Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 41

Cézanne review – gags, mountains and murder in a dizzying, devastating show

Tate Modern, London
For a long time, the French artist was the ultimate icon of seriousness. But these beautiful, touching works reveal the sly playful humour at the heart of his genius

Paul Cézanne’s sketchbook lies open at a childish drawing of a tall bendy house. It turns out he often let his little son use it. This openness to child’s play says a lot about the man, and not only as a parent. For Cézanne was the first western artist since the middle ages to claim a child’s freedom to depict things exactly as they pleased.

All around the glass case containing this sketchbook are Cézanne’s paintings of blocky houses overlapping in patterns of squares and triangles, coloured brown and yellow. These are the buildings of L’Estaque, a seaside village just west of Marseille, where Cézanne often stayed with his family – and where he invented cubism. As early as 1878, in The Sea at L’Estaque behind Trees, house walls and rooftops form a jagged cluster of flat yet rugged forms like the abstracted glances of objects that Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque would get nicknamed cubists for painting 30 years later. They were proud to claim the influence. Look at the label and you’ll see this has been lent from the Musée National Picasso-Paris, for it was owned by Pablo. Braque, for his part, painted his breakthrough cubist canvases in 1908 in L’Estaque itself, in direct homage to Cézanne.

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The friend zone: art, music, films and more about platonic love

From Michelangelo’s male muse to Sex Education’s best pals, we pick five passionate but ultimately chaste partnerships

When he was in his 50s, the Renaissance genius Michelangelo fell in love with a young nobleman called Tommaso dei Cavalieri. This drawing is one of the gifts he gave him: it even has a note asking what Tommaso thinks of it. But Michelangelo also wrote poems in which he insists his love is platonic, drawing on a philosophical conception of love as something that can raise you to the spiritual. Michelangelo knew and understood Plato, even comparing himself with Socrates who Plato says lay all night beside his boyfriend, chastely. Jonathan Jones

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The genius of Cézanne, Black beauty and a sci-fi voyage – the week in art

A major exhibition of the post-impressionist artist, pastoral photography from Tyler Mitchell and a science spectacular to get you thinking – all in your weekly dispatch

Cézanne
The mountain, the apples and so much more – a chance to encounter true genius.
• Tate Modern, London, from 5 October-12 March.

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Six reasons why artist’s artist Paul Cézanne is hailed as ‘greatest of us all’

As Tate Modern opens a major Cézanne exhibition, here’s why Picasso admired the artist so much he bought his mountain

Paul Cézanne, born in 1839, who painted quietly up to his death in 1906, is the unrivalled modern artist’s modern artist, called the “greatest of us all” by Claude Monet. The most intimate proof of this is how many of his successors have felt the need to move in on his patch – literally. When Picasso told his dealer Ambroise Vollard he had just bought “Cézanne’s mountain”, Vollard thought he meant one of his canvases of Mont Sainte-Victoire. In fact Picasso had purchased an estate on its slopes in the south of France.

The abstract painter Sean Scully and his family now also “in fact live near Mont Sainte-Victoire, in Aix-en-Provence”. For Scully, the mountain “stands as a silent sentinel that we see every day. It’s monumental yet extremely delicate in the manner in which it absorbs the light of time and season.”

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JMW Turner: Dark Waters review – death and despair in a prison of Arctic ice

Tate Liverpool
Turner’s masterful paintings of whalers and explorers, partly inspired by an Arctic expedition that went missing, are given a sombre undertow by composer Lamin Fofana’s haunting soundtracks

“Hurrah for the whaler Erebus! Another fish!” That’s the cry that comes from a crowd of ecstatic men in boats on a mirror-still sea, captured in Turner’s 1846 masterpiece that takes its title from their exclamation. You look for the fish and see the huge grey head of a whale suspended against yellow light, under the partly furled sails of a ghostly vessel. But something is wrong. The hysterical celebration is desperate. The water is becalmed, the air frozen and dead. These whalers are trapped in pack ice, still slaughtering their prey when they may never escape their remote prison.

Dark Waters is an exhibition of nautical ghost stories, a collection of sinister shanties and tales told by old salts in dockside pubs. Turner owned such a pub: it’s still going, as Turner’s Old Star in the Wapping area of London. Maybe that’s where he met whaling veterans and heard their icy adventures. In this show, that sense of a journey into Davy Jones’s Locker is heightened by an atmospheric soundscape, composed by Lamin Fofana whose splashes and moans create a very modern elegy for those in peril on the sea. I don’t generally think paintings need a soundtrack – but this one puts you in the right, sombre mood.

JMW Turner with Lamin Fofana: Dark Waters is at Tate Liverpool until 4 June.

