Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 45
July 15, 2022
Sublime seascapes, 3D Bowling, female truckers and portals to beyond – the week in art
Frank Bowling makes a switch to sculpture, Milton Avery creates ‘Rothkos with people in them’ and the Tardis opens its doors – all in your weekly dispatch
Frank Bowling and Sculpture
This mighty abstract painter of history and sorrow reveals his sculptural side.
• Stephen Lawrence Gallery, London, until 3 September.
July 12, 2022
Wild waves, perfect pipes: Milton Avery, inventor of abstract America – review
Royal Academy, London
As this brilliant exhibition shows, Avery was an experimental dreamer whose sublime landscapes and beach scenes paved the way for Rothko, Pollock and Newman
It doesn’t take long to start seeing the Rothkos hidden in Milton Avery’s beach scenes and landscapes. They loom as eerie empty vistas of sea and sky, turning what seem to be figurative compositions into abstract masterpieces. Man With a Pipe, for instance, is a deliberately bizarre scene painted in 1935. But remove the people and you would have three layers of abstract colour: a blackish sky over a grey ocean over a yellow beach. Exactly the kind of sublime vertical stack of colours Rothko painted.
The resemblance is not accidental. Mark Rothko first met Avery in late-1920s New York and hugely admired the older man: Avery was born in 1885, Rothko in 1903. Rothko’s generation would shake modern art and make New York the art capital of the world, painting huge canvases with no apparent subject matter, just colour, yet whose intense expressiveness got them named the abstract expressionists. Avery never made the same leap as Rothko, Barnett Newman or Jackson Pollock into pure abstraction but this brilliant exhibition proves he didn’t need to. This idiosyncratic, experimental American dreamer was already anticipating their poetic use of colour years earlier, in canvases that find abstraction hidden inside nature itself.
Continue reading...July 8, 2022
Turner’s turn-ons and Freud’s family affair – the week in art
The great landscape artist’s lesser known erotic art goes on show while Lucian Freud is at Sigmund’s house and Jay Jopling’s White Cube crew are off to the countryside – all in your weekly dispatch
Between the Sheets: Turner’s Nudes
JMW Turner is famous for landscapes but he also loved to paint erotica. His secret stash of sensuality gets an airing at the house he designed for himself near his beloved River Thames.
• Turner’s House, London, from Saturday to 30 October
July 6, 2022
‘Sigmund would have loved this’ – Lucian Freud: The Painter and his Family review
Freud Museum, London
The painter’s sex life drove his art. Does this show think that’s too vulgar to go into? The result is richly ironic: a case of repression in the building that houses Sigmund’s consulting couch
Three generations meet in Sigmund Freud’s study at 20 Maresfield Gardens, London. Lucian Freud’s painting of his mother, Lucie, hangs over his grandfather’s famous consulting couch. The woman lies as if floating in space, eyes closed, arms up in a gesture of surrender. Curator Martin Gayford, who knew Lucian Freud and was portrayed by him, says the painter had Freudian “mother issues”. Not because she was strict but because she wasn’t. A Weimar liberal who believed in radical parenting, she rewarded him for being wild and delinquent. And he resented her for it.
As Freudian secrets go, this is an anecdote rather than a deep dive. And Freud’s 1970s painting of his mum reveals no hint of either antagonism or adoration. It strives for utter objectivity, focusing as calmly on her patterned dress as on her time-furrowed flesh. We are facts, says Freud: we breathe, we copulate, we die. This painting, like all his paintings, just wants to look existence in the eye, to see his mother in her physical reality. After a while I sensed bones and organs under the dress. This is what art is for, Freud tells us: to preserve some trace of our existence. Just that.
Continue reading...July 5, 2022
David Hockney: ‘My era was the freest time. I now realise it’s over’
The artist pops in from Normandy to talk us through a show of his great paintings, discuss his old hometown Bradford becoming City of Culture – and reveal why Harry Styles was tricky to paint
David Hockney takes two crumpled cigarette butts from his pocket and places them on the lunch table. “You’re disgusting,” says his lifelong friend Celia Birtwell, who has featured in many of his paintings. “Horrible! Horrible!” However, the noxious objects he has placed next to our sandwiches aren’t what they seem. “They’re not real,” says Hockney. “They’re sculptured. They’re from a gallery in Berlin.” He beams.
Hockney, on a brief visit to Britain from his beloved newish home in Normandy, has popped in to see an exhibition of his work at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Hockney’s Eye: The Art and Technology of Depiction is open for him on an otherwise closed day, with select curators and friends awaiting his arrival. The mood is one of waiting for a royal audience, and everyone gathers round in mild awe when he finally makes his entrance, in a wheelchair pushed by his partner, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, known as JP.
