacy ('I remember one evening in Mougins...')" of Picasso biographers, it reeks of Richardson who did, indeed, know Picasso. And when he condemns Picasso writing as "second-rate celebrity literature" I can't help thinking of Richardson's association with the magazine Vanity Fair. Anyway, Richardson's Life is by far the most famous biography of Picasso. Of course he's in the line of fire.

So Richardson is right to think he's being attacked. Does Clark have a point? Is it stupid to try and understand Picasso's art from his life?

Clark's new book is brilliant, lofty and seductively serious – but he is wrong about biography, wrong about Richardson, and wrong about Picasso.

There is a very good reason for seeing Picasso's art as a mirror of his life. Picasso himself tells us that it is, again and again. In the personal collection of his art that he left to the French state and now forms the Musée Picasso in Paris, works are dated not just by year, but by season or even month: Picasso was careful to catalogue his output that precisely. Why? Because his art is in part a diary. Time and again, he makes images that root themselves in raw experience. His Head of a Woman at Tate Modern, a sensual, eviscerating portrait of his lover Fernande Olivier, makes you feel you are there, then, right when he made it. Their relationship hangs around the silent work; their passions haunt it. How is this not a work that demands a biography?

The same goes for so much of Picasso's art – from his homage to a suicided young friend, The Death of Casagemas, to his last desperate self-portraits.

Clark wants to make us recognise the difficulty and strangeness of Picasso's modernism: yes, of course, Picasso is an artist who should shock and disconcert you, if you are looking at him properly. But he is also (and here's the magic of the man) an artist who exults in the shared reality of the human condition, whose art is about being alive, and that's why Picasso keeps depicting his lovers, his rage, his … life.

Clark is also wrong about Richardson. It is not all that "pathetic" for a scholar who has spent much of his life researching an authoritative (and enjoyable) book to take offence when his efforts are publicly deconstructed. There are indeed a lot of bad, gossipy biographies and memoirs of Picasso – but Richardson's is not one of them. It is manifestly a loving, serious, important endeavour. I think Clark should acknowledge that.

Pablo PicassoBiographyArtJonathan Jones
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Royal Academy's Mexican revolution misses the bigger picture

Modernist Mexico's greatest artistic idea was mural painting on a gargantuan scale. But this show is confined to the attic

The revolution is a terrible disappointment. It began with such promise, but by the end all that remains are fragments of a story that never got going.

I am talking about the Mexican revolution as portrayed at the Royal Academy. Its new exhibition, Mexico: A Revolution in Art 1910-1940, takes one of the most dramatic episodes in the history of modern art and betrays it – like the bourgeoisie selling out the people.

The entire epic of modernist Mexico is confined to the less-than-spacious attic of Burlington House, aka the Sackler Galleries, while that venerable bourgeois festival the RA Summer Exhibition is lording it in the larger rooms.

That lack of space truly matters, for Mexico's greatest artistic idea in its years of revolution was mural painting on a gargantuan scale. The brilliantly original Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco created a powerful and popular art that reimagined the past and future of the Americas. It was at once avant garde and accessible. Clearly, it takes a lot of room to do justice to this artistic generosity.

But, wait for it. By one of those intellectual masterstrokes of modern curating, the organisers of this show have decided to decentre the big three macho Mexican revolutionary artists. Get this. Rivera, Siqueiros and Orozco each get just one decent-sized painting in the exhibition. In the first two cases, these are at least masterpieces. Rivera's Dance in Tehuantepec (1928) is a work of genius in which the bulbous cubist style he learned in Paris becomes a tropical aesthetic that gives a peasant dance a moving, geometrical grace. It is something rare: a high modernist painting that is truly popular.

Siqueiros too is at his best in a terrifying, monumental portrait of the revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata, whose scale conveys the dynamism of the murals that electrified American art.

Instead of exploring the careers and influence of these great artists, this exhibition tells a tangled tale of how foreign artists were drawn to Mexico. It loses itself in counting up the famous visitors, and the artistic coherence of Mexico's revolutionary years dissolves as one looks from Henri Cartier-Bresson to the British artist Edward Burra. So all these people went to Mexico. So what?

