Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 48

Future Shock review – like a pretentious nightclub where no one is dancing

180 The Strand, London
It claims to showcase the art of the future, but surely we have more to look forward than dry ice, lights and music that sounds like the contents of Brian Eno’s dustbin

When you’ve seen one laser carving clouds of smoke to create illusory 3D spaces that warp and shift before your eyes, you’ve seen them all. And I saw this special effect in Back to the Future: The Musical, so the two installations that use it in the latest subterranean art spectacular in the cavernous club-like depths of 180 The Strand cut no dry ice with me.

There are other parallels between this exhibition and Back to the Future, which is at the Adelphi, down the street. Both are science fiction. But whereas the story of Marty McFly and his time-travelling DeLorean wittily plays with ideas about crossing your own timelines, there are no ideas or wit in Future Shock. It is a light show without a gig. The electro music accompanying most of the installations sounds so samey in its soothing beeps that it just washed over me. At least in Back to the Future you get some laughs, and a car flies over the audience at the end. This is like being at a pretentious nightclub where no one dances.

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Walter Sickert review – serial killer, fantasist or self-hater? This hellish, brilliant show only leaves questions

Tate Britain, London
The dead bodies of murdered women are served up as butcher’s meat in this survey of work by the Victorian painter who almost certainly claimed to the police to be Jack the Ripper

Was Walter Sickert the Victorian serial killer Jack the Ripper? This grimily realist painter has been fingered for the Whitechapel murders by Ripperologists including Patricia Cornwell. But I didn’t expect to find damning evidence in a serious survey of his work at Tate Britain. Not that they flaunt it. But when I got to the last essay in the handsome catalogue my jaw dropped.

In 1888, this actor and artist – who was born in Munich in 1860 and moved to Britain as a child – appears to have written a series of letters to the police, claiming to be the killer. He put his drawing skills to macabre use in these missives, drawing caricatures of brutal male faces, sketches of men with knives standing over women’s bodies.

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‘An apparition came towards me’: Tracey Emin on seeing a ghost and building a new life in Margate

Still in recovery from cancer, the artist has moved home with plans to open an art school, launch a catering college, and even spruce up the streets. She talks about her new sense of freedom – and the pain that infused her latest devastating nudes

Tracey Emin is curled up on the red sofa of her new home in Margate, with her kittens Teacup and Pancake lolling beside her. “Some critic,” she tells me, “said I was influenced by Matisse. I said, ‘Oh, you mean because of this?’” She raises her right hand and places it behind her neck, adopting the posture of Matisse’s famous Blue Nude. “And I asked, ‘Are you saying that Matisse owns the way that women sit?’”

It can certainly feel that way, given the propensity of female nudes in Matisse’s oeuvre. The same could be said of Picasso, Botticelli and Titian, too. But Emin is now seeking to take back this territory – in spectacular fashion. “The nude, the naked female body, is the big picture,” she says. “It’s archetypal, everybody understands it. It’s like a cave drawing.”

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Emin’s nudes, Sickert’s bedroom and fictional photography – the week in art

Tracey Emin’s first show since her illness, an overdue retrospective for Walter Sickert and Rodney Graham dips his toe in cubism – all in your weekly dispatch

Tracey Emin
Devastating new self-portraits and nudes by one of Britain’s most exciting artists.
• Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate, 24 April to 19 June.

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Romantic aliens, talking hills and riddling rhododendrons – the week in art

Nathan Coley places neon signs in Sussex, Edinburgh goes botanical and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster gets cosmic in London – all in your weekly dispatch

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster: Alienarium 5
A futuristic installation that brings this artist’s style of image overload to bear on the pressing question: what if aliens fell in love with us?
• Serpentine South Gallery, London, until 4 September.

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Yours for $200m: why Warhol is now worth more than Picasso

One of his portraits of Marilyn Monroe is expected to shatter records at auction next month. But was Andy Warhol just an ‘affectless hero’ of the media age? Or was he the greatest and most profound artist of his era?

Andy Warhol: obsessively commercial pop artist, the patron saint of reality television, Facebook, Instagram, selfies, TikTok and every other imaginable fulfilment of his prophecy that in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. Or so it might appear. But that is not the real him. Warhol was a seer whose surfaces conceal mysterious waters. “What people think is Andy Warhol isn’t Andy Warhol,” says Tracey Emin.