Continue reading...July 1, 2022
Howardena Pindell review – from sheer painterly bliss to depictions of appalling racial terror
Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge
In a jaw-dropping show that includes ghostly abstract canvases and horrifying historical videos, Pindell’s majestic works come together to tell the story of America’s blood-soaked past
Everything that’s beautiful about American art is in Howardena Pindell’s abstract canvases from the 1970s. And all that is ugly in America is laid bare by her 2020 video Rope/Fire/Water.
Kettle’s Yard made me read the warning text before seeing Rope/Fire/Water, about its graphic content and the “self-care” it may necessitate. It is a short history of lynchings in America. There are some truly terrible images including early 20th-century postcards that celebrate the murders by burning alive, hanging and drowning of Black Americans by mobs of whites. Pindell reads from history books over the images. The slayings she mourns include that of civil rights activist Medgar Evers in 1963 – also remembered in Bob Dylan’s song Only a Pawn in Their Game – and the recent rising death toll that has given birth to Black Lives Matter.
Continue reading...The horrors of dissection, Freud’s family and Deller’s map of the self – the week in art
The dark art of anatomy, Freud family secrets, Bridget Riley’s brilliant watercolours and the atlas of our everyday lives – all in your weekly dispatch
Anatomy: A Matter of Death and Life
This thought-provoking exhibition starts with an exquisite sample of Leonardo da Vinci’s dissection drawings and works up to the gothic horrors of Edinburgh’s Burke and Hare.
• National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2 July to 30 October.
June 30, 2022
Bones, bowels and body-snatchers – Anatomy: A Matter of Death and Life review
National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh
William Burke’s skeleton looms over this gripping exhibition showcasing the spooky relics of science’s thirst for anatomical knowledge – and the horrors this often unleashed
What are tiny corpses, each nestled inside a little wooden coffin, doing in an exhibition about the art and science of anatomy? They are, after all, crudely carved artefacts without any pretensions to medical accuracy. But these exhibits are part of one of the most notorious episodes in the history of anatomy, for they seem to have been made and buried outside Edinburgh as a folk art memorial to the victims of William Burke and William Hare.
Burke and Hare, this exhibition shows with clinical precision, were monsters produced by science. They killed 16 poor, marginalised people in just a few months to provide bodies for the city’s competitive anatomy teachers. Edinburgh was the capital of the Scottish Enlightenment, a centre of medical research and teaching renowned across Europe. One anatomy student at Edinburgh University in the early 1800s was Charles Darwin. His damning verdict on his teacher is recorded here: “Dr Munro made his lectures on human anatomy as dull as he was himself, and the subject disgusted me.”
Continue reading...June 24, 2022
Fantastic Black artists, climate crisis in sound, and a Windrush victory – the week in art
Myths and Afrofuturism combine, installations go Back to Earth, Documenta embraces the collective, and a long-awaited public sculpture is unveiled – all in your weekly dispatch
In the Black Fantastic
Visions of technology, history and mythology in this show inspired by Afrofuturism, with Chris Ofili, Kara Walker, Ellen Gallagher, Hew Locke and more.
• Hayward Gallery, London, from 29 June to 18 September.
June 23, 2022
‘There was only one possible theme’: Alison Wilding on her climate crisis Summer Exhibition
Environmental change is the subject of this year’s Royal Academy show in London but, says its curator, ‘there is a celebratory aspect’
Selecting the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition is one of the biggest curating jobs in the world, but it is done by artists not professional curators. This year’s boss is Alison Wilding RA, not someone you might think of as a showy or grandstanding public figure but a deeply sensitive and thoughtful abstract sculptor, who has twice been shortlisted for the Turner prize. She has not picked out art at random but imposed a subject that’s far from the Summer Exhibition’s cosy suburban image. “I thought there was only one possible theme,” she says. “Climate.”
Dedicating this sprawling event, in which famous artists are hung next to first-time exhibitors in the grand salons of Burlington House, to the climate crisis did strike some of the more genteel Royal Academicians as a tad radical. “Some thought it could morph into a very dystopian exhibition,” she says. Obviously there is plenty to be dystopian about, but Wilding has been surprised by how much pleasure and joy she found. Alongside mourning the destruction of nature, the art here is full of reverence for Earth’s landscapes. “There is a celebratory aspect,” she says. The result, she thinks, has “dark corners, but also really beautiful areas as well”.
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