Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 50
March 11, 2022
Hockney 2.0, rare Japanese masterworks and LOVE comes to Yorkshire – the week in art
Robert Indiana’s sculpture lands near Leeds, Kyōsai comes to London and David Hockney’s tech trials continue – all in your weekly dispatch
Ingrid Pollard
Subversive perspectives on the British landscape, and who it belongs to, are at the heart of Pollard’s thought-provoking work.
• Milton Keynes Gallery from Saturday
March 9, 2022
‘This is art for the penthouses of oligarchs’ – Damien Hirst: Natural History review
Gagosian Britannia Street, London
The artist’s progress from raw young punk to pretentious money-lover is on show in this collection of formaldehyde works. Even the shark is getting very shrunken around the mouth
Thirty years ago, when I walked into the Saatchi gallery in London, I saw something wildly liberating and compulsive: a huge tiger shark that seemed to swim forward through clear blue liquid, with just a sheet of glass between you and its jaws. But the shark you see on entering Damien Hirst’s survey of his formaldehyde creations is not the same work: it’s Jaws 2, or even Jaws 3, the one where the mother shark attacks an aquarium. It is called Death Denied and was made in 2008, a fresher version of the notoriously decaying original, titled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. But even 14 years is a long time for a dead shark, and this one’s getting very shrunken around the mouth.
Any fear of those teeth – and the inevitable advance of death they symbolise – rapidly dissipates as you take in the progress of Hirst from raw young punk to pretentious money-lover. It is still possible to put on a strong exhibition of his early work, with its genuine sense of grabbing something from this short life, but what we see here instead is how his original desire to shock has become empty and artificial. Somewhere along the line he stopped feeling it.
Continue reading...March 4, 2022
New Himid, old Hirst, Mandela’s window and impossible rollercoasters – the week in art
Lubaina Himid’s paintings explore time, Damien Hirst’s animal vitrines still shock, Mandela’s jail window becomes an NFT and Jesse Darling builds antigravity roads to nowhere – all in your weekly dispatch
Jesse Darling
Sprawling multifarious installations that mock social structures and systems of power.
• Modern Art Oxford from Saturday until 1 May
February 28, 2022
From Six Feet Under to Manchester By the Sea: culture to help understand grief
From art that tears our souls to music that heals, our critics recommend popular culture to help cope with bereavement
No film directed by Kenneth Lonergan will ever be confused with a walk in the park: You Can Count on Me, Margaret and Manchester By the Sea all involve death and grief, but it is the latter that confronts the subject most starkly. Casey Affleck plays Lee, a janitor bonding falteringly with his teenage nephew (Lucas Hedges) following the death of his brother. Permeating everything is an unimaginable trauma from Lee’s past. Grief clings to him, closure a distant dream. In the finest moment of his Oscar-winning performance, Affleck quietly admits: “I can’t beat it. I can’t beat it. I’m sorry.” Ryan Gilbey
Continue reading...February 25, 2022
Whistler’s muse steals the spotlight and Pissarro gets together with friends – the week in art
The Royal Academy explores the birth of modernism, postwar British art shines and the ‘father of impressionism’ goes on display alongside his mates – all in your weekly dispatch
Whistler’s Woman in White: Joanna Hiffernan
A hugely enjoyable story of art, passion and the birth of modernism that is full of beauty and boldness.
• Royal Academy, London, 26 February to 22 May.
February 24, 2022
Carlo Crivelli: Shadows on the Sky review – fruity fun with the rogue of the Renaissance
Ikon gallery, Birmingham
With a witty trompe l’oeil by UK artist Susan Collis, the norms of the classic old-master show are turned joyfully upside down in this homage to a subversive Venetian master
There’s a crack from floor to ceiling in Birmingham’s Ikon gallery. Luckily, some workers are on the job fixing it. They’ve left a brush, a dustsheet and paint-spattered blue overalls while they get lunch. But is it really safe to hang Renaissance masterpieces by the 15th-century artist Carlo Crivelli in a space that’s in this much disarray?
