Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 34
April 14, 2023
Frank Auerbach: Twenty Self-Portraits review – savage, compassionate and pineapple-like
Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, London
Now in his 90s, the great German-British painter is finally putting his own face up for scrutiny – with wondrously strange results
Old age is relative. When Rembrandt painted his Self-Portrait at the Age of 63, showing his pummelled, bankrupted, bereaved face, he looked ancient. He died that year. All his self-portraits as an “old man” were done in his 50s and early 60s. Frank Auerbach, by contrast, will be 92 this month. He is marking the moment with an extraordinary series of self-portraits that examine his face with such relentless honesty, he’s like a 21st-century Rembrandt.
Auerbach has said that he never used to find his own head visually interesting – but “now that I’ve got bags under my eyes, things are sagging and so on, there’s more material to work with”. In these 20 paintings and drawings – many finished in the early months of this year – he makes the most of that saggy material. Over a soft-shaded pencil drawing of his walnut-like phiz, jagged lines are added like time’s graffiti. In another, the flesh is almost invisible under a network of disembodied wrinkles. One painting suggests the shadowy features of a skull, yet from its depths a fire-red eye blazes.
Continue reading...
Spiritual visions, robot stags and Auerbach through a glass darkly – the week in art
Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian unite, Mat Collishaw dives into the digital and a modern master considers himself in his 90s – all in your weekly dispatch
Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian
Two pioneers of abstract art who were both separately inspired by spiritual visions to paint the invisible.
• Tate Modern, London, until 3 September.
April 7, 2023
Lindsey Mendick review – Brookside’s buried body is a ceramic letdown
The Weston Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park
This show, inspired by the soap’s notorious murder plotline, looks like it was a lot of fun to put together – but sadly there’s little here for the viewer
Anyone who has seen Lindsey Mendick’s glistening, obscene ceramics knows she has talent to burn. Unfortunately, in her most ambitious show to date, she does just that and takes a torch to her abilities, wasting them in a misguided installation that makes no sense, has no point and leaves you standing frustrated and numb on the outside of what looks to have been a very enjoyable creative process.
Although surrounded by sheep and statues amid Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s rolling dales, this is an indoor exhibition in a squarish, windowless gallery, which Mendick has filled with a big hollow frame of beams, planks and joists that suggests a half-finished suburban housing estate. It is meant to suggest the Merseyside close where the Channel 4 soap Brookside was set, running from 1982 until its cancellation in 2003. Mendick peppers her deconstructed “Brookside Close” with memories of this old show’s golden moments, including a sofa fabric printed with Anna Friel snogging Nicola Stephenson.
Continue reading...Ai Weiwei smashes it, Steve McQueen stuns and Brookside goes ceramic – the week in art
The Chinese activist artist demolishes his sculptures, the Turner-winner memorialises Grenfell and the 90s soap opera is immortalised in Yorkshire – all in your weekly dispatch
Ai Weiwei: Making Sense
Lego and marble are among the materials in this exhibition of Ai Weiwei’s grand designs.
• Design Museum, London, 7 April to 30 July
April 5, 2023
The coronation invitation reviewed – is Charles planning a pumping pagan party?
Does the king actually wish to be crowned Archdruid, Master of the Hobby-Horse? That would appear to be the pagan message of the elegant, floral design – and its standout character, the leafy-faced Green Man
If the attractive, hand-painted invitation is anything to go by, the coronation will be a neo-pagan rite in which King Charles III is invested as Archdruid, Master of the Hobby-Horse and Lord of Summer Isle. That’s because the most prominent image in the intricate, joyous floral design – by heraldry artist Andrew Jamieson – is the wryly smiling face of the Green Man. This emerald visage, the standout feature in Jamieson’s elegantly swarming design, belongs to an ancient, pre-Christian divinity who can still be seen in the architecture of British medieval churches, a leafy mug among all the gargoyles.
The face of a fertility cult that existed at the margins of Christianity fits perfectly into Jamieson’s loving recreation of the playful natural imagery that is found in medieval art. In manuscripts from the era, the main text is usually religious and orthodox, while fun and fantasy are given free rein around the margins. Here, the official message of the invitation occupies a central empty square, while the Green Man and his ever-renewing natural kingdom sprawl around the edge in living colour.
