Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 43
September 7, 2022
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...
So Richard III was a good guy? Really? The Lost King: Imagining Richard III – review
Wallace Collection, London
Its standout exhibit is Paul Delaroche’s painting of the two princes the monarch jailed awaiting death. Why does this vogue-ishly pro-Richard show, a tie-in with the Steve Coogan film, place a question mark over it?
It’s always unwise to assume today’s history is better than yesterday’s. Interpretations change, and the current vogue for seeing Richard III, so long portrayed as a tyrant, as a nice guy who somehow lost track of his nephews’ whereabouts, just as he was having himself crowned in young Edward V’s place, may one day seem silly. I am prepared to bet that it will.
The Wallace Collection in London is the last place I expected to encounter what amounts to a kind of historical populism. The same age that witnessed Brexit also saw the rehabilitation of Richard III after his skeleton was discovered under a Leicester car park in 2012. This has inspired an apparently universal assumption that Richard was a Good King, even though his skeleton provides no evidence about his deeds in life. That’s what this exhibition, a tie-in with the new Steve Coogan film The Lost King, also seems to take for granted. Thus it places a big sceptical question mark over the painting at its heart, while presenting prop armour used in the film as the last word in factual reconstruction.
Continue reading...September 5, 2022
‘Terribly courageous’ – Atta Kwami’s glorious posthumous mural unveiled at the Serpentine
The Ghanaian artist was just starting to receive the acclaim he deserved, winning last year’s Maria Lassnig prize. His widow talks about the daunting task of completing his joyous final work
Atta Kwami’s last work is still wet in places from its final retouchings by his widow, who painted it from his design. I sit next to her in the garden of Serpentine North by the many pots of colours she has been using to complete her late husband’s mural. “Our main worry was, ‘Is it an Atta Kwami?’” says Pamela Clarkson Kwami, herself a painter and printmaker. “If you went too far it became a kind of caricature.”
Kwami was a Ghanaian painter and art theorist with a generous, joyous abstract vision whose working life looked set to move into a new gear when he won the Maria Lassnig prize in 2021, an award for a “mid-career” artist that includes a public art commission for London’s Serpentine gallery. Kwami was born in 1956 and spent years teaching and researching before he could afford to paint full-time: a perfect recipient for this anti-ageist art prize. However, Kwami had cancer. He died last October just as his work was beginning to receive the acclaim it deserved – and with his design for a mural at the Serpentine yet to be realised.
Continue reading...September 2, 2022
Visions of Egypt review – how can this show be so devoid of ancient wonder?
Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich
Ancient Egypt has inspired passion and awe in the western world for centuries – yet this confused show wants to chide us for it
Visions of Egypt is a blockbuster having a breakdown. It argues that modern racism towards Egypt began with the Battle of Actium in 31BC when Octavian defeated Mark Antony and his lover Cleopatra, the ruler of Egypt, and annexed it. The Romans looted Egypt’s art, “demonised” its queen, and “laid the groundwork for western perceptions … that still persist today”.
But to claim that ancient Rome still influences perceptions of Egypt is just bad history. It ignores the complexities, changes and contradictions of such a huge stretch of time. Anyway, why don’t they start with ancient Greece, which borrowed Egypt’s art in Kouroi statues, while Herodotus saw it as a mysterious, exotic other? By lumping 2,000 years into one unbroken wall of western prejudice, this show kills the art it conspicuously fails to love. Surely it’s obvious that when, say, Andy Warhol portrayed Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra and Kenneth Williams mugged it up in Carry On Cleo they were saying something about the 1960s, not the first century BC? Not that they’re in this show, which instead slops together some Victorian art and so-so contemporary work to make its tenuous point about Cleopatra.
Continue reading...Orgiastic body art, a Midlands meme and Hockney meets the Pharaohs – the week in art
A fresh look at Carolee Schneemann’s pioneering performance art, ‘four lads in jeans’ immortalised in bronze, and new visions of ancient Egypt – all in your weekly dispatch
Carolee Schneemann
Orgiastic meditations on enfleshment by this outrageous pioneer of performance and body art.
