Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 35
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.
March 22, 2023
‘You’ve never eaten a banana?!’ 10 writers face their fiercest – and strangest – food fears
Whether it’s the smell, the texture or the emotional associations, something has kept our guinea pigs away from everyday dishes such as hard-boiled eggs and shepherd’s pie. How traumatic will those first mouthfuls be?
It’s not because they look phallic, OK? There is nothing Freudian or weird about the fact that I have spent my life recoiling at the sight of a banana. My banana aversion has nothing to do with me being gay. I like cucumbers! I like courgettes! I have no problem with phallic produce.
‘It took me a few days to work up the courage’ … Arwa with the dreaded fruit. Photograph: courtesy of Arwa Mahdawi
Continue reading...‘Warhol cooked us scrambled eggs. Or was it Rauschenberg?’ – Gilbert and George preserve their greatest moments
Now in their 80s, the ‘living sculpture’ couple have built a free gallery to ensure their creations last for ever. Our writer gets a tour of the centre – and its mind-boggling inaugural show
George and Gilbert are showing me the Himalayan magnolia they’ve planted in the freshly cobbled courtyard of the Gilbert and George Centre. It’s a tall specimen that’s already starting to unleash its ravishing red blooms. “Just like human hearts!” they exclaim, adding that the friend who first showed them this tree’s flowers has just died. “It’s amazing,” says George, “that on the day we thought, ‘Let’s take a photograph to send him’, we should hear that he died.”
George Passmore is 81 and his husband Gilbert Prousch is nearly 80. The pair have been working as a piece of living art, a single artistic entity, since the 1960s and are intensely aware of how many people they’ve outlived. “They’ve all gone,” says George. “Duncan’s gone, Warhol’s gone.”
Continue reading...March 21, 2023
After Impressionism review – radical ideas and ecstatic sex from the edge of a new universe
National Gallery, London
Cézanne outshines Van Gogh, with Picasso his revolutionary pupil, in this absorbing hurtle toward modern art – smashing 500 years of tradition into cubist shards
‘Make it strange” is one of the slogans of modernism. The National Gallery’s show After Impressionism makes modernist art itself strange, by seeing it from the past – the Victorian salons where this revolution in the arts actually started. It is a flawed show but one I found hard to leave. European art in the 1880s and 1890s hurtles towards the “modern” before your eyes, yet also burrows away into recesses of nostalgia and pastoral – and you lose yourself, as modernism wants you to.
You can cut a line through the exhibition and follow the high road of the new, ignoring all those odd byways. Simply rush from Paul Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire with its hypnotic field of broken, tentative, obsessive dapplings held together by an iron intellect, straight to Pablo Picasso’s 1910 portrait of Wilhelm Uhde. This writer and collector is the last man, the last bourgeois individual, in Picasso’s revolutionary portrait. His cartoonish features, pinched and prissy over a stiff wing collar, are disintegrating into a crystal cavern of invisible structures made suddenly visible. This is the maze of “cubism”, that takes its start from Cézanne’s analysis of vision. This is where, by 1910, the most radical art stood – on the edge of a quantum universe.
Continue reading...March 17, 2023
Souls of the south, a migration celebration and 60 years of nude men – the week in art
Black artists find resistance in found objects, an Ode to David Lammy MP and a survey of gay nude photography – all in your weekly dispatch
Souls Grown Deep Like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South
The art of resistance in the former Confederate states of the US uses whatever lies to hand in the back yard. Found stuff and craft skills are deployed here by artists from Thornton Dial to the Gee’s Bend quilt-makers to assemble a Black vision of the south.
• Royal Academy, London, until 18 June
March 15, 2023
Mona Lisa V ‘the monstrous’: the grotesque, shocking side of Leonardo da Vinci
The Italian master didn’t just paint the conventionally beautiful. As a new National Gallery show reveals, he was also drawn to irregular, diseased and aged faces – all captured with mind-bending accuracy and compassion
Leonardo da Vinci comments in his notebooks that while few are trained in judging portraits, everyone feels entitled to criticise actual people: “whether someone is a hunchback (gobbo), or has one shoulder higher or lower than the other, or too big a mouth or nose, or other defects.” It’s a telling remark, but at first sight some of his most disturbing drawings suggest he shared those prejudices against people who look different.
We think of him painting the beautiful: Ginevra de’ Benci, Cecilia Gallerani and Salai glow with glossy hair and good bone structure. Yet alongside his fascination with youth and loveliness Leonardo was obsessed with irregular, diseased and aged faces whose “monstrous” distortions he drew with daunting precision.
Continue reading...March 10, 2023
Empowering Art review – Indigenous masterworks full of wonder and sorrow
Sainsbury Centre, Norwich
Orca whale totem poles and otter masks feature in this eye-opening exhibition of a culture in which ‘every man was his own Leonardo’
When the artist Simeon Stilthda saw a picture of Egypt’s Great Sphinx in a missionary bible in the 1870s, he carved his own version of it. Stilthda was a member of the Haida people in the Pacific Northwest of the Americas and his carving was a tribute from the indigenous culture of this region to ancient Egypt, thousands of miles and years away. It’s not just a wonderful sculpture – round the back, the Sphinx has a Haida hairstyle – but a piece of art theory in wood. Stilthda draws eye-opening parallels between his community’s religious art and that of the Pharaohs.
Like the ancient Egyptians who conjoined a human and lion to create the Sphinx, the Indigenous peoples of North America’s Pacific Northwest have a magical eye for nature. This compelling exhibition transports you to vast coniferous forests and the open ocean where humans and animals are close. This style of Pacific Northwest art, with its blocky curved patterns, appears to emulate the black and white markings of one of the region’s ruling creatures, the killer whale. Not only do orcas feature on totem poles along with birds mythic and real, but their “abstract” appearance is reflected in a style that brilliantly stretches and warps reality.
Continue reading...Da Vinci’s dark side, our need for nature and a big pinch of salt – the week in art
Renaissance grotesquerie with the Ugly Duchess, our fragile relationship with nature, and prize-winning Finnish video art about sea salt – all in your weekly dispatch
The Ugly Duchess: Beauty and Satire in the Renaissance
The National Gallery investigates grotesque humour in the Renaissance and reveals the dark side of Leonardo da Vinci.
• National Gallery, London, from 16 March to 11 June
March 3, 2023
The Profumo sex scandal revisited, rival queens and a post-human pioneer – the week in art
New depictions of Christine Keeler and the great 60s sex scandal, archive insights into two of Henry VIII’s wives and experiments with art in the age of AI – all in your weekly dispatch
Scandal ’63 Revisited
Artists depict Christine Keeler and the Profumo Affair that rocked 1960s politics, with Caroline Coon, Marguerite Horner, Stella Vine and more.
• De Montfort University, Leicester, until 15 April
February 24, 2023
Surreal snakes, nautical Dutchmen and a long march for Procession – the week in art
Polly Morgan takes reptile stuffing to new heights, Hew Locke’s acclaimed Procession heads north and the Van de Veldes push the boat out – all in your weekly dispatch
Polly Morgan
Great slithering serpents – Morgan takes her surrealist reptilian taxidermy to new heights of strangeness with this exhibition and public sculpture exploring natural camouflage.
• Royal Society of Sculptors, London, 27 February to 29 April
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