Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 52
January 20, 2022
America in Crisis review – photographs of a country on the brink of civil war
Saatchi Gallery, London
The sorry state of the nation is spelt out as images of robotic stormtroopers at the George Floyd protests stand next to those taken during the turbulent 60s
On 30 May 2020, photographer Philip Montgomery captured a police charge during protests in Minneapolis against the killing of George Floyd. The cops look like giant metal insects, every human part of them hidden. You can’t see faces through the glinting visors, or flesh under their robotic armour as they approach with guns blazing through a pale mist of teargas smoke.
Blown up to the size of a painting, Montgomery’s spooky monochrome news photo looks like a premonition of the future in the Saatchi Gallery’s engrossing, unsettling exhibition America in Crisis. These sci-fi American stormtroopers mirror the warnings, a year on from the attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters, that the world’s most powerful democracy is heading for a second civil war. Yet America in Crisis is not only about the future. It’s about how the present may be understood by the past.
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January 14, 2022
Walk into a human body, book dealers’ vandalised treasures and a 2D world – the week in art
Alison Katz gets autobiographical , the V&A recovers images cut from medieval manuscripts and Emily Speed sees life in two dimensions – all in your weekly dispatch
Wang Gongxin: In-Between
Multimedia installations that explore by modern means the ancient painterly problems of light and shadow.
• White Cube Mason’s Yard, London, from 19 January to 26 February.
January 7, 2022
A soldier’s vision, astro masterpieces and the treasures of Kazakhstan – the week in art
Pre-Soviet Kazakh culture goes on display, Turner steps in to bring fireworks to Edinburgh, and US painter and army veteran Marcus Jansen has a solo show – all in your weekly dispatch
Marcus Jansen
Visceral paintings of a world gone mad by this US army veteran.
• Almine Rech, London, from 13 Jan to 22 February
January 4, 2022
The Bored Ape NFT craze is all about ego and money, not art
Eminem has just joined the exclusive club of celebrity investors willing to pay heaps of cryptocurrency for NFTs that are nothing more than derivative monkey cartoons
Bored Ape #79 looks almost as bored as I feel when I think about NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and their supposedly seismic impact on art. My jaw slides, my eyelids hang down and I want to pick lice from my fur.
Even though I can identify with Bored Ape #79, I won’t be buying it, unlike Eminem who has bought another in this highly fashionable NFT “art” brand that looks slightly like him. It’s called EminApe and sports a military-urban peaked cap above its enervated face. He reportedly paid around $450,000 (£334,000) for it.
Continue reading...December 28, 2021
Howling, crouching, horrifying – why are Francis Bacon’s animals so nightmarish?
Bacon was no sentimental painter of animals. As the Royal Academy’s Man and Beast blockbuster will show, he used apes, dogs, bulls and owls to create his own personal mythology of the perverse
More cultural highlights of 2022Man and Beast, as the Royal Academy’s winter blockbuster is subtitled, are the same thing when Francis Bacon is looking at them. They are both meat. The artist’s painted world is a butcher’s shop: slabs of beef hang vertically in his triptychs among umbrellas and swastikas, bisected beasts drained of blood, flattened into red and white fatty flesh. But the people in his paintings are just as beastly – and just as butchered. Bodies wrestle and kiss. Nudes are splayed on dirty mattresses. We are just biological stuff.
Bacon would surely have seen the irony that the Royal Academy’s survey of his art through the lens of his interest in animals has been delayed by a virus. For Bacon sees no hierarchy of organisms, no sacred specialness in the human species. When the exhibition finally opens at the end of January, it will unveil a truly Darwinian artist in whose eyes a pope and a chimpanzee are equally tragicomic.
Continue reading...December 27, 2021
Van Gogh’s self-portraits and colossal venues: 2022’s best art and architecture
It’s Happy New Ear for the impressionist, Manchester and Folkestone’s shiny new mega-venues open and Stonehenge gets the blockbuster treatment
More cultural highlights of 2022 Continue reading...December 20, 2021
The best art and architecture of 2021 – the year the galleries reopened
As the lights came back on, Jean Dubuffet was recast as an incendiary prophet, Poussin revealed his raunchy side – and a giant Swedish ‘plyscraper’ showed the miracle of wood. Our critics rank the highlights of 2021
• More on the best culture of 2021
December 17, 2021
From Bruegel’s boozers to Hirst’s horrific ashtray: what are the wildest parties in art?
Summon some Flemish yokels. Send for some Venetian aristocrats. Then open the ale and party to the sound of bagpipes … if you can’t get to a Christmas bash this year, come to art’s best knees-ups instead
Has your Christmas party been cancelled? Or perhaps you never got an invitation in the first place. Fear not. However socially distanced this festive season becomes, you can always soak up some fun from the great party scenes in art.
Would you rather dance in the village square with beered-up peasants from the paintbrush of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, or glug red wine and get your clothes off with Titian’s boozy revellers? They are not so different. After all, everyone’s the same after a few drinks. Although painted nearly 50 years apart, at different ends of Europe, Titian’s Bacchanal of the Andrians and Bruegel’s Peasant Dance both depict large crowds united in a wild yet graceful rite in which there’s room for many telling details: two villagers snogging to the sound of bagpipes, a youth balancing a pitcher of wine at a dangerous angle, a rustic couple dancing hand in hand, a woman lying back in satisfaction.
Continue reading...Kapoor experiments, Sickert broods and aliens visit Tate Modern – the week in art
A great sculptor tries out painting, Edwardian unease comes to Liverpool and Anicka Yi’s strange creatures continue to float through the Turbine Hall – all in your weekly dispatch
Anish Kapoor
Explosions of colour and intimations of horror: the paintings of a great sculptor who’s not afraid to try something totally new.
• Modern Art Oxford until 13 Feb
December 10, 2021
Landscapes from Obama’s portraitist and 17,000 hand-painted flowers – the week in art
Kehinde Wiley is at the National Gallery, photography catches fire and Josef Albers puts the human into expressionism – all in your weekly dispatch
Kehinde Wiley
Barack Obama’s official portraitist responds to the National Gallery’s landscape paintings with video art and five new canvases.
• National Gallery, London, until 18 April
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