Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 53

Bridget Riley at 90: a master who can leave you feeling elated, liberated – and even seasick

Riley swung the 60s with her reality-shifting creations. Now, in a new show to mark her 90th birthday, you can see them in all their glory

Bridget Riley gave abstract art the neurological impact of a mind-altering substance six decades ago when she started painting black-and-white spirals, waves and folds that confuse perception. A new exhibition to mark her 90th birthday earlier this year is called Pleasures of Sight, but the happiness she provokes in us is really in our brains. The delight of Riley’s art comes from the way she can make the mind see mountains and valleys, vertigo-inducing swoops and sudden movements that are not there.

She is the only British painter to change the history of abstract art. In the 1950s, the most exciting art in the world came from New York. Jackson Pollock, whose work made a huge impression on Riley when she saw his famous show at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 1958, made painting feel like a living “action” instead of a framed picture: he and the other American action painters created art on an embracing scale, one that you could fall into. Riley felt its power yet changed its nature. Since the start of the 60s she has painted on that same big, open, potentially limitless scale yet with a scientific realism. Instead of relying on woozy romantic feeling, she aims for quantifiable, physical results.

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From snubbing Mick Jagger to explaining the cosmos: the secret life of MC Escher and his impossible worlds

The artist’s mind-boggling works – full of stairways leading nowhere and water flowing uphill – defy logic. But did they also foresee the second world war? And why was he so riled by the Stones frontman?

You are walking up a staircase that winds up to the top of a tall square tower. It ascends one side, then the next, then the next – and then suddenly you are right back where you started. This is the kind of problem people who are trapped in the geometrically impossible, yet still strangely plausible, worlds of MC Escher have to deal with all the time. In his mind-boggling creations, dimensions collide and normality dissolves. Looking into his pictures is like standing on the very edge of a cliff – and being right down at the bottom at the same time.

The Dutchman’s illusions have been famous and beloved since the 1950s, when spaced-out fans first started claiming to see hemp plants hidden in his art. And now we have Kaleidocycles, a Taschen book about the artist featuring paper puzzle kits that allow you to actually build his paradoxical structures at home, unlikely as that may seem. The tome has just been reissued in time for Christmas and the 50th anniversary of his death next year. His work does seem perfect for the festive season, given it’s all fun and games. Or at least that’s how it seems, initially.

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Feeling lonely? Film, music, art and more that will put you in good company

From the stark horror of Hamsun’s novel to Fassbinder’s commentary on love and racism, our critics choose great cultural works about being alone

Accept no slow acoustic covers – there are not enough Greatest Songs of All Time playlists out there to adequately contain the magnificence of Robyn’s original heartbreak hit Dancing on My Own. Watching on as an ex-partner finds new love in the club, the Swedish songwriter finds a bittersweet haven in the euphoria of dance, weaving a gossamer thread between joy and despair. It set the blueprint for a whole new school of sad-banger pop but, 11 years on, nobody has quite managed to ascend to Dancing on My Own’s cathartic heights. Pour a glass, play it loud and hug yourself tight: you deserve this. Jenessa Williams

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Psychedelic cats, Louise Bourgeois’ dreams and the world’s first coffee house – the week in art

Louis Wain’s extraordinary cats, uncanny surrealism in Liverpool and a look at Islamic coffee culture from Sufi pioneers to the Ottoman empire – all in your weekly dispatch

Derek Jarman
The visionary film-maker was also a powerful artist. This is a full survey of a great British radical.
• Manchester Art Gallery until 10 April

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‘If only it actually served pints’: our critic on the pub that took the Turner prize

The Array Collective’s recreation of a pub is a cheerful call for diversity in Northern Ireland. But it’s like a theatre set without a play – and has only a thin smear of artistic meaning

The verdict is in for the most virtuous Turner prize ever. Salmon farming may be ecologically sleazy, community fellowship on the streets of Cardiff a good thing, sound systems a radical subculture, and neurodiversity in need of understanding – but the most important good cause of all is anti-sectarian pro-diversity activism in Northern Ireland. The judges have recognised warm and fluffy protest artists Array for their “hopeful and dynamic artwork”. It’s hard to see this as a purely artistic victory. By only shortlisting collectives with strong social messages, this year’s prize has put aesthetic achievement pretty low on its list of “values”.

