Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 46
June 18, 2022
Destination masterpiece: 75 great artworks to see across the UK
From a Nubian god in Edinburgh to a Banksy in Bristol, our critics choose the most intriguing and important paintings, sculptures, installations for you to take in this summer
1. Lucas Cranach the Elder – Judith With the Head of Holofernes
The Burrell Collection, Glasgow
The culture clash that underpinned Cranach’s art – German courtly splendour and strait-laced religious reformation – powers a magnetic imagining of Jewish heroine Judith displaying the head of Assyrian general Holofernes. The bloody spoils seem like a trophy, and are more chilling for it. SS
June 17, 2022
Dürer in Birmingham, Hockney in Normandy and a not-so-hot climate crisis show – the week in art
Stunning works from Renaissance grandee Albrecht Dürer, David Hockney’s French spring scenes and the Royal Academy’s dull take on global heating – all in your weekly dispatch
Dürer: The Making of a Renaissance Master
The phenomenal early work of one the most curious, inventive and restless artists of all time.
• Barber Institute, Birmingham, from 17 June to 25 September.
June 15, 2022
‘What a Tory exhibition this is’ – the RA’s climate crisis Summer Exhibition
Royal Academy, London
Wilting flowers, soppy woodlands, a porcelain model of a disposable cup … this climate kitsch is about as concerned about the environment as Boris and Carrie Johnson
Earth’s plight is desperate but that doesn’t mean artists necessarily have anything to say about it. Some do, and have been making powerful environmental art for years. Richard Long has a piece here, the latest in a lifetime of walking through landscapes making ephemeral markers of sticks and stones, inviting you to commune like him with the fields and hills. But imposing “climate” as a theme turns out to be a goad to all that is worst in the Royal Academy. This is a catastrophic exhibition but not in the way it intends.
The insincerity hits you like a stench of decaying rubbish. I’m not saying veteran Royal Academician Allen Jones doesn’t care about the climate but his painting sure looks like a piss-take. A man and woman run towards a flaming sky, painted in his deliberately lurid pop style. Her breasts are green. Below this persiflage hangs Atomic Landscape # Prepfordeath by Zachary Walsh. It’s a big rolling green British landscape with a mushroom cloud on the horizon.
Continue reading...June 14, 2022
‘The Beatles? I was more a fan of the Beach Boys’: Peter Blake at 90 on pop art and clubbing with the Fab Four
The groundbreaking artist documented the birth of youth culture and created the most famous album cover in history. Now with a new exhibition, he talks about what inspires him – from corn dollies to music halls
Peter Blake’s wife, Chrissy, is lovingly protective of her husband, who will turn 90 on 25 June. I don’t know where she has been listening, but when she hears the word “Beatles” she pops into the upstairs lounge where he is ensconced in an armchair.
“Let this be the only article in the last 55 years that doesn’t mention the Beatles,” she pleads.
Continue reading...June 10, 2022
Peter Blake illustrates Under Milk Wood and Peter Saul cartoonish compositions come to London – the week in art
The godfather of pop art illustrates Under Milk Wood, landmark avant gardists link up and it’s Biennale week in Whitstable – all in your weekly dispatch
Peter Blake
Sensitive illustrations for Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood by the godfather of pop art.
• Waddington Custot, London, from 11 June to 23 July.
June 8, 2022
‘She is dancing among the greats’: the dangerously honest, richly ambiguous Paula Rego
Art’s great storyteller has died at the age of 87. Our critic celebrates a woman of courage and freakish imagination
The wickedness of Paula Rego’s imagination shines like patent leather in her 1987 painting The Policeman’s Daughter. A young woman is polishing, as the title tells us, her father’s jackboot. He is nowhere to be seen, but the spectre of a man we take to be an authoritarian bully haunts the fetish object that is his boot. His daughter has her arm sunk into it, right down to the sole, as if she is being swallowed, or willingly immersing herself in a dubious sensual communion with an image of brutality. It is a painting of compromise, corruption and the squalor of power.
Rego refused to waste her life like this woman, lost in the dusty perversions of an authoritarian regime, or in the more polite claustrophobia of the English middle-class family.
Continue reading...June 7, 2022
Thrifty summer: free films, folk and standup – 25 cost-free ways to enjoy arts in the UK
You don’t have to shell out to enjoy the best in music, film, theatre, art and comedy – from a Francis Bacon in Aberdeen to Notting Hill’s unique and spectacular carnival
Music
Continue reading...June 6, 2022
EastEnders goes Warhol with a 100-hour bender in the Queen Vic – The Lock-In review
The Queen Adelaide pub, London
Stanley Schtinter has made an epic film out of all the scenes set in the soap’s famous bar. Showing in East End pubs, the Warholian result is a spellbinding – and frequently baffling – meditation on time
Time seems to be slipping in a bank holiday lock-in at an East End pub, where I nurse my beer and watch people in another pub in another decade, drinking their sorrows away, fighting and sharing the latest gossip from Albert Square. You notice the heavy boozing, as well as the smoking, in 1980s EastEnders. Characters regularly drink themselves unconscious.
The Lock-In tells the story of EastEnders from its start in 1985 to the present – from the drunken vantage point of its pub, the Queen Vic. Put together by artist Stanley Schtinter, this 100-hour long compilation of scenes set in the Vic raises hugely enjoyable questions about what the hell anyone watches anything for. I actually felt I could stick the full 100 hours, but was fairly certain I shouldn’t. The nicely Warholian effect is to expose the amount of time we regularly spend gazing at screens, either barely caring what’s on, or locked into a drama we know doesn’t really matter, but that entertains for a few hours. The only thing that makes this epic soap marathon different from binge-watching at home is that Schtinter frames it as art and as an event – by stitching EastEnders clips together in a way that melts narrative logic, and screening it in a variety of east London pubs.
Continue reading...June 3, 2022
Picasso faces down his hero while Henry Moore gets stoned – the week in art
Picasso goes toe to toe with his unlikely hero Ingres, Moore’s primordial forms go on show in Somerset, and punk feminist Penny Goring lets rip – all in your weekly dispatch
Picasso Ingres: Face to Face
A head-on encounter between the greatest artist of the 20th century and his unlikely neoclassicist hero Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.
• National Gallery, London, until 9 October.
May 30, 2022
Smog, glorious smog: how Monet saw through London’s poisonous wealth
The Frenchman was transfixed by the light he saw in the polluted city. But his misty painting of Waterloo Bridge, about to go under the hammer for an expected £24m, was anything but romantic
Claude Monet’s Waterloo Bridge, Effet de Brume is going for a song. I’d say £24m, the minimum price Christie’s expect for this almost minimalist masterpiece, is cheap, at least by the standards of the nutty art market. If an Andy Warhol is worth more than £158m, and a Picasso nearly £103m, what makes a great Monet less valuable? It seems you need modernist edge to smash the market these days. Yet this work has it in spades, right down to Monet’s nod towards the climate crisis.
Monet loved the dirty town that was Victorian and Edwardian London. One reason is in the title of his painting: “Effet de Brume” means “fog effect”. Or given the atmospheric problems of London at the time: smog effect. Coal fires, industrial chimneys and belching steamers on the Thames created that misty, weird light that kept Monet coming back to the Savoy Hotel, where he painted this view in 1904.
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