Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 42

Maria Bartuszová review – a world of misshapen planets and alien art forms

Tate Modern, London
The Prague-born artist, who made wildly experimental art under the nose of the communist authorities, began casting her weirdly entrancing sculptures from children’s party balloons

Ghosts and bones and sinister metamorphoses make Maria Bartuszová an astonishing discovery. This artist who was born in Prague in 1936 and spent most of her adult life in the now defunct state of Czechoslovakia, made wildly experimental art under the nose of the communist authorities, even getting state support for her freakish creations, but with no real links to the western art world. Even now she’s a mystery – the catalogue struggles to tell her life in any but the most perfunctory terms. But her sculpture is as disconcerting as the stories of her Prague forebear Franz Kafka.

Most of the art in Bartuszová’s Tate exhibition is made from plaster, something she could sculpt cheaply and easily when she was a young mother working from home in the 1960s. Having to balance making art with looking after her young children gave her an idea. She started using kids’ party balloons to cast her sculptures. The stretchy shapes of balloons released new kinds of artistic form – inflated and bulging, hollow and egg-like, fleshy and erotic: anything but geometrical or perfect.

Continue reading...

Sacred and profane: what Warhol and Chaucer tell us about the huge royal queue | Jonathan Jones

I went to see it and learned why so many are waiting for a sanctified moment. Who needs performance art when you can step into history?

The end of the queue, on a cloudy evening by the Thames, was a disappointment. It was hard to tell the pilgrims from people just leaving work or heading for a night out. Gradually, as I traced it past the Golden Hinde in its dry dock and the Clink prison, the relaxed procession became more substantial and packed. Yet it still seemed different from the stories being told about it.

The British love a queue, say US media reports, and this is supposedly the queue to end all queues, the Mother of Queues. Social-media posts purporting to come from the queue say much the same thing, some suggesting it’s a queue for its own sake, even a collective work of art. But a queue is basically a disciplined attempt to get somewhere a lot of people want to be. And at first glance this could be a queue for the latest phone or a gig – except much less intense.

Jonathan Jones writes on art for the Guardian

Continue reading...

Utopian cities, medieval manuscripts and a queen in mourning – the week in art

One of Britain’s earliest artworks goes on show in Newcastle while the Design Museum is looking to the future and there are surreal sculptures in London – all in your weekly dispatch

Maria Bartuszova
Surreal, elusive shapes by a Slovak sculptor who defied Communist rule.
• Tate Modern, London, 20 September to 16 April

Continue reading...

The Lindisfarne Gospels review – was Eadfrith the monk Britain’s first great artist?

Laing Gallery, Newcastle
This mind-bending illuminated manuscript was created in AD700 by Eadfrith, a monk who was as entranced by pattern and abstraction as Jackson Pollock

Eadfrith, according to a 10th-century inscription, was a monk and Bishop of Lindisfarne on Northumbria’s Holy Island, who wrote out and illuminated the entire gospels singlehandedly, to create the exquisite book at the heart of this exhibition. He worked for 10 years around AD700, “for God and St Cuthbert [Lindisfarne’s founder] and generally for all the holy folk who are on the island.”

What an artist Eadfrith was. Being a book, its vellum pages still bound together after 1,300 years, the Lindisfarne Gospels can only be displayed a double-page spread at a time. They’ve selected a banger. To the left is a “carpet” page, so named because it resembles an eastern rug – but you could equally well call it a Jackson Pollock page, with its abstract coils and knots; a many-layered pattern in delicate yet acid-sharp green, pink and gold.

Continue reading...

‘Like being beaten with a bat’: Georg Baselitz on eye-opening art – and his true feelings about female painters

Now in his 80s but as fiery as ever, the German provocateur talks about his pride at being a ‘degenerate’ artist, painting his wife nude – and revisits his assertion that: ‘Women don’t paint very well’

Georg Baselitz is talking about Tracey Emin. “She ate too much spaghetti at De Kooning’s restaurant,” says the German painter. I understand this as meaning her paintings are overly indebted to the abstract expressionist master.

“But he says it with admiration, yes?” explains the translator. “She has touched De Kooning. It’s joking, teasing her.”

Continue reading...

