Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 5

From Jenny Saville’s gobsmacking show to a pomo celebration of Richard Rogers – the week in art

Saville paints beauty and terror, Watteau returns, a £2.5m Rubens gets an unfair drubbing and erotic art reveals itself – all in your weekly dispatch

Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting
A hugely impressive display of skill and imagination that proves Saville a tremendous painter of beauty, terror and everything in between. Read the review.

• National Portrait Gallery, London, until 7 September

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Portraits so powerful they override reality – Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting review

National Portrait Gallery, London
Saville’s colossal canvases are filled with bloodied mouths, epically thrusting nipples and meaty legs – and her tender Degas-like drawings are truly lovely

The posters and grand title of Jenny Saville’s retrospective scream paint! – in red, pink and bruise colours – but you need to look at her exquisite drawings to get the measure of her. In Neck Study II a woman, eyes closed, holds up her head so we can study the curves and dips of flesh on her stretched neck. Saville notes these anatomical realities with a pencil in precise nuances of shading, also observing every contour of her face and the bones under her thin shoulders. It is beautiful. It is true.

So what the hell – I thought – was she doing in the adjacent gallery where massively enlarged faces, pummelled by life and her art, are lit as harshly as flash photographs? They include her portrait of a boy with a bloodied beaten face, lip twisted, eyes dazed, used for the cover of a Manic Street Preachers album that was banned from supermarkets for being too disturbing. That was just a small reproduction. Here you are confronted by the colossal real thing, faces that truly get in your face.

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That muscular back! Those fleshy breasts! The National Gallery’s ‘fake’ Rubens looks very real to me

How can anyone call Rubens’ sumptuous masterpiece Samson and Delilah a ‘fake’ and ‘a shoddy artefact’? The Flemish master is simply doing a superb job of copying his own favourite outlaw artist

Samson, a huge muscular hunk of a man, slumbers in the lap of his seducer Delilah, in a bedchamber sumptuously lit by candle. As Delilah looks down on the unconscious form of the great biblical hero, her accomplice is cutting the very tangled locks that hold his superhuman strength. Meanwhile, at the door, soldiers are waiting by torchlight. At the heart of it all is Samson’s rippled naked back, nestled on the woman’s pink silk skirts.

Is this a painting by the Flemish baroque master Peter Paul Rubens? Hell, yes. The wonder is that anyone would ever think otherwise. And yet some do. Michael Daley and his campaigning group ArtWatch UK, and the art historian Euphrosyne Doxiadis (among others), are getting traction with their claims that the National Gallery owns a “fake” or “modern copy” and is covering up that reality.

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Summer arrives with monsters, minimalism and a memorial quilt – the week in art

Big names liven up the Royal Academy’s annual extravaganza, Durham digs into its past and Tate welcomes the Aids memorial quilt – all in your weekly dispatch

Royal Academy Summer Exhibition
Tracey Emin unveils a stunning Crucifixion, while Cornelia Parker, Frank Bowling and George Shaw are also among the stars of this huge, often rewarding show.

• Royal Academy, London, 17 June to 17 August

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Edward Burra / Ithell Colquhoun review – sex, jazz, war and the occult, all confusingly jumbled

Tate Britain, London
Colquhoun’s surrealism and Burra’s pro-fascist war paintings and Hogarthian scenes of Harlem nightlife are all brilliant. But they have nothing in common – so why handcuff them together?

They make a truly odd couple. She’s an occultist who once appeared on BBC television explaining to the nation how to make surrealist art at home. He’s a jazz enthusiast whose slices of modern – and often queer - life are full of roly-poly grotesques. What on earth have Ithell Colquhoun and Edward Burra got in common, and why has Tate Britain handcuffed them together for an uncalled for, unneeded and ultimately baffling double header?

I loved Colquhoun’s exhibition at Tate St Ives when I reviewed it earlier this year, but this version of it is much more flatly laid out and her experiments in releasing the unconscious are shouted down by all the drunken, drugged, omnivorously shagging people in Burra’s 1920s and 30s clubs and bars. Yet he also gets edited and reinvented in a way that left me largely cold.

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I have seen the light and it’s Tracey Emin’s Jesus – RA Summer Exhibition review

Royal Academy of Art, London
With an extraordinary painting by Emin, great works by Cindy Sherman, Cornelia Parker and Sean Scully, assisted by some perving from Allen Jones, this annual jamboree has returned to relevance

Halfway through the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, I was woken up by Jesus (but more on this shortly). Suddenly, as I came to, the whole place appeared alive and more and more good stuff leapt out from the 1,600 works on view. What’s that upsidedown stag? It’s by the 87-year-old German master Georg Baselitz. As for those convex mirrors above your head, reflecting you and the floor in radical foreshortening, that’s an installation by Cornelia Parker. In the same room hang eviscerated animal carcasses hooked up on chains, made of textiles by Tamara Kostianovsky.

