Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 36
February 21, 2023
‘She really wanted to see my labia piercing’: what was it like to be painted by Alice Neel?
A dominatrix in heels and feathers, a Warhol alumnus who whip-danced for the Velvet Underground, a feminist trailblazer … ahead of major Barbican show, three giant personalities relive sitting for the great American artist
An unusual guest captivated viewers of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show on 21 February 1984. Alice Neel was not the conventional celebrity but a painter and activist who’d been documenting poverty, resistance and radical lives in New York since the 1920s. She was also very funny. The 84-year-old communist started by teasing Carson about his latest divorce before suggesting he should make a show about the backstage life of a chat show host – instantly inventing postmodern comedy with a pop imagination to rival her friend Andy Warhol.
Neel was a hit – but she would be dead from colon cancer later that year. However, this final blaze of media glory was a fittingly American triumph, for Neel is as much an artist of American individualism as F Scott Fitzgerald. Her portraits capture larger-than-life people, big personalities who fill the canvas with colourful clothes or naked flesh. She paints her subjects entire, seeing selves in bodies, not just faces. For her, those bodies are never meat, but vulnerable revelations. She got Warhol to let her paint his scarred, frail torso after he was shot, and portrayed herself nude with the same honesty. Dressed or not, posing for Neel was an intimate experience. She had a way of seeing secrets. Here, three of Neel’s Americans remember seeing themselves anew through her eyes.
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February 17, 2023
Hockney’s secrets, a Mike Nelson thriller, and graffiti gets a retrospective – the week in art
The great English artist’s immersive spectacular, Extinction Beckons on London’s Southbank and a sweeping street-art show at Saatchi Gallery – all in your weekly dispatch
David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)
Britain’s greatest pop artist continues his unique trajectory through the modern world with an immersive spectacle that plunges you into his pictures.
• Lightroom, London, 22 February to 4 June
February 15, 2023
Golden Mummies of Egypt review – ancient faces meet your eye across millennia
Manchester Museum
Banish thoughts of horror films and bandaged zombies, this exquisite exhibition shows us ancient Egyptian artefacts that were loving portraits of unique people
A bearded man looks back at you from his mummified cocoon, his face absolutely alive. His eyes are dark and pensive in a face that emerges from the shadows in full perspective, each black hair bristling. This kind of painted simulacrum created in Egypt in the second century AD wouldn’t be technically possible again until the age of Jan van Eyck.
And somewhere underneath this uncanny living portrait is the dead man himself. This is a rare surviving example of a Roman-era Egyptian mummy that has never been unwrapped or had its portrait removed. It makes you wonder what you are looking at – a work of art or a dead person or, as this exhibition suggests, another thing entirely.
Continue reading...February 10, 2023
Riotous women, stonking sculptures and Monet’s lost brother – the week in art
Sarah Lucas throws a party, Donatella shows his tender side, Alice Neel captures the real America, and Peter Doig brings romantic irony to the Courtauld – all in your weekly dispatch
Alice Neel: Hot Off the Griddle
The artist born in 1900 who portrayed the real people of the American century, from Andy Warhol to Kate Millet and many more.
• Barbican, London, from 16 February to 21 May
February 7, 2023
Donatello review – the Robert Mapplethorpe of the Renaissance
V&A, London
Everywhere you look, Donatello breaks the rules at this showcase of some of his most sublime sculptures
A god with his trousers down dances maniacally. This bronze statue, known as Attis-Amorino, is blinded by ecstasy, his willy hanging out, waving his hands in the air as he raves. He’s got a poppy flower in his hair and poppy seedpods on his belt. These, the catalogue reassures us, symbolise the family for which the Florentine Renaissance sculptor Donatello made this in about 1435 to 1440. But opium has been extracted from poppies since early times and the seeds represented unconsciousness for ancient Greek and Romans. Clearly, this little deity is off his head on something.
This is one of the most confounding sculptures ever created. Many may walk past it quickly, preferring to look – and be seen looking – at the Madonnas that fill much of this exhibition. For Attis-Amorino is, as we say nowadays, problematic. Go behind it and you will see shiny buttocks peeping out of those falling trousers. Yet if we are anxious about such a work of art, that is because it’s still doing its job after more than 580 years.
