Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 56

Anish Kapoor on vaginas, recovering from breakdown and his violent new work: ‘Freud would have a field day’

Why has the artist painted scenes of bloodletting, decapitation and a woman with 10,000 breasts? He’s scared to talk about it – but he can explain his fascination with vaginas and the world’s blackest black

At 67, Anish Kapoor, with a knighthood, a Turner prize and a retrospective due at the Venice Biennale next year, appears determined to strip away his own artistic skin. Like Marsyas – the satyr flayed alive by Apollo, whose gory fate Kapoor once commemorated in a 150m-long, 10-storey-high sculpture – the artist is exposing his innards. That’s the only way to describe his latest works. One of the world’s most renowned sculptors is about to go public as, well, a painter. Yet it is the content of the works he’s about to unveil that may disconcert. “They’re very, very violent,” he confesses. “And I just wonder what the hell that has to do with what’s in me. I can’t sit here and psychoanalyse them. I don’t know how to. But I recognise that it’s there.”

The works, about to go on display at Modern Art Oxford, are beautifully painted yet brutal: full of images of bloodletting, decapitation and disembowelling. Kapoor seems to have taught himself to paint the human figure in order to desecrate it. At his London studio, there are stacks of these blood-soaked canvases depicting huge wounded bits of bodies and purple organs spattered on the walls.

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Noguchi review – this isn’t art, it’s luxury lighting

Barbican, London
Beautifully spaced and tasteful, Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi’s work would look great in a high-end kitchen. But as art, it’s a total bore

If you like hanging out in high-end lighting shops, the Barbican art gallery is the place for you right now. Paper lampshades are everywhere, from tall wavy ones on the floor to deluxe versions of the spherical lantern shades you can buy anywhere. Beautifully spaced, warm with glowing light, artfully ornamented with objects in stone, ceramics and bronze, this survey of the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi is a must for design buffs – and a total bore for anyone in search of true art.

There is no punch to it, no emotional or psychic energy, just a gentle progress of clever but harmless creations. There couldn’t be a sharper contrast with the Barbican’s eye-opening recent show of the great iconoclast Jean Dubuffet, in which every ugly quirk of art brut gripped you. Noguchi’s smooth creations in the same spaces didn’t even fill my mind for the time I looked at them. It was as if they had no reality at all.

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Turner prize 2021 review – lashings of creativity in a collectivist clash

Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry
The decision to have only artists collectives nominated has resulted in a show that ranges from a recreation of a 1980s Northern Irish gay bar to pretentious prattling about fish

Celebrating the creativity of people who see the world in a non-standard way has a radical history in art. It goes back to the German doctor Hans Prinzhorn and his collection of asylum patients’ art that inspired the expressionists and surrealists. And let’s not forget the greatest outsider artist of all, Vincent van Gogh.

Yet it’s one thing for art experts to hail outsiders. It’s another to abolish the line between outside and inside, to include such art in the culture of the establishment on equal terms. But that is what Project Art Works do in their emotional room in this year’s Turner prize exhibition. Project Art Works provide the materials, space, tutoring and exhibiting opportunities for people they term neurodiverse to make art. They get my vote and I suspect the popular vote too.

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Hokusai: The Great Picture Book of Everything review – wonders beyond The Great Wave

British Museum, London
Rare black and white sketches by the Japanese genius are magnificent explorations of the human condition

Like me, you may think of the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai, whose long and brilliantly productive life ended in 1849, and see a blast of blue. The sensual colours of his woodblock prints, those exquisite shades of sea and sky, are what stay with you. But the British Museum’s new show strips away those seductive colours and reduces Hokusai to black and white. It’s a daring thing to do.

As a story of detective work and rediscovery, this show is a sensational event. In June 2019, a set of 103 drawings mistakenly attributed to another artist went on sale in Paris. Expert dealer Israel Goldman recognised this as a lost body of work by Hokusai and the British Museum’s authority Timothy Clark agreed – so the museum bought them. It’s a rare good news story at a challenging time. But if you come expecting a blockbuster you may be surprised to find a sombre, low-lit show in the museum’s drawings gallery. Stick with it. The rewards are massive.

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Hokusai: The Great Picture Book of Everything review – beyond The Great Wave on a philosophical quest

British Museum, London
Rare black and white sketches by the Japanese genius are magnificent explorations of the human condition

Like me, you may think of the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai, whose long and brilliantly productive life ended in 1849, and see a blast of blue. The sensual colours of his woodblock prints, those exquisite shades of sea and sky, are what stay with you. But the British Museum’s new show strips away those seductive colours and reduces Hokusai to black and white. It’s a daring thing to do.