But it’s Jesus who lifts this exhibition out of the ordinary. He moves towards you like a shark in the illusion created by Tracey Emin’s painting The Crucifixion. And like a shark, he is frightening. I thought art had lost its capacity to shock. But what can be more shocking than a celebrated 21st-century artist sincerely painting the passion? Emin shows another work before this startling, upsetting show-stopper – an outsized, melancholy portrait print. It makes you wonder and worry: is the artist OK? And even, is the artist any good? This female face is so broadly sketched it’s a bit clumsy, and yet you can’t forget it.

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Artists, Siblings, Visionaries by Judith Mackrell review – the remarkable lives of Gwen and Augustus John

Gwen’s talent vastly outshone her brother’s – but both are treated with subtlety in this outstanding dual biography

A young woman sits reading, a pot of tea to hand, her blue dress almost the only colour in a still, sandy room. Gwen John’s painting The Convalescent shows a subdued yet happy moment, for this woman is free to think and feel. That, we see in Judith Mackrell’s outstanding double biography of Gwen and her brother, was her ideal for living: to be at liberty even if that meant existing in deepest solitude.

The quietness of a life spent largely alone in single rooms, reading, drawing, painting and occasionally having wild sex with the sculptor Rodin, is counterpointed in this epic narrative by the crowded, relentless, almost insanely overstimulated life of Augustus John. Lion of the arts in early 20th-century Britain, he was a bigamist, adulterer, father of so many children you lose track (so did he), and an utterly forgettable painter.

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A magical mystery tour of Liverpool, bug-eyed cuteness and the world of vineyards – the week in art

Roll up to the latest Biennial in the city of the Liver birds, trip the light fantastic with Liliane Lijn and wonder at a massive ox – all in your weekly dispatch

Liverpool Biennial
Turner winner Elizabeth Price and Turkey’s Cevdet Erek are the stars of this mystery tour of Liverpool that’s occasionally magical.

• Various venues, Liverpool, until 14 September

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Liverpool Biennial review – AI seagulls, gladiatorial football and big trouble in Chinatown

From the vicious acoustics of match days to supernatural moments in a church, this year’s best pieces reflect the emotional bedrock of this roaring, soulful city

I narrowly avoided being “relieved on” by a seagull in Liverpool. Another critic pulled me aside just in time. But then again, she pressed the button to release the airborne poo – fake, I think – in the first place. This is Kara Chin’s funny installation in a cinema recreating the seediness of the seaside with squawking AI seagulls on video screens, chaotic electro-assemblages resembling mutant arcade machines and a floor covered with guano. Liverpool is not by the sea but close enough that seagulls provide a chorus as you walk between Liverpool Biennial art events in museums, galleries, warehouses and community centres.

I can’t see the Liver Birds on the skyline without remembering the first time I visited this city as small child, seeing my aunt off on a voyage across the Atlantic, from docks that then loomed with massive ships. Proustian memories of the biggest city I knew as a child return with a vengeance in a raw warehouse space where Turkish artist Cevdet Erek has created a homage to the noise and intensity of soccer crowds. He loves football and loud music. I meet him there and he enthuses about attending Anfield as research, and being inspired by a track on Pink Floyd’s Meddle. Flashbacks of matches with my dad surge.

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Hamad Butt: Apprehensions review – beauty and violence from a lost and dangerous YBA

Whitechapel Gallery, London
He died before his time but Hamad Butt’s sublimely hazardous retrospective of mustard gas baubles and blinding lights is a thrilling mix of the nostalgic and new

Flies crawl about in a triptych of glass-fronted cabinets, while in another installation you gradually realise the fragile bottles you’re looking at are full of poisonous gas, lethal to humans. Does this remind you of anyone?

Hamad Butt is the Damien Hirst who got away, the Young British Artist of the 1990s who didn’t win the Turner prize, make millions or lose his youthful talent and turn into a bloated mediocrity. Now he is a cult figure precisely because he is none of those things and can instead be presented as if he was a complete unknown, whose art expresses his queer Pakistani identity rather than being part of a fin-de-siecle art movement of sensation and creepy science. I couldn’t find any reference, even in the moving array of Butt’s working documents on show, to the fact he studied at Goldsmiths alongside Hirst, Collishaw, Wearing and more.

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