Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 60
June 18, 2021
Fluid bodies, decadent fables and a rescue for Gormley’s iron army – the week in art
Christina Quarles entwines broken bodies, Helen Frankenthaler is like a ticket to New York and Barbara Hepworth searches for secret music – all in your weekly dispatch
Christina Quarles: In Likeness
Paintings of furiously entwined, fragmentary, fluid bodies by this hot American artist.
• South London Gallery until 29 August
‘Like a Rothko dancing wildly to jazz’ – Helen Frankenthaler review
Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, London
She invented staggering new ways to paint, but it was the men who followed her who got all the credit. Now this towering figure is finally getting her due
You generally have to go to New York to do abstract expressionism properly. For a moment, among Helen Frankenthaler’s very, very big paintings, I thought I was there among the skyscrapers, until I looked out of the window and saw some blokes sweating outside a Georgian sandwich shop.
Forgetting the everyday again, my eyes sank into a purple haze. Frankenthaler invented a way of painting by letting colour soak into an unprepared canvas on her studio floor. The results, all around you in this brilliant selection, are entrancing and authoritative. The colours are definitely inside the surface, not on it. They are fused into the unprimed fabric: pooled, puddled, and left to dry. Then, gazing into her own paint lagoons, Frankenthaler has sometimes put a line around a blot, seen a face in a stain, an island in a spillage.
Related: ‘He was aware of racist pigeonholes’: how Basquiat took inspiration from jazz, hip-hop and no wave
Gagosian Grosvenor Hill until 27 August.
Continue reading...From Tubular Bells to Horses: 10 of the best pieces of album artwork
The most eye-popping record sleeves, including Pink Floyd’s floating pigs, De La Soul’s flower power and Patti Smith’s simple portraiture
Pre-internet, it could be hard to find anything out about music, so a record cover might be the only information you had access to. At primary school, I learned that Tubular Bells was in a controversial film called The Exorcist (which at the time I thought was porn). I got the album for its mysterious shiny tube floating in the clouds like a UFO – and the music inside matched that soaring image.
Related: The Guide: Staying In – sign up for our home entertainment tips
Continue reading...June 14, 2021
‘Cultural appropriation is a two-way thing’: Yinka Shonibare on Picasso, masks and the fashion for black artists
Picasso was so enthralled by African art, he used it to start a revolution. But did it give rise to a fantasy of Africa that still endures? British-Nigerian artist Shonibare tells us why he’s revisiting that seismic moment
In 1998, in a hilarious work called Diary of a Victorian Dandy, Yinka Shonibare inserted himself, impeccably attired, into the sitting rooms, drawing rooms, billiards rooms and bedrooms of high society Victorian Britain, invariably causing a sensation in each of the perfectly mocked-up photographs. The work mimics William Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress, but instead of ending up in Bedlam, like Hogarth’s protagonist, Shonibare the Dandy triumphs over white society at everything from financial dealing to fine conversation. It all climaxes with him having a great time in a brothel with no apparent guilt or punishment. Well, it was the 1990s – and Shonibare was a bona fide Young British Artist. Also, he says with a laugh, “Hogarth was the first YBA.”
Shonibare has played plenty of games with art and history since, including refitting a model of HMS Victory – that most British of all vessels, the flagship of the Battle of Trafalgar – with sails of (supposedly) African batik fabric and sticking it in a giant bottle. But now the British-Nigerian artist is turning his attention to the birth of modern art in Picasso’s Paris. Not many artists come away from an encounter with Pablo looking good. A 2012 Tate exhibition about the Spaniard and modern British art left Henry Moore and Francis Bacon looking very small indeed. But Shonibare engages with the old Minotaur in a relaxed, funny yet profoundly insightful way.
Yinka Shonibare: African Spirits of Modernism is at Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, until 31 July.
Continue reading...June 13, 2021
Masks, monsters and masterpieces: Yinka Shonibare squares up to Picasso
Picasso was so enthralled by African art, he used it to start a revolution. But did it give rise to a fantasy of Africa that still endures? British-Nigerian artist Shonibare tells us why he’s revisiting that seismic moment
In 1998, in a hilarious work called Diary of a Victorian Dandy, Yinka Shonibare inserted himself, impeccably attired, into the sitting rooms, drawing rooms, billiards rooms and bedrooms of high society Victorian Britain, invariably causing a sensation in each of the perfectly mocked-up photographs. The work mimics William Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress, but instead of ending up in Bedlam, like Hogarth’s protagonist, Shonibare the Dandy triumphs over white society at everything from financial dealing to fine conversation. It all climaxes with him having a great time in a brothel with no apparent guilt or punishment. Well, it was the 1990s – and Shonibare was a bona fide Young British Artist. Also, he says with a laugh, “Hogarth was the first YBA.”