As a story of detective work and rediscovery, this show is a sensational event. In June 2019, a set of 103 drawings mistakenly attributed to another artist went on sale in Paris. Expert dealer Israel Goldman recognised this as a lost body of work by Hokusai and the British Museum’s authority Timothy Clark agreed – so the museum bought them. It’s a rare good news story at a challenging time. But if you come expecting a blockbuster you may be surprised to find a sombre, low-lit show in the museum’s drawings gallery. Stick with it. The rewards are massive.

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Turner prize 2021: a collective effort to make art radical again

Pickled cows and unmade beds: the art award has always challenged convention. But in 2021 it is going further, by abolishing individual artists altogether

The Turner prize has given us some great characters. Grayson Perry was a little-known alternative potter before this annual competition for avant garde British art launched him as a commentator and media personality. Tracey Emin became a national sensation when she showed her unmade bed in 1999, though she lost out to Steve McQueen – yet another talent for whom it was the beginning of great things.

But it’s a fair bet that no individual will become rich or famous as a result of this year’s Turner exhibition at Coventry’s Herbert Art Gallery. This is no slight on the 80 or so people I count behind the five collectives on this year’s shortlist. It’s just that you have to scan the small print to even find these folks’ names. The Turner has turned on itself.

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Lightning bolts, smart toilets and radical pottery – the week in art

Printmaking genius Hokusai is at the British Museum, the Turner comes to Coventry, and ancient nomads pitch up in Cambridge – all in your weekly dispatch

Hokusai: The Great Picture Book of Everything
A unique cache of drawings by one of the world’s best-loved artists offers a closer look at the genius who created the Great Wave.
• British Museum, London, from 30 September

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Gold of the Great Steppe review – breathtaking exhibition reveals lives of history’s ‘barbarians’

Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
From their astounding burial mounds to their dazzling horses dressed up as mythical beasts, this exhibition about Kazakhstan’s ancient nomads shows the power of archaeology to revive the dead

A young archer was buried around 2,700 years ago in the foothills of the Tarbagatay mountains of eastern Kazakhstan. In 2018, his bones were found preserved in the permafrost, surrounded by exquisite ornaments and weapons: beautifully observed figures of deer, finely crafted holders for his bow and arrows and dagger, myriad tiny beads – “and everywhere”, as Howard Carter said of Tutankhamun’s tomb, “the glitter of gold”.

Great archaeological discoveries don’t have to be full of gold, but it helps. That warm yellow metal catches your eye almost wherever you look in the Fitzwilliam’s stunning snapshot of archaeology in action. Gold scabbards, gold torques, gold animals – they all light up a display that also includes miraculously preserved felt and leather, as well as reconstructions of the ancient people of Kazakhstan in their woollen finery, on horses dressed up to resemble mythical beasts.

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A smirking masterwork and Christo’s posthumous triumph – the week in art

Hals dazzles London, Shonibare devises a Royal revamp and Liverpool gets a lesson in sex and death – all in your weekly dispatch

Frans Hals
A constellation of engrossing portraits by this great Dutch artist focuses attention on the Wallace Collection’s most charismatic treasure, his masterpiece The Laughing Cavalier.
• Wallace Collection, London, 22 September to 30 January.

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A frisson of filth: there’s more to Frans Hals than The Laughing Cavalier

Why did Van Gogh, Manet and Cezanne worship this incendiary painter of everyday people? Because, as a new show reveals, his range and compassion were staggering

Not many of the world’s greatest works of art can be called funny. Yet The Laughing Cavalier by Frans Hals has an undeniable cocky humour. A painting of this unknown man has hung in London’s Wallace Collection since the 19th century, his flamboyant upward turned moustache and tiny point of a beard setting off the confident brightness of his eyes above a huge frilly ruff and a sleeve laced with gold. Now the gallery is about to celebrate its most famous painting in an exhibition offering a chance to look closer at other male portraits by Hals.

So what has his cavalier got to laugh about? Maybe what’s tickling him is the fact that a Dutch artist who died poor in 1666 would help inspire the birth of modern art. We’re conditioned to think of this as something that suddenly happened in 1900, but the Paris avant garde had already kicked away the foundations of the past. From Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet to Paul Cézanne, these 19th-century rebels pulverised convention and forced art into their brutal, ironic modern world of railways, brothels and absinthe. And the incendiary creator of The Laughing Cavalier was their hero.

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