Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 40
October 19, 2022
Alexander the Great review – cultural treasures reduced to the status of comics
British Library, London
This infuriating show shoves Scrooge McDuck next to Plutarch in a postmodern take on history which seems to forget that the Macedonian warlord was a real, live person
The problem with the British Library’s ultimately maddening trawl through medieval and modern images of Alexander the Great is there in the show’s subtitle. The Making of a Myth sounds innocuous until you discover they literally mean it. This exhibition takes such a thoroughly postmodern view of history that it tries to convince you the Macedonian warlord whose conquests linked Europe, Asia and Africa in the fourth-century BC is a figment, his life so wrapped in multiple fictions there is no truth at all to get at.
But Alexander existed. He really was tutored by the philosopher Aristotle before uniting Greece under his rule, defeating the Persian Empire and battling as far as India before dying at just 32. He founded cities called Alexandria from Egypt to Afghanistan. A new style of art, sensual and emotional, spread through the new “Hellenistic” world he created.
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October 17, 2022
Prima-donna dramas and hedonist paintings: the best culture about Europe
From misty travelogues to the bitchiest of bureaux, our critics select music, tv, literature, art and film that celebrates life on the continent
As the nights draw in, our British tendency is often to romanticise life elsewhere, to long for sunnier climes as a circuit break from the drudgeries of late consumer capitalism. Sometimes, it takes a band like the Beautiful South to pull you back down and remind you that even the most exotic locales have their problems. Rotterdam (Or Anywhere) is not an uplifting choice, but other than Jess Glynne’s Jet2 anthem, Hold My Hand, what other song truly conjures such a Pavlovian sensation of crowding on to a budget airline, nervously hoping that all your problems might be solved mid-air? Jenessa Williams
Continue reading...October 14, 2022
Fuseli and the Modern Woman review – a dark, perverse mindset laid bare
Courtauld Gallery, London
Absurdist updos, bulbous buttocks – the Swiss painter’s surrealist portrayals of women go into the weird recesses of the 18th-century gothic imagination
To get to Henry Fuseli’s drawings and watercolours you have to climb to the very top of the “stare” case at the Courtauld, which in his day was the home of the Royal Academy and its annual exhibition. This elliptically spiralling masterpiece of Georgian architecture got its nickname from an outrageous print by Fuseli’s contemporary Thomas Rowlandson called The Exhibition “Stare” Case. It shows women tumbling, their dresses flying up to reveal their bottoms, while a bunch of depraved old men watch happily.
It’s worth glancing at the reproduction of this satire on your way up as it provides a context for Fuseli’s enthusiastically perverse portrayals of women. He may seem furtive and odd, yet in his own time he was anything but. Fuseli was hugely successful, a Swiss artist who migrated to Britain, made his name with his 1781 gothic painting The Nightmare, and became Keeper of the Royal Academy Schools.
Continue reading...The Turner prize heads to Merseyside and sofas get sexy – the week in art
Tate Liverpool opens its Turner prize exhibition, the Design Museum hosts a new show on surrealism and the pre-Raphaelites decode a mythic king – all in your weekly dispatch
Turner prize
Ingrid Pollard, Sin Wai Kin, Veronica Ryan and Heather Phillipson duke it out for the title and prize money.
• Tate Liverpool from 20 October-19 March.
October 13, 2022
Inside Frieze: what can it tell us about art, money and power in 2022? – podcast
It showcases the art world’s most cutting-edge work. But the Frieze art fair is also a marketplace where the eye-watering prices are defying the looming global recession. Jonathan Jones explains why this is happening – and if the bubble is about to burst
Frieze has arguably become the most important event in the art world’s calendar. For art lovers it is a place to see a dizzying array of the most exciting modern work being produced – all under one roof. For artists, gallerists and auction houses, however, this huge art fair is a time to meet up, schmooze and sell, sell, sell – often to the super-rich.
Nosheen Iqbal asks Jonathan Jones how Frieze got so big, and how the staggering prices art can now command have changed what is being made. From the super-wealthy to banks, buyers now see art as an investment, as well as a pleasure. But is this sustainable?
Continue reading...October 12, 2022
‘Pose with the pumpkins? I’d rather meet the meteorite’ – Frieze art fair review
Frieze London ★★☆☆☆ / Frieze Masters ★★★★★ / Regent’s Park, London
Painting is back in vogue at the giant art fair. But it’s superficial and silly rather than sleazy and shocking. The Masters section is where the work to lust over is – with an actual space rock for sale
Everything has turned upside down in Regent’s Park. The two Frieze art fairs that take place here in October have changed places. All the danger, outrage and obscenity you might hope to find among the up-to-the-minute contemporary galleries at Frieze London have migrated to Frieze Masters. It is an unholy joy while its supposedly cutting-edge sibling has aged into a crashing bore. It’s coming to something when two pumpkins are the most outrageous spectacle at Frieze London. People congregate around them as if desperately seeking that famous Frieze vibe of the insouciantly daring. “Pose with the pumpkins!” a photographer is saying – and many people will want to be snapped with Anthea Hamilton’s sculptures. Bold, orange, funny and meaningless, they dominate a show created by Hamilton at Thomas Dane Gallery’s stand. But the main reason they stand out is that a couple of pumpkins will do that in a sea of paintings.