Shonibare has played plenty of games with art and history since, including refitting a model of HMS Victory – that most British of all vessels, the flagship of the Battle of Trafalgar – with sails of (supposedly) African batik fabric and sticking it in a giant bottle. But now the British-Nigerian artist is turning his attention to the birth of modern art in Picasso’s Paris. Not many artists come away from an encounter with Pablo looking good. A 2012 Tate exhibition about the Spaniard and modern British art left Henry Moore and Francis Bacon looking very small indeed. But Shonibare engages with the old Minotaur in a relaxed, funny yet profoundly insightful way.
Yinka Shonibare: African Spirits of Modernism is at Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, until 31 July.
Continue reading...June 11, 2021
Damien Hirst’s death obsession and intimate visions of Amazon life – the week in art
Hirst’s macabre dead-fly art, Claudia Andujar’s Yanomami photographs and Jimmy Robert’s history of the Caribbean – all in your weekly dispatch
Damien Hirst: Relics and Fly Paintings
The latest exhibition in Hirst’s year-long occupation of this space sees him at his most macabre and death-obsessed, from black paintings made with dead flies to a flayed statue of Saint Bartholomew.
• Gagosian Britannia Street, London, until end of 2021.
June 4, 2021
Shonibare takes on Picasso and female sculptors break the mould – the week in art
Curtiss turns to flesh, Oxford gets a history lesson and Colston emerges from the river – all in your weekly dispatch
Yinka Shonibare CBE
A provocative encounter in which Shonibare takes on Picasso, exploring the Spanish master’s collection of masks and modern art’s debt to Africa.
• Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, until 31 July.
June 2, 2021
Sweet, sincere and humanising: could Keir Starmer’s oh-so-serious student picture win votes?
The Labour leader’s portrait from his Leeds University days reveals a young man with a vision, who might just appeal to that key electoral group: Joy Division dads
The torch of Labour leadership has truly passed to a new generation. Tony Blair’s student look was long hair and Jagger struts in his 70s student rock band Ugly Rumours. Keir Starmer’s image-conscious university photo from 1982, as seen in last night’s interview with Piers Morgan, brings us hurtling into the age of New Romanticism.
Blair failed in music, but turned politics into superstardom. Young Starmer seems to have shared a passion for subculture, at a moment in pop history when image and emotion were elegantly entwined. Can he recapture the youthful charm pictured here to make love tear Boris and the electorate apart (again)?
Continue reading...May 28, 2021
Ai-Da the robot painter, Iranian epics and a gaze at God – the week in art
An uncanny robot gets creative, Iran presents 5,000 years of culture, a Polish chronicle makes his debut, and someone puts a rocket on the fourth plinth – all in your weekly dispatch
Ai-Da: Portrait of the Robot
Enter the uncanny valley with this realistic humanoid robot who can draw “herself”. Is that art? So what is art? Plenty to think about. Read more.
Design Museum, London until 29 August
May 25, 2021
Five thousand years of mystical magnificence: Epic Iran at the V&A – review
V&A, London
Persepolis and Isfahan are dazzlingly brought to life in a blockbuster show that explores five jaw-dropping millennia of cultural history, from soaring domes to charging horses
Typical. You go for months without any culture, then 5,000 years of it come along at once. That’s what the V&A’s luxury coach tour of a blockbuster promises, and delivers, including quite brilliant recreations of Iran’s two most renowned sites, Persepolis and Isfahan. Epic Iran shows there is a cultural history that connects the country as it is today with the people who lived here five millennia ago. To put this in perspective, that’s like telling the story of Britain from before Stonehenge to the present and hoping it all connects up somehow. But in Iran, it does.
That’s partly because of a pride in history that preserved traditions across the millennia. The most important document of that is The Shahnameh, The Book of Kings, written at the start of the 11th century CE by the poet Ferdowsi. Iran had been converted to Islam in the seventh century, but Ferdowsi’s epic is packed with the heroic deeds and bloody battles of the ancient, pre-Islamic Sasanian empire. It is also written in Persian, as opposed to Arabic. There are gorgeous manuscripts of this classic. A masterpiece made in Tabriz in the 1500s for the Safavid ruler is open on a battle scene in which bejewelled horsemen charge each other across a sea-like expanse of blue: the painter takes time to depict little flowers blooming on the battlefield, just before the horses trample them.
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