They were drawn by the country's own art scene, whose profound importance to modern art this exhibition refuses to show. It is not exciting that Burra went to Mexico. It would much more interesting to ask, say, why a Mexican Marxist was asked to paint murals in the capitalist Rockefeller Centre in New York.

This could have been the greatest modern art story ever told. Instead, it is a congested travelogue. Obviously there are some wonderful things, including the radical art of Tina Modotti. But not enough.

We get one tiny Frida Kahlo self-portrait. And downstairs, the bourgeoisie are flocking to the Summer Exhibition.

ExhibitionsDiego RiveraHenri Cartier-BressonFrida KahloPaintingArtJonathan Jones
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What makes art a target for attack?

A Tate Britain exhibition is to tell the story of physical attacks on British art. But are recent acts of violence against Rothko and Constable's work so different from those of the 1500s?

Britain is a nation made by violence – against art. Our culture was transformed in the 16th and 17th centuries by iconoclasts who smashed statues and shattered stained glass. Before the Reformation unleashed these art attackers, art in Britain was just as rich and decorative as anywhere in medieval Europe. There were wall paintings in churches, beautiful alabaster carvings made in the Midlands and sought as far away as Italy, and splendid monasteries.

Art Under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm, an exhibition opening at Tate Britain in October, tells the story of deliberate assaults on art in Britain since the 1500s.

The attacks on art in the Reformation age did more than make churches greyer places – Britain's culture became suspicious of images. While Catholic Italy gloried in the visual, we preferred to rely on the word of God. This was why Britain did not produce great Renaissance artists like Michelangelo or Caravaggio. Instead we had Shakespeare. It has been argued that the massive loss of visual beauty in Shakespeare's Britain fed a new sensual joy in language – a lost pleasure in images was replaced with the richness of Shakespeare's English speech.

There has been a wave of attacks on art in the past 12 months, from Rothko to Constable. How do these idiotic acts compare with the assaults on art that changed Britain in the Reformation?

People were not attacking art 500 years ago. They were attacking "idols". The reason sacred images in churches and abbeys had to be destroyed was that they set up saints as false gods. Idolatrous art, claimed the devout reformers, perverted the Christian faith into a pagan cult.

Only in our eyes are the medieval objects they damaged wonderful art. For Protestant vandals in the past they were superstitious totems.

Today, art is no longer widely seen as either a vessel of religion or a dangerous false idol. Religious paintings hang in museums as art, to be looked at aesthetically, not religiously. And yet the sacred has returned in a strange way. Art in museums is cherished as special and redemptive. It is revered.

Art is not prayed to in modern Britain. It is set apart though, and that makes it a target.

Tate BritainArtJonathan Jones
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Hashima island and the lure of the apocalypse | Jonathan Jones

Google's Street View photos of Japan's deserted Hashima island show the appeal, in anxious times, of imagining the very worst

A block of flats opens up like a diseased mouth to reveal brown stains, black holes and rot. Railings on rancid concrete walkways echo eerily with shouts, children's laughter and barking dogs. In the former courtyard that offered a sunny meeting place, wild grasses offer a good home for insects and snakes.

This is one of the most recognisable and domestic scenes in a set of photographs taken by Google Street View on Hashima island nine miles out to sea from Nagasaki. From the late 19th century until 1974 Hashima was a densely populated coalmining community. When the mine closed, the island was abandoned. Google says it has photographed Hashima to record the island's mouldering concrete architecture before it disintegrates. Yet it is not the island's first sightseer. If you think you half-recognise this place, you might be right. Before Google got here, Hashima was visited by location scouts for the James Bond film Skyfall. In the latest outing for 007 the super-villain hangs out not under a volcano (done that, been there) but on an abandoned concrete island whose desolate courtyards and echoing halls make the perfect setting for torture and murder: Hashima, as rebuilt by Pinewood Studios.

What draws Bond and Google to this terrible place? It is, surely, the lure of the apocalypse. The taste for ruins is the dark unconscious of architectural history. This taste first appeared in the 18th century, when decaying old medieval buildings started to be seen not as scars on the landscape but places of melancholy wonder, haunted by a seductive past. By 1810 when Caspar David Friedrich painted The Abbey in the Oak Forest, a blackened ruin could stand for all that was good and noble in a bleak unrelenting world.

