Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 39
November 14, 2022
Pitch perfect: books, music, art and more about football
With the Qatar World Cup imminent, our critics offer up cultural highlights – from a damning tale of homophobia to David Peace’s Damned Utd – about the ‘beautiful game’
People stream out of every corner of a smoky city in Going to the Match, a 1953 painting by the renowned master of matchstick figures LS Lowry. Everyone seems compelled by a magnetic attraction, approaching the football ground as if it contains the holy grail or a UFO. And Lowry shows us why this game looms so large in their lives. What else have they got? Grey chimneys hang in the milky air above a landscape of dreary toil. The dearth of colour is shocking. But the crowd are all individuals: women and men, workers and clerks, all inspired by the common passion that turns a Saturday afternoon into a supercharged special time. This is why football became the people’s sport. Jonathan Jones
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November 11, 2022
Brueghel’s Cambridge carnival and modernism’s female pioneers – the week in art
Turner-winner Elizabeth Price digs into Scottish industrial heritage, Richard Long heads to Dartmoor and north London gets a medieval makeover – all in your weekly dispatch
Elizabeth Price: Underfoot
The often gothic Turner prize-winner Price applies her imagination to Glasgow’s industrial heritage.
• The Hunterian, Glasgow,until 16 April.
November 9, 2022
Making Modernism review – the genius of Käthe Kollwitz stands out like a raw wound
Royal Academy of Arts, London
This badly mistitled survey mistakenly pitches a selection of German expressionist women as revolutionaries – with one timeless exception
The eyes of Käthe Kollwitz, black and hopeless, look at you like messengers of death from a lithograph the German artist made of herself in 1934. You don’t need much knowledge of modern history to guess why the socialist Kollwitz was in despair, a year after Hitler became chancellor of Germany. But is she really “making modernism”, as the title of this exhibition claims, in this confession of private anguish and political shock? Kollwitz’s self-portrait in her 60s is as timeless as Rembrandt’s as a broken old man.
Kollwitz is by far the greatest artist in this survey of seven women artists who worked in early 20th-century Germany. And she has almost nothing in common with her supposed peers. Some art leaps at you out of its own time. Other art stays in a lost place and moment, fascinating as history, important as a document – but it does not grab us. That’s true of a lot of the works here. Gabriele Münter depicts the Munich equivalent of Britain’s Bloomsbury set in paintings that capture middle-class avant garde life. She portrays her lover, the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky, in shorts and sandals in her 1909-10 painting Kandinsky and Erma Bossi at the Table, chatting to Bossi who’s also in this show. Meanwhile, in her 1903 etching Woman with Dead Child, Kollwitz portrays a lumpen naked body in pain, hunched over the infant corpse she grasps to her as if trying to shake it back to life.
Continue reading...November 4, 2022
Cash as canvas, Turner returns and footy gets fashionable – the week in art
An exhibition on money as protest art, the creativity of terrace culture in Merseyside and Frick Collection treasures visit the National – all in your weekly dispatch
Art of the Terraces
Mark Leckey and more look at the subculture of soccer casuals.
• Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 5 November-12 March
October 31, 2022
Get stuffed: TV, art, books and more devoted to food, glorious food
From music extolling the virtues of red beets to chilli-based larks, our critics select culture to make you salivate
Between Bonita Applebum, Butter and the Jam, hip-hop titans A Tribe Called Quest are not shy about paying gastronomic homage. On Ham’n’Eggs, floating like croutons over a languid beat-soup, Q-Tip and Phife Dawg tie foodie punchlines like cherry stems, extolling the virtues of candied yams, slim jims and “nice red beets” as if cooking up a big Sunday brunch in the deep American south. They might be warning of high cholesterol, but it has the opposite effect; if you’re not raiding the cupboards by its call-and-response close, you’ve got much better self-control than us. Jenessa Williams
Continue reading...October 28, 2022
A beheaded monarch, subversive ceramics and oil drilling in Gateshead – the week in art
Celebrate Halloween with an executed King Charles, clay like you’ve never seen it and a taste of Kurdistan in Tyneside – all in your weekly dispatch
Executions
A gory Halloween history lesson that includes relics of the beheaded Charles I, as well as 18th-century death-cell portraits and an axe or two.
