Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 49
April 1, 2022
The power of Auerbach, the perils of Venice and seaside pleasures from Martin Parr – the week in art
Head to Petworth for Frank Auerbach, Greenwich for Canaletto and Bournemouth for the beach – all in your weekly dispatch
Frank Auerbach: Unseen
One of the most powerful painters of modern times gets a survey of his work so far.
• Newlands House Gallery, Petworth, from 2 April
March 29, 2022
Canaletto’s Venice Revisited review – pre-tourist masterpieces resist the climate crisis narrative
National Maritime Museum, London
Linking Canaletto’s paintings of a fading Venice to current climate concerns seems a bit pointless – these stately home treasures already depicted decay
There were no giant cruise ships in 18th-century Venice. No Disney store by the Rialto, no Biennale. Instead, a handful of aristocrats, off on their grand tour, took leisurely gondola trips on quiet canals. And instead of taking home a mask and a bottle of grappa, they got a painter called Canaletto to do them a few views.
One visitor, Lord John Russell, commissioned no fewer than 24 such souvenirs and they are on view at the National Maritime Museum while their usual home, Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire, is being restored. They are undeniably gorgeous. But the museum tries to hang too large a narrative arc on what is basically a nice chance to see some stately home treasures. No, they insist – this is a chilling insight into the peril facing Venice today, when flooding caused by the climate crisis and egregious levels of mass tourism threaten to destroy this precious human ecosystem. The show ends with a salutary video of the city’s recent floods and a powerful interactive tool that lets you see, from year to year, how the worst flooding in Venice’s history has hit in just the last few years. There used to be many years with no floods at all.
Continue reading...March 28, 2022
Darling buds: books, music, theatre and more with spring in their hearts
From Chaucer’s elemental epic to Gnarls Barkley’s alternative take on gospel, our critics suggest popular culture inspired by the season’s sense of renewal
Van Gogh painted Almond Blossom in 1890, the last year of his life, but even as he struggled with mental illness, the powerful colours of spring set his brush fizzing. Two years earlier, he had painted the fierce spring colours of Provence with intoxicated joy. Now he recaptures that happiness in a brilliant display of white blossoms studded like stars on to the smoother blue void of the sky. Even so, the blooms are sporadic and spaced apart, the branches of the tree green with lichen and moss. The spring is here but you can feel his pain and sadness among the new buds. Jonathan Jones
Continue reading...March 25, 2022
Ghosts haunt the Square Mile and a digital punk comes to Glasgow – the week in art
Artists’ innermost visions go on display in London, Rana Begum shows off her ethereal magic and Ilona Szalay gets introspective – all in your weekly dispatch
Radio Ballads
Sonia Boyce, Helen Cammock, Ilona Sagar and Rory Pilgrim collaborate with people from Barking and Dagenham to create socially engaged artworks.
• Serpentine Gallery, London, from 31 March.
March 18, 2022
Renaissance codpieces, Jenny Saville on the Holocaust and fungi fun – the week in art
Hew Locke brings his bricolage to Tate Britain, the V&A explores male fashion ancient and modern, while robot futurism hits St Ives – all in your weekly dispatch
Hew Locke
This artist of warm, expansive bricolage takes on the vast spaces of Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries.
• Tate Britain from 22 March
Cannibalism and genocide: the horrific visions of Ukraine’s best loved artist
Maria Prymachenko created seemingly happy scenes of rural life. But look closer and you see the terror unleashed on her country by Stalin. Now her work has once again become a national symbol, duplicated at rallies worldwide
At the 1937 International Exposition in Paris, two colossal pavilions faced each other down. One was Hitler’s Germany, crowned with a Nazi eagle. The other was Stalin’s Soviet Union, crowned with a statue of a worker and a peasant holding hands. It was a symbolic clash at a moment when right and left were fighting to the death in Spain. But somewhere inside the Soviet pavilion, among all the socialist realism, were drawings of fabulous beasts and flowers filled with a raw folkloric magic. They subverted the age of the dictators with nothing less than a triumph of the human imagination over terror and mass death.
These sublime creations were the work of a Ukrainian artist, Maria Prymachenko, who has once again become a symbol of survival in the midst of a dictator’s war. Prymachenko, who died in 1997, is the best-loved artist of the besieged country, a national symbol whose work has appeared on its postage stamps, and her likeness on its money. Ukrainian astronomer Klim Churyumov even named a planet after her.