I thought I loved looking at paint. But Frieze London puts that addiction to the test, an aversion therapy. There seem to be more canvases than in the National Gallery. You walk in and immediately see a spread of abstract starbursts by Jadé Fadojutimi in the prestige site occupied by Gagosian. She doesn’t hold it. Her paintings boom and crash with colour yet they don’t stop zinging long enough to let you sink into them. And there are paintings to the left of her, paintings to the right. Whichever path you take through the labyrinth of booths, you will come across every kind of painterly commodity: pictures of people, pictures of dogs, even a picture of the Muppets riding bikes through a park by Keith Mayerson.
Continue reading...October 11, 2022
Objects of Desire review – surreal lobster phones and a seaside sleazorama
Design Museum, London
A lamp in the form of a life-size horse, a chair made of soft toys, a lips settee begging to be bonked on – this delightful orgy of bad taste highlights perverse surrealist design from Dalí to today
The Design Museum may need to keep an eye out for unsuitable acts on all the erotic furniture in its often delirious exhibition of perverse design. Perhaps they should put up a sign: “No sex on the sofas, please!”
Objects of Desire explores the influence of the surrealist movement on modern interiors and fashion. It is a celebration of design gone awry: instead of rational functionality, the creations here infiltrate the irrational into the practical, attacking reality in the name of dreams. A standard lamp in the form of a life-size horse, a comfy chair made of soft toys, and above all those lubricious, curvy, velvet and leather sofas, make this exhibition a delightful orgy of bad taste.
Continue reading...October 7, 2022
Soheila Sokhanvari: Rebel Rebel review – vivacious paintings of liberated Iranian womanhood
Barbican Curve, London
As protests against head coverings once again shake Iran, there is a disturbing deja vu to discovering what was done to many of these defiant women
When Ayatollah Khomeini’s theocratic regime took power in Iran 43 years ago, film-maker Kobra Saeedi wouldn’t toe the line. She took part in a protest on International Women’s Day 1979 against the introduction of compulsory hijab – and brought her camera. She was jailed, confined for years in mental institutions, then released into poverty and homelessness.
In Soheila Sokhanvari’s painting Kobra, we see her in her stellar prime, hair uncovered like all the 31 creative, rebellious women of pre-1979 Iran portrayed in this show, a cigarette between her red varnished nails as she looks quizzically out of the painting. As protests against head coverings are again shaking Iran, there’s a disturbing deja vu to discovering what was done to this defiant woman. The death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini after she was arrested by the Gasht-e Ershad morality police has led to spontaneous demonstrations including school girls giving the middle finger to the image of Khomeini. The women in this exhibition, some of whom died long before the rise of religious rule, now look like the grandmothers of this revolt.
Continue reading...The Turbine Hall is back, Cerith Wyn Evans goes home and an Egyptian stone speaks – the week in art
Radical Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña takes over the Turbine, an international star returns to his Welsh roots and The British Museum unlocks hieroglyphic secrets – all in your weekly dispatch
Hieroglyphs: Unlocking Ancient Egypt
The Rosetta Stone is at the heart of a blockbuster journey into the sands of time.
• British Museum, London, 13 October until 19 February.
October 6, 2022
So that’s how Star Trek’s warp drive works! Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of Imagination review
Science Museum, London
From Alien to Frankenstein to Star Wars and beyond, this celebration of the many worlds of sci-fi is a bit too family friendly for its own good. Beam me up!
The subtitle of the Science Museum’s exciting-sounding exhibition is all too accurate. It’s set up as a journey in space, where you queue to board an interplanetary craft and are guided through the bowels of the ship by an onscreen talking head. But it takes you to the “edge” of imagination only in that it lets you dip a toe in the marvellous worlds of sci-fi without ever truly diving in.
The show so wants to be fun that it refuses to engage with its subject, in case it does our poor heads in. Science fiction is as old as modern science, if not older: what are Leonardo da Vinci’s designs for flying machines if not medieval sci-fi? Cyrano de Bergerac, in the age of Isaac Newton, wrote a space fantasy called A Voyage to the Moon. By the 19th century, the genre was being forged by Mary Shelley and her successors. All we get of this history are two books by Jules Verne and HG Wells in a glass case, alongside an incredibly familiar still from Georges Méliès’s film A Trip to the Moon. Later, you can see Boris Karloff’s huge tattered suit from Bride of Frankenstein.
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