• Museum of London Docklands, until 16 April
October 26, 2022
The Horror Show! review – the bands, TV shows and artists who revealed Britain’s sinister psyche
Somerset House, London
Slicing into the nation’s dark side, this excellent show is full of phantoms ranging from Rachel Whiteread’s spectral House to the gothic terror of Inside No 9
Reece Shearsmith’s severed head lies on a purple cushion, eyes open, mouth gaping. The actor and writer’s bonce is a prop from the 2018 Inside No 9 Halloween special in which he and Steve Pemberton play themselves in a live broadcast that goes eerily wrong, as malevolent ghosts invade a TV studio. It’s exhibited here not as a joke, or a curio, but as a relic of idealism. Fans of the black comedy Inside No 9 will know its creators have a real passion for horror, fully shared by this witch’s cauldron of an exhibition.
This is no London Dungeon shop of horrors – which is not to say there are no scares. Kerry Stewart’s 1993 installation The Boy From the Chemist Is Here to See You certainly gave me the creeps. It consists of a door with a frosted glass panel through which you see the refracted face of a child, actually a charity box figure, its frozen painted features adding to the unease.
Continue reading...October 24, 2022
‘A lot of my work has this insane anxiety about it’: David Shrigley on worrying, God and drawing like a five-year-old
He has been shortlisted for the Turner prize for his acerbic, often hilarious images. Now living in the countryside with his wife and dog, the artist has produced a new book – and his work is as tense and restless as ever
Cool young artists are talking about their work. “I don’t actually do the paintings myself,” says a man in a stripy jumper. He gets a bunch of kids to do them for him. A woman wearing thick lipstick and holding a cigarette describes her practice: “I use a lot of found materials in my work. My latest piece is 50 identical pairs of children’s shoes which I found in a charity shop.” Another artist tells how he bought soiled underpants from “dossers” for his latest show, while a battered youth goes around bars at the weekend and starts fights to “get my head kicked in while a friend of mine videos it”.
David Shrigley drew this in the mid-1990s. It is a devastatingly precise satire of the Young British Artists scene. It was funny then and still is. When he drew it, Shrigley had recently graduated from Glasgow School of Art with a 2:2 degree – a humiliation he can’t forget – and was working as a guide and art handler at Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts.
Continue reading...October 21, 2022
Banksy, Breughel’s boy and a house of Britain’s horrors – the week in art
The muralist hits Salford, peasant life comes to Birmingham’s Barber Institute and Somerset House gets with the Halloween ghost theme – all in your weekly dispatch
The Horror Show!
Bauhaus, Helen Chadwick, Susan Hiller, Juno Calypso and many more in a ghost train tour through the story of modern Britain.
• Somerset House, London, 27 October to 19 February.
Pieter Brueghel the Younger review – weighty works from son of revolutionary artist
Barber Institute, Birmingham
Snogging, dancing and streams of excrement abound in a show that proves Brueghel’s boy was equally keen to depict the joys and squalor of peasant life
A man releases a stream of brown excrement as he sits on a window ledge with his naked apple-like buttocks bulging out. Welcome to the world of the common people as painted by the great artistic revolutionary Pieter Bruegel the Elder – but with a twist. The window-shitter, like the man who sticks out his fat belly and bulging codpiece as he dances at a wedding, or the young woman who throws a contemptuous look at a lusty youth, was painted by his son.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the creator of such masterpieces of European art as The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, the Tower of Babel and The Hunters in the Snow, died in 1569 at the height of his powers, leaving two young sons, Pieter and Jan. The Barber Institute’s tiny and yet epic journey into the Bruegelian cosmos explores how Pieter Bruegel the Younger carried on his dad’s art trade, almost as if he’d inherited the family shop.
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