There's a fundamental difference between gothic ruins and modern ruination. Hashima is never going to look mysterious and romantic. Instead it is a premonition of catastrophe. This landscape of the modern picturesque is a fantasy of disaster. With every skyscraper we build, we add another dream of falling glass and twisted steel to the collective imagination. Blockbuster films imagine cities in ruins, protests turn real streets into theatres of mayhem, terrorism exploits these darkest fantasies. We live in the most sophisticated cities and suburbs the world has ever known but imagination feasts on the spectacle of those same comfortable places invaded by zombies or trashed by aliens.

This is why Hashima island is the ideal picturesque escape of our time. Here the apocalypse has happened. It is a modern dreamscape made real. What does it say about our time that people want to look at it? In Ian McEwan's novel Sweet Tooth, set in the wretched 1970s, a character writes a novel about the end of the capitalist industrial world. Such fictions, points out McEwan, proliferated in 70s Britain, as society seemed about to fall apart. Apocalyptic fantasy says a lot about the time that creates it. In 2013, the progress and prosperity that seemed assured just a few years ago has given way to anger and fear. When you are anxious, one source of release is to imagine the very worst. That is why we like to gaze on Hashima island's peaceful deathly nothingness.

JapanArchitecturePhotographyJonathan Jones
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Bad boys v sex dolls – the week in art

Subversive artists IAIN BAXTER& and Adam Chodzko join forces, while dolls take over the Serpentine gallery. Plus, Tate's £10m donor and Ikea refugee shelters – all in your art roundup

Exhibition of the week: IAIN BAXTER&/Adam Chodzko

This exhibition juxtaposes two masters of provocation. Iain Baxter& – he added the & to his name in 2005 – is one of the founders of conceptual art. In 1966 he and Ingrid Baxter created the NE Thing Co., a totally free and undefined art enterprise that was registered as a real company under Canadian law. The NE Thing Co. was a pioneer of the socialisation and deconstruction of art in the late 1960s. Baxter&'s subversive wit meets its match in Adam Chodzko, who has been teasing at the edges of contemporary British art for two dangerous decades.
• Raven Row, London E1 from 11 July until 11 August

Other exhibitions this week

Sarah Morris
Powerful painter and film-maker who is easily able to make this gallery's empty spaces come alive.
• White Cube Bermondsey, London SE1 from 17 July until 29 September

Laura Knight
Portraits by a woman who made her mark on 20th-century British art. Knight's realism often has a kick.
• National Portrait Gallery, London WC2H from 11 July until 13 October

Graham Sutherland
Landscapes by a British artist whose work hovers between modernity and romance make a fitting sight in this Lakeland setting.
• Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal LA9 until 15th September

Roxy Walsh and Sally Underwood
An installation called Dependent Rational Animals explores relationships between painting (Walsh) and sculpture (Underwood).
• Towner, Eastbourne BN21 from 13 July until 22 September

Masterpiece of the week

Camille Pissarro, The Boulevard Montmartre at Night, 1897
The city flickers like television static in this great modern painting.
• National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London WC2N

Image of the weekWhat we learned this week

That the first African artist ever has been given a Tate retrospective

Plus a contemporary African art anti-museum has opened its doors

That Tate got a £10m gift from an Israeli shipping magnate

Ikea has branched out into flatpack refugee shelters

Why an army of sex dolls have taken over the Serpentine gallery

And finally ...

Share your art about water (which is now even easier via GuardianWitness)

Check out our Tumblr

Or follow us on Twitter

ArtTate ModernIkeaJonathan Jones
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Tate Britain's Painting Now exhibition: how can painting ever belong to 'now'?

The title of this forthcoming London show makes it sound as if these artists do their work between tweeting a brilliant remark on the Egypt situation and heading to Berlin for a gig

Painting Now … that's a tricky concept.

It is the title of an exhibition Tate Britain has just announced for this autumn. Painting Now will feature Gillian Carnegie, Tomma Abts, Simon Ling, Catherine Story and Lucy McKenzie. The oldest of these five painters was born in 1967, the youngest in 1977 – if nothing else, it is welcome proof that the passion to paint lives on in the 21st century. So what's my gripe?