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Lucian Freud review – the Queen, Leigh Bowery and the artist’s ex-wives stand brutally revealed

National Gallery, London
From the monarch to the naked performance artist who was living with Aids, Freud paints life lived in the face of death, with an unsentimental eye for human tenderness

Even the Queen of England, said Andy Warhol, can’t buy a better hot dog than the bum on the sidewalk. Another thing the Queen of England couldn’t buy was a flattering portrait by Lucian Freud. When he painted Elizabeth II at the start of this millennium, he treated her face with the same harsh objectivity as any other face, a closeup of wrinkles and sags, tight mouth and unhappy eyes, under coils of grey hair, with the absurd addition of a crown. Was Freud a republican? He certainly wasn’t a sentimental royalist.

This royal head rests uneasy on a wall of equally unvarnished portraits of famous and unfamous faces in the National Gallery’s addictive centenary blockbuster Freud show. It is a key to his art, for it is so movingly unpretentious – in an almost adolescent way – in its declaration of the artist’s moral mission. A portrait, says this portrait, must be brutally true. Face to face with a monarch, an artist has only two options: be a courtier or a truth-teller. Freud takes the path he always does, warts and all. His genius is his innocent simplicity. Just look and be honest about what you see. It was the clearest, most humble of creeds, yet it meant ignoring a truckload of philosophical and artistic distractions, over a long working lifetime.

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Marina Abramović’s Gates and Portals review – why surrender your liberty to these wafer-thin ideas?

Modern Art Oxford
The artist is not present in her latest show. Instead, visitors are shunted from room to room according to her Method, with a hint of Blair Witch ritual

Marina Abramović’s 2010 New York show The Artist Is Present made her a global icon, but she is not personally present in the mystical extravaganza of her new show Gates and Portals. She did turn up at the press launch, however, to explain that since becoming a celebrity she wants to remove herself from her work, to allow it to speak for itself. This is a tall order. As I found at that event, she’s an extraordinary presence. She composes herself with magnetic stillness, and when she speaks she seems to time her words to some underlying rhythm of breath and heartbeat. Her charisma and uncanny agelessness hold you hypnotised.

Facilitators trained in what she calls the Abramović Method sadly can’t reproduce those unearthly qualities. It’s as if Judi Dench were to train a bunch of people in the Dench Method and get them to perform her famous roles: just not the same. Worse, it focuses your mind on the ideas behind the art – and they are wafer-thin.

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A wave of Korean art, the sound of Turner and Freud goes to the races – the week in art

The V&A’s new show is a dazzling historical remix, Tate Liverpool sets an English master to music, while Lucian Freud’s love for the turf is revealed – all in your weekly dispatch

Hallyu! The Korean Wave
Infectiously bold survey of South Korea’s pop culture that also manages to squeeze in some solid history. Read our five-star review.
• V&A, London, from 24 September

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Hallyu! The Korean Wave review – a dazzling historical remix

V&A, London
This gleeful, giddy celebration of the culture of South Korea ranges from fashion to fine art and grand guignol to Gangnam style

If you don’t recognise the guards’ costumes from Squid Game that loom at the V&A with their cerise suits and geometrical masks– where have you been? This dystopian TV series was watched by well over 100 million viewers in more than 80 countries on its release last year. It’s part of the surge of global pop culture from South Korea that Hallyu! – Korean for “wave” – celebrates.

The reason this blockbuster show from the V&A translates so well is that it portrays its own desires and concerns as universal: it doesn’t recognise frontiers. In a century when many have become suspicious of globalisation, fleeing an economically and technologically unified world into renewed nationalism, South Korea has gone the other way. There’s no Krexit. This society embraces everything and everyone.

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Shockingly, Brad Pitt turns out to be a very fine sculptor

Pitt is not the first star to try his hand at art, but his finely wrought, intelligent reflections of American violence make him one of the very best

I would assume Brad Pitt has a pretty enviable life, even in the throes of his messy divorce from Angelina Jolie. And dropping into a museum in Finland to exhibit his sculptures alongside works by his pals Nick Cave and Thomas Houseago sounds like another cool extension of it. So it would only be fair to the rest of us if he fell flat on his face like other celebrities who dabble in art. But from what I can see of his exhibition online, that is not the case at all.

The involvement of Houseago is a clue that Pitt is up to something substantial rather than self-indulgent. This idiosyncratic and excellent British artist hews savage, deliberately awkward sculptural forms that teem with monsters and myths. He has recently taken to painting, however, with a bright visionary intensity inspired partly by Edvard Munch – hence the choice of northern Europe for this Nordic noir exhibition. And as an art world mag reported recently, he “counts celebrities like Brad Pitt among his closest friends”. But there’s more to it than that. Houseago, who suffered abuse in a tough childhood in 1980s Leeds, has turned to painting in the last couple of years as therapy, while recovering from a mental breakdown. And while Pitt may not, as far as I know, have similar levels of trauma to deal with, it seems he too escapes into his art in order to enhance his health and happiness.

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