Try an experiment to understand this. Start recording video and sit in front of the camera for three minutes. You are not to speak. You are not to leave your seat. Just look into the camera. “Be yourself.” But who is that?

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High anxiety: film, music, games and art for the paranoid

From Dalí’s eerie streetscape to the fearful little crewmates in Among Us, our critics recommend culture for the irrationally threatened

The world may be celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Godfather right now, but for paranoia aficionados, the biggest Francis Ford Coppola semi-centennial is still two years off. The Conversation came between the first two instalments of his operatic mafia trilogy but is stunningly different in mood. Starring an extraordinary Gene Hackman as a surveillance expert who fixates on a fragment of dialogue he has recorded, it culminates in Hackman tearing up his apartment as if he’s tearing at his own skin, all because of the tectonic shift in meaning that can come from a minute change of inflection. A lonely, desperate, guilt-ridden masterpiece. Jessica Kiang

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A once-in-a-lifetime look at Raphael plus Japanese creativity at Buckingham Palace – the week in art

A Raphael exhibition to convince sceptics, NY minimalist Rosemarie Castoro, spectacular colour from Sheila Hicks and Japanese art with a royal flavour – all in your weekly dispatch

Raphael
This is a once in a lifetime exhibition. It reassembles the legacy of a Renaissance genius who lived fast and died young – from grand frescoes and tapestries to delicate drawings and intimate portraits of lovers. By the end Raphael is laid bare: his personality hovers in the gallery. Even if you don’t think you like his classical perfection, this will change your mind.
• National Gallery, London, from 9 April to 31 July.

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Raphael review – the Renaissance master who made saints and virgins glow

National Gallery, London
This glorious show suggests that the painter’s adoring Madonnas are more than just geometric wonders – they contain memories of his own lost mother

If you wanted a great portrait in early 16th-century Italy, or a few rooms filling with frescoes, or even a bathroom doing, Raphael was your artist – ahead of his contemporaries Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. He could paint with as much authority as Leonardo, but without the long delays and distractions to which the older genius was prone as he paused commissions to build a flying machine or simply do maths for a few months. As for the other artistic titan of the time, Raphael cruelly satirised Michelangelo in his fresco The School of Athens, which is spectacularly recreated in this show as a wall-filling facsimile. Michelangelo is depicted in this great vision of classical Greece as the philosopher Heraclitus, sitting by himself, a grumpy loner with his face resting in his hand in the attribute of melancholy.

Raphael was well-dressed and charming. Of the big three of the High Renaissance, he was the most straightforward, the most productive, and for 300 years, the most influential. When he was in his early 20s he saw the Mona Lisa and other works by Leonardo and transfigured their style into his own, as you can see here in his 1507-8 painting La Muta of a woman with Mona Lisa-like mystery and reserve. The adaptation he made to Leonardo’s style was a sensational success – honing the classical noses and poses, but removing the bizarre chiaroscuro. This created a noble, balanced, clear figurative art that was taught for centuries as the correct, perfect style, until modernism knocked it off its pedestal.

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Frank Auerbach: Unseen review – art that restores a sense of what it is to be human

Newlands House Gallery, Sussex
Holocaust orphan Auerbach’s stunning paintings – tangled masses with hints of horror – have been brought out of the Tate’s vaults to resonate poignantly in a time of war

It would be lovely to write about Frank Auerbach, just once, without mentioning his childhood, and I suspect the artist would prefer it. But as war once again destroys cities and people in Europe, his story has terrible relevance. Frank Helmut Auerbach was born in Berlin in 1931. When he was seven his Jewish parents sent him to Britain. He never saw them again: they died at Auschwitz.

This orphan of the Holocaust is one of the great witnesses of the modern world. It’s frankly inexplicable that his portrait of Estella Olive West, called Head of EOW 1, and which belongs to Tate, is not on permanent view near the Rothko room at Tate Modern. But that’s all the better for the enterprising Newlands House Gallery, which has ransacked the Tate stores for a stunning group of Auerbachs, including this painting, that spend too much time locked away. They were commissioned and bought by one man, David Wilkie – not your stereotypical international collector with a superyacht, but an art-obsessed insurance clerk from Brentford.

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