I dispute the idea that painting can ever belong to "now". The title Painting Now makes it sound so current and fast, as if these artists do their work between tweeting a brilliant remark on the Egypt situation and heading to the airport for a gig in Berlin. Which perhaps they do. But it's a doubtful proposition that any good painting has ever been made with an eye exclusively on the present.

This does not mean painting cannot be modern. It has produced much of the most powerful modernist art, from Jackson Pollock to Cy Twombly. But none of the great modern painters was an artist of "now".

If they were, Jackson Pollock's Lavender Mist would today look like a period piece, illuminating the quirks of 1950s America but quite odd and silly from our point of view. The reason it does not look like that, but is, on the contrary, utterly alive and relevant, is that Pollock had his eyes fixed on somewhere beyond "now": he knew enough about the history of art before him to grasp the scale of newness and daring needed to make paintings that were truly revolutionary.

People have been painting since the stone age, and the conscious, written history of painting goes back to ancient Greece. When a painter faces a blank canvas, that weight of tradition is daunting – you are doing the same thing Caravaggio and Rembrandt did. What can you add that is truly new?

This challenge of history makes modern painting irresistibly exciting. When a painter really breaks through to a new and powerful style, work that adds to what painting can be, it is a profound achievement.

You can only do that by taking your art utterly seriously and on its own terms, which are ancient terms. So this is my problem with Painting Now. No good painter has ever painted just for "now". The reason there are so few painters of real originality in today's Britain is that our art scene is so focused on ideas of contemporaneity and youth. Painting demands a more open-minded idea of what matters in art and what makes it relevant – for example, the exclusion of older artists from this survey of current British painting makes no sense. A 90-year-old painter has just as much chance of being original as a 20-year-old. More, actually.

When you paint, you enter a different time stream. All previous painters are at your shoulder. You need to ignore the art magazines and curators who demand an art of "now". You need to ask Cy what he thinks.

PaintingCy TwomblyArtTate BritainModernismExhibitionsJonathan Jones
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Whitechapel Gallery's Spirit of Utopia offers only broken dreams

Exhibition examining models of perfect society celebrates alternative lifestyles without much hard analysis

The Spirit of Utopia, an exhibition at London's Whitechapel Gallery that assembles alternative ideas for living from an international brigade of artists, offers a fascinating aesthetic playground but a depressing political insight. Far from unveiling a tempting menu of utopian futures, it chews over the leftovers of a broken dream.

A utopia is a detailed model of a perfect society. Thomas More coined the word in the title of his 1516 book that reports on the laws and habits of an imagined republic. Since then, communists have attempted to build utopias in real places, architects have designed buildings and cities that are utopian microcosms and writers from William Morris to George Orwell have imagined utopias (or dystopias) either as dreams or nightmares.

The artists in The Spirit of Utopia do not offer any such total picture of a different way of life. Instead they collect beguiling fragments of radical whimsy. In the downstairs gallery, a spectacular array of novel ways of living encompasses nature, culture and the human self in the form of a futuristic garden by the London collective Wayward Plants, a practising potter's studio conceived by the American artist Theaster Gates, and Pedro Reyes' Sanatorium, a functioning wellbeing centre where visitors can experience therapies that include hitting a dummy whose face is a balloon on which you have drawn the face of the person you feel most oppressed by.

Take them seriously or comically or a bit of both, but what you can't take from any of these installations is a vision of utopia – unless the future is a greenhouse where people make pots and get therapy. Or maybe it is. The Spirit of Utopia is not about coherent proposals for a better way of running the world. It is a celebration of vaguely alternative lifestyles. Its soft radicalism has a slight whiff of scented candles. Where is the hard analysis of economy and state that might genuinely overthrow the bad guys? Where are Marxists when you need them?

There is some tougher talk in the upstairs galleries but it is so romantic it is more pose than politics. The American/German project Time/Bank wants to abolish money and replace it with a new idea of value based on a post-Einsteinian understanding of time. Good luck with that. Meanwhile Danish subversives Superflex attempt to hypnotise you into experiencing the financial crash from the viewpoint of the financial speculator George Soros. This is powerful, perhaps because it does not indulge in any whimsy and insists on the darkness of today's reality.