It’s OK. The museums that have lent their treasures can relax. This is a witty bit of trompe l’oeil by artist Susan Collis. I watched her draw the crack in just two strokes with a steady hand and eye that might have impressed Crivelli himself. She has also made the brush, whose little encrustations of muck are precious stones, and the sheet and coat whose stains are embroidered. It’s a good joke because Crivelli himself is a whiz with trompe l’oeil. His Virgin and Child with a kneeling Franciscan friar, lent by the Vatican Pinacoteca, no less, on the other side of the same wall, has a brilliantly realistic crack painted into the marble on which the Virgin rests her feet, a dark rotting bloom of entropy.
Continue reading...February 23, 2022
Whistler’s Woman in White: Joanna Hiffernan – raw, boozy, sexual slices of real life and love
Royal Academy, London
This life-affirming show tracks a revolutionary moment in art, as the US artist and his young Irish lover blow apart the claustrophobia of Victorian painting
American cowboy James Abbott McNeill Whistler and his flame-haired Irish lover Joanna Hiffernan go on a wild rampage and shoot the art world of Victorian Britain to bits in this hugely enjoyable artistic and biographical romp. It’s such a well-told story it will doubtless inspire a so-so film coming to a streaming service near you soon. Don’t wait for that, go to the Royal Academy and enjoy a life-affirming adventure with the mothers and fathers of modern art.
To appreciate how new and subversive the double act of Hiffernan and Whistler were in 1860s London you have to realise how clogged Victorian art was. A wall of it suffices to set the airless scene. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Annunciation is claustrophobic, a narrow picture of a small room where the figures are bled of life in their pseudo-medieval aesthetic prison. Then you look at the opposite wall and a raw, boozy, sexual slice of real life startles you awake.
Continue reading...February 18, 2022
Surrealism goes global, artists open their studios and Damien Hirst shows a macabre master – the week in art
The Tate’s ambitious surrealism survey opens its doors and the Ikon Gallery opens up 100 years of artists’ studios – all in your weekly dispatch
Surrealism Beyond Borders
An ambitious attempt to see surrealism not just as something that happened in Paris, Belgium and Spain but as a global movement with branches from Egypt to Mexico.
• Tate Modern, London, 24 February to 29 August.
February 16, 2022
Pissarro: Father of Impressionism review – the ‘old man’ who was always pushing art forward
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Camille Pissarro may be less famous than Monet, Renoir or Degas but his genius lay in always making you think, not feel
Camille Pissarro isn’t worried if he looks past it with his big white beard. He doesn’t care if he appears weak. He looks straight back at you from his self-portrait at the start of this exhibition, over the top of his spectacles, aged and maybe myopic. He is staring in the mirror, seeing himself honestly, with a grey Paris street on view through the window behind him.
Pissarro’s belief in art as a fundamentally honest enterprise shines through in this intimate exhibition that digs into avant-garde lives. His warmth is disarming. There are portraits of his wife, Julie, who was a cook’s assistant in his parents’ house when he fell in love with her, and some of their eight children, especially Lucien, who was evidently the apple of his father’s eye and grew up to become an artist. A drawing of a family picnic by his second son, Georges remembers a childhood among geniuses: while Julie cooks on a campfire, white-bearded dad talks to friends including Gauguin. Another friend, Cézanne, ignores them to paint the landscape.
Continue reading...February 14, 2022
The World of Stonehenge review – even the stone axes amaze
British Museum, London
This fiercely emotional exhibition venerates the people of ancient Britain, uncovering a mystical landscape of gods and kings
Stonehenge is a place you just have to go and see. An exhibition inspired by it is surely doomed to fail – the mystery killed by cases of broken beakers. But The World of Stonehenge is as magical as a great barrow full of glinting treasure. It hooks you with a wooden trident (two of these are on display) and plunges you into primal waters of the imagination. It is a knockout epic.
It can’t include Stonehenge, of course, but it does have Seahenge. This monument is made of wood and had to be removed from its seashore home to preserve it – so here it returns from the past. Gnarled wooden columns stand in the twilight. You go up to the semicircle and stare closer into their ridged brown surfaces. Maybe you glimpse a face, an eye, a shadowy form. You know these are not just old posts but the embodiment of ancient powers whose names we have forgotten, for now.
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