Admittedly, Array did create one of the most artistic moments in this year’s Turner. Their cosy, ramshackle installation of an alternative pub with stuffed dummies, LGBTQ+ posters and a corner bar suggests a benign version of American artist Ed Kienholz’s classic sculpture The Beanery – except he created his copy of a Los Angeles bar 56 years ago.

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All hail Cat Jesus! The fantastic feline artist behind Benedict Cumberbatch’s latest biopic

Louis Wain’s endearing drawings of lovable cats made him a star of the Victorian era – but his work morphed into intense, delirious visions as his mental health fell apart

Cat Jesus, as the work is known to staff, can be found on a painted mirror in the archives of the Bethlem hospital’s Museum of the Mind. It was created by the celebrated cartoonist of comical cats and Bethlem psychiatric hospital patient Louis Wain, whose art is about to go on show here. One Christmas, Wain was asked to help with the institutional decorations. He asked if he could paint on mirrors – and the results still survive. In Cat Jesus, a feline Father Christmas holds up a white kitten with a sunflower halo around its head while other cats salute the radiant offspring, in front of a Taj Mahal-like building in a fantasy jungle.

It really looks like holy art for a new cat religion. You can see that too in another picture of a white cat, who stares at you and seems to say: “I am happy because everybody loves me.” Wain had already depicted, as his contemporary HG Wells put it, “a cat society”. Born in 1860, he was a star of the golden age of British illustration. Pictorial magazines such as The Illustrated London News were hugely popular and still used drawings, not photographs. Wain drew cats doing human things – playing cricket, taking tea, going to the doctor – and the pet-loving public lapped it up.

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Down but not out: film, theatre, art and more to help deal with failure

From Oscar Isaac’s underperforming folk singer to The Good Place, Guardian critics offer up bittersweet culture for when success eludes you

Pinching together the lapels of his inadequate jacket against a freezing New York February, cat-losing folk singer Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) trudges in slush-filled shoes back from a failed audition in Chicago, to fail a second time: his gig at the Gaslight Cafe becomes just a footnote to Bob Dylan’s appearance that same night. Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis kept faith with its themes by underperforming at the box office but, like the songs Llewyn soulfully performs to an audience of practically no one, its tragicomic portrait of defeat retains a lovely, sad-eyed warmth, as a rare and absurdly comforting minor-key anthem for life’s also-rans. Jessica Kiang

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Black British painting, gay New York photography and Dr Eno will see you now – the week in art

Tate Britain is preparing the definitive survey of Caribbean British art while Alvin Baltrop cruises the Hudson River piers and modern art turns therapeutic – all in your weekly dispatch

Life Between Islands
Alberta Whittle, Sonia Boyce and Hurvin Anderson are among the stars of what promises to be a definitive survey of Caribbean British art since the 1950s.
• Tate Britain, London, from 1 December to 3 April

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Lubaina Himid review – jolly postmodern pop art made me long for a slap in the face

Tate Modern, London
Himid’s paintings, soundworks and sculptures are haunted by historical pain, fizzing with colour – and too polite by far

Those wags at Tate Modern! They spend 21 years telling you figurative painting is dead: 21 years of film projections, dance and guys screaming on monitors. Then they give an old-school figurative painter a retrospective and tell us this is what modern looks like now.

Lubaina Himid’s exhibition in the museum’s Blavatnik Building, where time and performance-based art usually rule, is full of the kind of jolly postmodernist pop you usually see at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. The vibe this museum projects is heavy and apocalyptic, in keeping with its daunting industrial scale. But this artist is all whimsy. She starts her retrospective with a set of paintings about DIY. Safety instructions from a manual are written out next to pictures of cogs, nails and tools. On speakers nearby, in one of several sound art pieces Himid has created with Magda Stawarska-Beavan, these instructions are repeated. It’s like a very, very soft version of Jasper Johns. And it turns out this whole show is about as dangerous as a painting of a hammer. It doesn’t escape from art into life.

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Fabergé’s trinkets, Frida Kahlo’s third eye and David Shrigley’s balls – the week in art

The V&A luxuriates in Russian craftsmanship, Lubaina Himid comes to Tate Modern, and Shrigley sets up a tennis ball exchange – all in your weekly dispatch

Lubaina Himid
Painting, conceptual critiques and robust satire influenced by Hogarth all help make Himid one of the crucial artists of our time.
• Tate Modern, London, 25 November to 3 July.

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