Perhaps, in the end, artists are too reasonable, happy, and good humoured to be genuine revolutionaries smashing the status quo. Everything here has some tongue in cheek, not least the work of Britain's Peter Liversidge that includes a collection of signs offering free stuff.

In the 19th and 20th centuries when people actually tried to build utopia, often with murderous results, they did it in the name of science. By contrast, Claire Pentecost offers a recipe for healthy soil based on kitchen garden alchemy – mystical reformism has replaced scientific revolution.

Paradoxically, in failing the utopian idea, this exhibition saves it. Real attempts to build perfect societies have proven catastrophic. Humans are not perfect. More was in fact joking in his misunderstood masterpiece of political thought. The artists in this charming show retrieve what is best in the utopian tradition. Tentative and comical, they let the old fantasy die but preserve its enriching spirit in a jar.

Whitechapel GalleryArtSculptureExhibitionsJonathan Jones
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Meschac Gaba's anti-museum shows the strength of modern African art

Forget ancient ceremonial sculpture, Beninese artist Meschac Gaba's playful Museum of Contemporary African Art at Tate Modern reveals how African art is often overlooked

It was in the Marriage Room that Meschac Gaba's vision tore through my expectations of what art is and how it relates to our ordinary, irreplaceable lives. This room in the Beninese artist's Museum of Contemporary African Art is full of wedding souvenirs, from photographs to gifts, that record his marriage to a Dutch curator in a ceremony at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Art or life? It was both. And today, that joyous conflation of reality with the cool precincts of a museum is commemorated in a soppy wedding video and love tokens displayed as museum artefacts in London's Tate Modern. It got me hooked on the strange and wonderful nature of Gaba's enterprise.

At the Museum of Contemporary African Art you can sit on sofas and read books, play a piano, see Ghanaian money with Picasso's face on it, or visit a Swiss bank that looks like an African street market. Through an epic assembly of often poignant stuff runs a confessional thread, as the artist narrates his journey through the world of modern art, between Africa and Europe and back again.

In the Library, where books on a vast range of modern art are available to consult, you can hear about Gaba's childhood, how he drew all over his reading books. His passion for art eventually led him to study at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Personal information is not extraneous to this exhibition – it's an unavoidable part of it.

Museums can be autobiographies, or novels. The Museum of Contemporary African Art is a bit of both. But it is also a protest. Where is the African art of today in European and American museums? The Art and Religion Room juxtaposes reproductions of "classic" African religious sculpture with tacky Christian and Buddhist artefacts. The stress that museums place on African ceremonial art of the past, this implies, is a bit like judging modern European art by kitsch replicas of Raphael Madonnas.

Where, he asks, is the contemporary voice of Africa in our museums?

It's here, in this powerful surrealistic anti-museum. The homemade quality of everything in the Museum of Contemporary African Art gives it a raw atmosphere of living cities. The excitement and complexity of our sprawling century seems to press at the doors. Traditionally, museums put art in a quiet world of its own. This one opens the window and lets in the noise.

SculptureArtTate ModernBeninAfricaJonathan Jones
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Shostakovich meets Michelangelo the lover

Michelangelo's self-searching love sonnets and the jagged music of Shostakovich are a perfect match. Both were created by artists who had been flayed

A man's skin hangs empty. Its face has no skull inside, no brains, no eyes. It is a sagging grey mask. Where the eyes and mouth were, black holes gape in a bloodless grimace. This is the self-portrait of Michelangelo Buonarroti, painted by him on the wall of the Sistine Chapel when he was in his 60s, slumping wretchedly at the heart of his towering picture of The Last Judgment. Michelangelo imagines himself, in this painting of the saved and the damned, as a flayed skin. Even in this hollowed state, his face is unmistakable, as he was portrayed by his contemporaries many times. The beard, the wiry hair, the sadness – all the familiar features are visible in his bizarre self-portrait, but horribly changed.

This is the man who is about to take centre stage at the Manchester International festival, when Peter Sellars directs a performance of Shostakovich's Michelangelo Sonnets. The composer penetrates to the dark heart of Michelangelo in this extraordinary work. He was a man flayed by Soviet society, and in 1974, close to the end of his life, he composed music that not only gives a new form to Michelangelo's poetry but brilliantly and profoundly reveals the melancholy heart of a great artist.