Continue reading...February 3, 2023
Un-macho abstraction, a Venice Lion and questions of queerness – the week in art
The female heroes of abstract expressionism, Sonia Boyce in Margate and an unsettling ruling at Tate Modern – all in your weekly dispatch
Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-70
Abstract expressionism gets stereotyped as macho, but here are its female heroes, including Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler.
• Whitechapel Gallery, London, 9 February to 7 May
Vermeer will never look the same after Amsterdam exhibition | Jonathan Jones
Connections, reflections, vibrations between paintings will shine at the Rijksmuseum as never before
• ‘Chance of a lifetime’ Vermeer exhibition to open in Amsterdam
This is an exhibition to die for – or even in, like the character in Proust who expires in front of Vermeer’s View of Delft. Proust was once so excited to see a Vermeer show that he collapsed. So take it easy if you get to see this gathering of practically all his masterpieces. I got chest pains merely leafing through the catalogue. This is more than an exhibition, it’s a miracle.
Seeing one painting by Vermeer is like diving into a clear blue lagoon with lemon yellow fish and glistening pearls, but this is ridiculous: 82% of his works are in the Rijksmuseum’s exhibition. As an immersion in a great artist, it outdoes virtual art experiences – for instead of projections, it will surround you with the originals in all their mirror-like splendour.
Continue reading...February 1, 2023
Tudor Mystery review – who could have painted such medieval strangeness?
Compton Verney, Warwickshire
A new exhibition brings together portraits of weird children and nobility by an artist with an eye for human uniqueness. It also reveals their true identity …
Four weird kids in black clothes turn their big eyes in unison as they sing what you imagine is a melancholy song about death. The great, great (and a few more greats) grandmother of Wednesday Addams is on keyboards, playing the virginals, the leader of the group. Her clothes are grave but more decorated than her brothers’ dark jerkins. She looks at you in a charged, even angry, way.
This psychologically acute study of Renaissance adolescence was painted in about 1565. Elizabeth I had been Queen of England for less than a decade. William Shakespeare had just been born. Yet in front of this painting by an artist known as the Master of the Countess of Warwick all that time collapses and you seem to be confronted by real young people, a bunch of severe teens whose turbulent emotions are squeezed into their stiff silken costumes and released in music. Their songbooks reveal they are performing the introspective Sixth Psalm of King David, set to music by Josquin des Prez: “I am weary with my groaning: all the night make I my bed to swim; I water my couch with my tears.”
Continue reading...Was Donatello the first artist in history to express a queer identity?
The sculptor lived at a time when you could be burned at the stake for homosexuality. Yet, as an exhibition of his work hits London, the evidence that he was openly gay seems increasingly convincing
The godfather of the Florentine republic sighed. Perhaps he also stroked a cat, Vito Corleone-style, as he considered yet another request for a favour. This time it was the sculptor Donatello who needed help from his patron, Cosimo de’ Medici, the boss of mid-15th-century Florence. It was a case of boyfriend trouble.
Donatello had fallen out with his apprentice, who was also his lover. The young man had run off to Ferrara so Donatello, consumed with possessive rage, wanted Cosimo to give him a letter addressed to the ruler of Ferrara to explain that Donatello was there to murder his boyfriend. Cosimo provided the letter and sent a separate message asking Ferrara’s ruler to be gentle with Donatello for he was an artist and could get a bit emotional. When Donatello found his beloved, the youth “fell about laughing and Donatello, melting instantly, started laughing too”.
Continue reading...January 30, 2023
Bath’s slavery past, an exiled Iraqi and Britain’s first celebs – the week in art
Early photographs are put in the frame, Günther Förg revels in colour, Alberta Whittle probes Bath, and sculptor Barbara Chase-Riboud gets an extended run – all in your weekly dispatch
A New Power: Photography and Britain 1800-1850
The very first British photographs and their social and political impacts are exposed to scrutiny.
• Bodleian Library, Oxford, 1 February to 7 May
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