Get bent: music, film, books and more about corruption

From murky goings-on within Fifa to warring media scions, our critics select culture that delights in degradation

Written in response to the accusations of corruption within Fifa around the 2014 World Cup, Declan McKenna’s Brazil is multifaceted in its outlook, and all the more impressive when you consider that he was only 15 years old when he wrote it. Unravelling the “global north” snobberies that tend to assume everyone is striving for a life of upwardly mobile excess, it remains the brightest jewel in the singer’s festival set, somewhat ironically encouraging the kind of terrace-worthy singalongs that a crooked footy exec would pay big bucks for. Jenessa Williams

Continue reading...

Idealised, gilded or defaced, Queen Elizabeth's image dominated our age

From Beaton to Warhol, from the Sex Pistols to the coins in our pockets, the Queen’s face has been everywhere

Accession of King Charles and death of Queen Elizabeth – latest updates

We carried her in our pockets and purses, jangled her and handed her over, put her in slot machines and bought soft drinks with her. The first image of Queen Elizabeth II that I can remember looking at was her profile on the new decimal coinage we were shown in infant school. The face on her coins was ineffable and timeless, and dominated our age.

The monarch’s face on a coin is a guarantee of value that connects the Queen with Roman emperors, with King Offa; modern British money carries on it an icon of rule as old as coinage itself. The power and authority of the Queen in her depictions, from cash to art, from films to photographs, from paintings to novels, was as charismatic as that of any historical king, queen, tsar or khan. In real life, Elizabeth II was the model of a constitutional ruler, standing apart from her governments, respecting to the letter the limits of her role in a democracy. In our imaginations, however, she was absolute.

Continue reading...

Edward Lear: Moment to Moment review – paradise with a runcible spoon

Ikon Gallery, Birmingham
The master of nonsense verse made his living as an artist – and these magical sketches from his travels are dreamlike delights

The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea – and saw two sails from a boat spread out like vampire wings against a pinky sky and a purple ocean. Nonsense is never far away in the landscape art of Edward Lear. From this tiny watercolour of a scene on the River Nile to an Italian lake with a wraithlike woman in the foreground. In a scribble, he calls her “a Dantesque female” and she seems to have stepped out of a Dalí painting.

Lear, king of the limerick and high priest of Victorian nonsense, was professionally an artist first, an author second. His landscapes totter on the edge of dream and ecstasy. He rivalled John James Audubon as an ornithological painter, which was how he first escaped the genteel poverty of his economically declined middle-class family. But most of all, his art became an excuse and support for a life of constant travel that kept him away from sooty Victorian England and took him all round the shores of the Mediterranean until he finally settled in San Remo on the Italian Riviera.

Continue reading...

Stormy American realism, antique AI and nonsense-free Lear – the week in art

Winslow Homer’s high drama arrives in Britain, an anticolonial hero takes his rightful place on the fourth plinth and some new Warholia surfaces – all in your weekly dispatch

Winslow Homer
Romanticism and realism fiercely blend in this painter who recorded the rise and fall of hope in the US.
• National Gallery, from 10 September until 8 January

Continue reading...

Do the circling sharks now stand for Trump? Winslow Homer: Force of Nature – review

National Gallery, London
His paintings could be strangely clunky yet his vision was staggering – which is why this passionate artist, who captured an America in perpetual peril, still speaks to us today

The black sailor lies back on his broken, doomed craft. All around him, the sea chomps and shudders. And there is a storm coming, to judge from the spinning column of grey water on the horizon. A ship is ploughing through these troubled waters but will it care enough to help? The sharks seem to know it won’t. They expect a meal any moment now. They roll and glide by the boat, flashing their giant mouths and tiny eyes.

This is Winslow Homer’s 1899 masterpiece The Gulf Stream, and there could not be a more timely loan to the National Gallery from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art as the US is consumed by its history of racial injustice and premonitions of disaster, even of a second civil war. Is America doomed, like this sailor? Is it a wreck about to be torn apart by its own divisions, savaged by the circling shark of a second Trump candidacy? Homer hasn’t any answers but he poses the question of how a nation with such a legacy of slavery can ever escape its past.

Continue reading...