Continue reading...April 4, 2023
The Rossettis review – lurid, luscious-lipped beauties drown out the family’s real talent
Tate Britain, London
Dante Gabriel’s paintings are overshadowed by his sister Christina’s poetry in this baffling, overblown exhibition about the decidedly non-revolutionary pre-Raphaelites
It’s obvious, from the very first room of Tate Britain’s overblown, baffling celebration of the “radical” and “revolutionary” pre-Raphaelites, who was the real talent in the Rossetti family: the poet Christina Rossetti. You can hear readings of her poems here, including Colour, which praises colours in almost childlike, spiritually clear images: “What is yellow? pears are yellow, / Rich and ripe and mellow.”
Unfortunately as you listen, you are obliged to look at her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 1849-50 painting The Annunciation, displayed like the icon it isn’t in the middle of the space. Where Christina’s images have a crystalline exactitude that makes them pretty much timeless, this work is strictly for buffs of Victoriana. It is like some sort of taxidermy exhibit, a leaden quotation of medieval art that’s neither properly medieval, nor bitingly modern.
Continue reading...March 31, 2023
Radically romantic Rossettis, female impressionists and whisky – the week in art
Preraphaelite sensuality gets complex at the Tate, the great Berthe Morisot wins her due and Northumberland distils Anglo-Saxon history – all in your weekly dispatch
The Rossettis
Poetry, painting and Victorian sexual experimentation in a show that sets Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sensual paintings in their complex biographical context.
• Tate Britain, London, 6 April to 24 September.
March 28, 2023
‘Before cancer I was really unhappy’: Tracey Emin on the joy of founding her own art school
When she thought she was dying, Emin vowed to create a lasting legacy. Now she has opened the doors of a new art school and studio complex in Margate, and found fulfilment in helping younger artists
It’s a Saturday morning and the band of the 1st Margate Girls’ and Boys’ Brigade is marching down a side street with pipes and drums ringing out amid a crowd that includes luminaries of the art world, Bob Geldof, and the kids across the road who are still in their pyjamas. Then the town’s Social Singing Choir launches into a version of Madonna’s Like a Prayer that is so lovely people cry. Tracey Emin, too, seems to wipe away a tear as she waits in her tricorn hat and red robe – the official costume of a Freewoman of Margate – to cut the red ribbon and officially open her new art school.
This delightful public performance is an Emin artwork, but not as we know it. Emin’s subject matter until now had always been herself. “That woman knows herself,” as Lucian Freud said approvingly. But this ceremony is about her embrace of other people. It’s about the community she is setting out to create.
Continue reading...Portraits of Dogs review – pass the pooper-scooper, this one’s a stinker
Wallace Collection, London
This show of canine portraiture is so trite and desperate to please, it ends up insulting animals and audience alike
The Wallace Collection’s lavish, even epic survey of canine portraiture down the ages is the kind of exhibition I thought galleries had grown out of: a sickly cocktail of brittle snobbery, fey “fun” and naked desperation to please. At least, to please dog lovers, who really do appear to be the target audience. “Why not pamper your pooch with a gift from our shop?” suggests the website. Why not? Because I’ve never owned a dog and anyway they’re not allowed in our flats.
Obviously, the dog in art is a valid subject, even if it lacks the pedigree of the cat, which goes back to ancient Egypt. The problem is that Portraits of Dogs frames the image of the dog in a silly, facetious way, like some pretentious pet food commercial.
Continue reading...March 24, 2023
Monet in Lego, modern art’s birth and Hockney’s bigger leash – the week in art
Ai Weiwei recreates a masterpiece in 650,000 pieces, Picasso and Matisse as arty midwives and dog portraits you won’t find in a charity shop – all in your weekly dispatch
Daisy Parris
Paintings that dredge eerie emotional depths from sensual layers of abstract colour, with visceral scrawled messages pointing to the sources of their longing. The biggest are the best.
• Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate, until 16 April.
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