Continue reading...Ukraine’s best loved artist: ‘Once again a symbol of survival in the midst of a dictator’s war’
Maria Prymachenko created seemingly happy scenes of animals and rural life. But look closer and you see the horrors unleashed on her country by Stalin. She has once again become a national symbol, her work duplicated at rallies worldwide
At the 1937 International Exposition in Paris, two colossal pavilions faced each other down. One was Hitler’s Germany, crowned with a Nazi eagle. The other was Stalin’s Soviet Union, crowned with a statue of a worker and a peasant holding hands. It was a symbolic clash at a moment when right and left were fighting to the death in Spain. But somewhere inside the Soviet pavilion, among all the socialist realism, were drawings of fabulous beasts and flowers filled with a raw folkloric magic. They subverted the age of the dictators with nothing less than a triumph of the human imagination over terror and mass death.
These sublime creations were the work of a Ukrainian artist, Maria Prymachenko, who has once again become a symbol of survival in the midst of a dictator’s war. Prymachenko, who died in 1997, is the best-loved artist of the besieged country, a national symbol whose work has appeared on its postage stamps, and her likeness on its money. Ukrainian astronomer Klim Churyumov even named a planet after her.
Continue reading...March 15, 2022
Kyōsai review – wild satirical swipes at the western world
Royal Academy, London
Like Hogarth on sake, the artist’s quirky works wittily satirise the human carnival of foreigners Japan opened itself to in the mid-19th century
It’s no secret that the first European modernists were obsessed with Japan. In Manet’s Portrait of Zola, the novelist has a print of a wrestler by Utagawa Kuniaki II and a painted Japanese screen in his study. The Japanese artists most imitated by the likes of Van Gogh and Whistler were woodblock printmakers such as Hiroshige and Hokusai who had flourished in the early 1800s. It’s a curious mirror image to see how, while they looked east, their contemporary Kawanabe Kyōsai was looking west. His paintings on scrolls and woodblock prints, made from the 1850s to his death in 1889, are full of witty portraits of Europeans and a not always happy marriage of Japanese and western styles.
The Japan into which Kyōsai was born had kept its borders closed for centuries. His lifetime saw the first visit by an American fleet, the end of the Tokugawa shogunate that had restricted foreign contact, the legalisation of Christianity and the coming of railways and the telegraph. He’s constantly making satirical swipes at these changes. In one picture Jesus is portrayed on the cross, holding a fan. In another Mr Punch, from Punch magazine, features as a demon. More demons attend a strict western-style school in a satire on educational reforms.
Continue reading...March 14, 2022
Hockney’s Eye review – ‘Makes Constable look like a wet hanky’
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Exhibiting next to Old Masters, David Hockney’s work more than hold its own, its dazzling hues sometimes making the rest look dull in comparison
David Hockney has never patented a colour, as far as I know. But there’s a Hockney blue and a Hockney red, in fact a whole palette of bright subtle hues that are totally his own. That has never been more lusciously apparent than in his scintillating takeover of the Fitzwilliam Museum, one of Britain’s best collections of Old Master paintings. Those oldies have met their match. Next to Domenico Veneziano’s 15th-century Annunciation hangs Hockney’s version of the Virgin Mary being hailed by an angel that’s an intense, almost psychedelic rave of colour, a rich pink against blue shadows on an emerald lawn, all set off by the yellow floor with radiating terracotta lines.
Roll over, Quattrocento. Yet Hockney would never say anything like that. He competes with artists from 500 years ago in a friendly familiar way, as if he went to the Royal College of Art with Veneziano and Fra Angelico rather than Allen Jones and RB Kitaj. What was he thinking of, painting his own Renaissance Annunciation after Angelico, in 2017? Experimenting with the theory of perspective, which the show enhances with a computer analysis of how Veneziano cheats on the idea of a single vanishing point. So from imbibing Hockney’s hot colours, you are led to think about western art’s discovery of how to picture the world in realistic depth.
Continue reading...Astral peaks: music, books, art and more about the majesty of space
From beautiful celestial metaphors to a virtual simulacrum of an entire galaxy, our critics suggest popular culture inspired by the wonders of astronomy
It looks as if the universe was designed by a Romantic painter. Great glowing clouds of smoke and mist hang in the void with twinkling stars spangled within them. Instead of lonely bright dots in black nothingness, as space used to be pictured, it turns out to be a sublime storm of dazzling richness. The Pillars of Creation is the photo that made the Hubble telescope’s name. It shows a star-forming region of the Eagle nebula, 7,000 light years from Earth. In 2015 Nasa released a second, even more detailed and glorious Pillars of Creation). The successful launch of the new James Webb telescope has eclipsed Hubble, but as it “sees” in infrared, it is unlikely to provide similarly beguiling pictures. The Hubble Age is ending but it changed our cosmic perception for ever. Jonathan Jones
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