• Barbican, London, from 8 September until 8 January
August 29, 2022
And … relax: film, music, art and books for chilling out
From a sun-dappled Japanese purgatory to a weightless infinity of mirrors, our critics recommend art that both stimulates and soothes
Bureaucracy meets the afterlife in Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life, a gently paced drama concerned with a simple question: which single memory from your life would you choose to remember for eternity? Every week, a group of recently deceased people arrive at an unassuming redbrick building – a purgatory of sorts – where they meet counsellors tasked with helping them move on. To do so, they will need to select the one moment of their lives they will bring into the afterlife (all other memories will be wiped out). Conversations between counsellor and client are calm and meditative, touching on the purpose of life and what, at the end of it, we will truly value. That – alongside After Life’s sumptuous shots of a surrounding autumnal, sun-dappled garden – makes the filmAfter Life a welcome prompt to rest and contemplate. Rebecca Liu
Continue reading...film, music, art and literature for chilling out
From a sun-dappled Japanese purgatory to a weightless infinity of mirrors, our critics recommend art that both stimulates and soothes
Bureaucracy meets the afterlife in Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life, a gently paced drama concerned with a simple question: which single memory from your life would you choose to remember for eternity? Every week, a group of recently deceased people arrive at an unassuming redbrick building – a purgatory of sorts – where they meet counsellors tasked with helping them move on. To do so, they will need to select the one moment of their lives they will bring into the afterlife (all other memories will be wiped out). Conversations between counsellor and client are calm and meditative, touching on the purpose of life and what, at the end of it, we will truly value. That – alongside After Life’s sumptuous shots of a surrounding autumnal, sun-dappled garden – makes the filmAfter Life a welcome prompt to rest and contemplate. Rebecca Liu
Continue reading...August 26, 2022
Brutal sale of Keith Haring’s Radiant Baby reflects a genius cut short
Artist’s childhood bedroom painting destined to become ‘art world commodity’ with auction next month
Keith Haring painting cut from artist’s bedroom wall to be sold at auctionThe Radiant Baby, painted by Keith Haring on his childhood bedroom wall, has been ripped from its tender, intimate and original context to become an art world commodity. Dead and gone, he doesn’t even have a say in what becomes of such a personal creation. This brutal intrusion captures the sadness of a genius cut short. If there had been no Aids, Haring would be in his early 60s now and, I suspect, an even greater, possibly very different, artist than the youthful icon we celebrate.
There is an abundant energy and intelligence to Haring’s drawings and paintings of identical gyrating human figures, pop-eyed monsters and cartoon animals that’s not only miles ahead of most street art, but has the fluidity and curiosity of an artist who would have continued to grow. It is tragic that we must freeze Haring in time, rip his baby off the wall or call his style “iconic” when it was in reality a fast-moving talent’s unfinished symphony.
Continue reading...Trees rise in Bristol, Africa props up Europe and London scores gold – the week in art
The Arnolfini strolls into forests, the V&A shows Sokari Douglas Camp and the British Library explores a precious metal – all in your weekly dispatch
Forest: Wake This Ground
Artists including Eva Jospin, David Nash and Ai Weiwei try to reconnect with Earth’s forests.
• Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, until 2 October
August 22, 2022
Winslow Homer, Cézanne and Zaha Hadid: the best art and architecture of autumn 2022
The exhibition of the year is here, plus we have South Korean pop culture, a Sudanese women’s champion, decoded Egyptian hieroglyphs, Zaha Hadid’s ‘yonic stadium’ and a rare showing for the ‘American Turner’
The first survey of US artist Carolee Schneemann’s (1939-2019) work in the UK, the show celebrates a radical artist and feminist agent-provocateur, tracing her development from early paintings and assemblage to confrontational performances using her body as primary medium and subject, and her later films and multimedia installations. AS
• Barbican Art Gallery, London, 8 September-8 January.
Jonathan Jones's Blog
- Jonathan Jones's profile
- 8 followers