Michelangelo's fame rested on the colossal achievements of his early career, when he carved marble statues, including Bacchus, the Pieta and, ultimately, David, that were more alive and expressive than any of the ancient Greek and Roman works the Renaissance revered. Then Pope Julius II called him to the Vatican to design the papal tomb, and to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

That's the story everybody knows. But the true fascination of Michelangelo lies in what he did with his fame. By 1520, not only was the 45-year-old a revered master but his High Renaissance rivals Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael were dead. Michelangelo was only halfway through his life – he would die in 1564, just short of 90 years of age. While the first half of his life had been dominated by backbreaking work, the second half was more contemplative. One of his first ventures in what was for him a new discipline, architecture, was the Laurentian Library in Florence, where dark pilasters and columns in the vestibule seem to hang in mid air, their weight oppressing the visitor. This is a room that expresses a state of mind – a chamber that catches you in its melancholy. It is also a portal into the metaphysical shadow-world of Michelangelo's own poems.

Like architecture, poetry was an art that meant more and more to Michelangelo as he grew older. His first surviving poems date from when he was about 30, but his early verses often seem slightly mechanical in their imitation of the great 14th-century love poet Petrarch and the talented Renaissance versifier Lorenzo de' Medici.

Michelangelo was proud of his old Florentine family, the Buonarroti, and determined to assert his place in the cultural elite of his city. Florence was a city of the word. In the middle ages its supreme poet Dante made the Tuscan dialect of Florence the literary language of Italy. Michelangelo claimed he knew Dante's Divine Comedy – all three books of it – by heart. Yet he was never interested in writing epic verse. From the scale of his paintings and sculptures it might seem that he would write massive slabs of grand narrative, but instead he wrote pensive sonnets, meditative madrigals, terse epitaphs. His poetry is self-searching, uneasy, shot through with his longing for love and his attempt to understand his own art, which he writes about almost as if someone else created it.

Michelangelo wrote love poetry long before he is known to have had any love affairs. In his arduous stone-chipping youth, he seems not to have had time for love – but he craved it. His poems, taking their cue from earlier Florentine writers going back to Dante's contemporaries, dwell on love as the passion that unleashes language.

In the 1530s, when he was in his late 50s, he finally fell in love for real. The object of his desire was Tommaso de' Cavalieri, a handsome teenager from a noble Roman family. He gave Tommaso presents of poems and drawings – in one of the drawings, Jupiter has taken the form of an eagle to carry off the youth Ganymede.

The poetry Michelangelo composed for Tommaso has a true fire. It is viscerally real, acutely sensitive: "This, lord, has hit me, since I laid eyes on you. / A bitter-sweet, yes-and-no mood …" He claims that his love is spiritual, that only people with dirty minds think he is up to anything illicit. Yet he is acutely sensual in his longings as he dreams of resting in his lover's arms, or of being the prisoner of an armed knight – a pun on the name Cavalieri.

Michelangelo's poetry reverberates with his sculptures – with the swooning abandon of the Dying Slave in the Louvre, or the bearded older man crushed beneath a young nude in The Genius of Victory. Love is not his only theme. Michelangelo muses on the nature of art in his verses: he uses sculpture as a metaphor.

Shostakovich provides this poetry with the jagged, difficult and tragic music it calls out for. It is surely a comment on the modernity of Michelangelo that it took a modern composer to match his language. Those words, wielded like chisels, lugged like blocks of marble, find majestic analogy in the composer's sharp breaths of pain.

It is not the only modern musical setting of these verses: Benjamin Britten also composed a powerful response to Michelangelo the poet. Yet somehow it is the awe-inspiring darkness of Shostakovich in old age, after a lifetime of suffering and rage, that communicates the essence of Michelangelo – the genius who flayed himself.

• Jonathan Jones's The Loves of the Artists: Art and Passion in the Renaissance is published by Simon & Schuster.

MichelangeloSculptureClassical musicDmitri ShostakovichPaintingBenjamin BrittenJonathan Jones
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