Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 61
May 21, 2021
Chimps in lingerie from a magical master – Michael Armitage: Paradise Edict review
Royal Academy, London
The Kenyan painter conjures up delirious forest landscapes and surreal scenes of African city life. But there are dangers lurking in this paradise – as well as superb spoofs on European painting
The holes in Michael Armitage’s paintings are worrying. He paints on lubugo bark cloth, which plainly isn’t as strong as canvas and naturally breaks in places to create these disappearances. It’s a lovely effect, suggesting gaps in history and conscience. But what’s worrying is the thought that works that are already cracking apart may not last long – and these masterpieces of modern painting deserve to be seen in museums many years from now.
Armitage paints deliriously green forest landscapes and surreal scenes of African city life. Wouldn’t you like to be in this tropical paradise? Especially now, when it’s hard to travel and standing in a gallery with a mask can feel pretty exotic. But cruel scenes take shape in this heat. In the most captivating and epic work here, The Paradise Edict from 2019, figures emerge in outline from an alluring panorama, torturing and being tortured. Naked pairs of legs are held by coolly violent hands. And that calm, inviting pool of water you wanted to swim in? There’s a very big crocodile crawling out of it, half hidden in the mist of green. This apparent idyll turns out to be a nightmare reminiscent of Goya.
Related: The grand reopening: our critics pick the best art shows for 2021
Michael Armitage: Paradise Edict is at the Royal Academy from 22 May until 19 September.
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A young master of the grotesque and down a rabbit hole at the V&A – the week in art
Michael Armitage’s paintings seriously (and amusingly) impress, Alice’s wonderland continues to inspire, and Matthew Barney unveils his new film – all in your weekly dispatch
Michael Armitage
Superbly rich and subtle paintings that are by turns beautiful, grotesque, tragic and hilarious, by a major young talent who already rivals the masters. See this.
Royal Academy, London, 22 May-19 September.
May 20, 2021
Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy review – a fish’n’chips surrealist
Whitechapel Gallery, London
She shocked pre-war Britain with a hat made of seafood, covered a plaster head in giraffe hide and created dream-like boxes of corals and shellfish. Eileen Agar had some commendably wild notions
A vintage Pathé newsreel from 1936 is playing on a loop at the Whitechapel Gallery with a commentary so comically steeped in archaic sexism, the “jokes” are hard to decipher. It’s a light item about an artist called Eileen Agar, who has made herself a hat covered in fake seafood, in which she is filmed walking along a London street while people stop and stare, amazed.
It says as much about Britain before the second world war as it does about Agar, whose artistic life the Whitechapel has been reclaimed in a copious exhibition. This was a society in which wearing a mildly eccentric hat was considered outrageous enough to get you on the news. The people who gasp at Agar seem to belong to an ordered, rule-bound Britain that’s hard to imagine now. It’s not the past we’ve been watching in The Pursuit of Love – this actual footage from the 1930s reveals an age too drab to inspire nostalgia.
Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy is showing at the Whitechapel Gallery until 29 August.
May 18, 2021
Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser review – a wonderful tumble down the rabbit hole
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Inspiring everything from Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit to Heston Blumenthal’s mock turtle soup, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland continues to feel delightfully modern
To get into the V&A’s blockbuster about the influence of Alice, I had to stand at a security gate for ages, waiting to be called forward into the silent museum. It was a tiny bit Kafkaesque. Then I remembered Kafka was probably influenced by Carroll so it was in fact Carrollesque. Both Carroll and Kafka create slippery, unstable realities in which hapless characters face menacing trials. They both define our world – but one was a modernist and the other a 19th-century don. This is the question this hugely enjoyable and thought-provoking exhibition raises: how did a Victorian children’s author create one of the myths that sum up the modern condition?
Continue reading...May 14, 2021
From brutal Dubuffet to nice guy Nero: what to see as art exhibitions open
As galleries reopen their doors, we preview a visual feast that includes Rodin, Eileen Agar, Paula Rego, Matthew Barney – and an out-of-body experience in Liverpool
More events to enjoy: Classical | PopProvocateur, founder of art brut, or raw art, Jean Dubuffet embraced the arbitrary and irrational, using crude materials and working with an ironic rejection of skill and finesse. Immersed in French intellectual and artistic life, the show focuses both on Dubuffet’s own work and on his extensive collection of outsider art. It’s the first major UK exhibition of this complex, fascinating artist in more than 50 years.
Barbican Art Gallery, London, 17 May-22 August.
Eileen Agar’s seaside surrealism and Thomas Becket’s lost medieval Britain – the week in art
We also have the wildly subversive Jean Dubuffet, the making of Rodin and Tracey Emin’s unflinching self-portraits – all in your weekly dispatch
Eileen Agar
One of the most imaginative and quirky early 20th-century British artists gets a fresh look – is Agar’s seaside surrealism due a revival?
• Whitechapel Gallery, London from 19 May until 29 August.
May 13, 2021
A spectacular gorefest – Thomas Becket: Murder and the Making of a Saint review
British Museum, London
The archbishop’s slaying and martyrdom transfixed the medieval world – and inspired some magnificently murderous art and artefacts that are still shocking today
If you thought medieval religious art was all clasped hands and uplifted eyes, then prepare yourself for the gorefests that shudder through this brilliant new show like a broadsword hitting bone. On 29 December 1170, four knights sent by King Henry II entered the holy sanctum of Canterbury Cathedral with swords drawn and slew its archbishop, Thomas Becket, a flamboyant, charismatic politician who’d started his career as the king’s right-hand man then became a thorn in his side as a champion of church over crown. The murder – whether or not Henry really intended it – rapidly became notorious across Europe and Becket was revered as a modern martyr. Not figuratively but literally, being canonised as a saint just three years after his death.
The medieval cult of Becket was promoted with shockingly realistic murder scenes on bejewelled caskets, the glowing pages of illuminated manuscripts and mystical stained glass. This exhibition has plenty to fascinate history buffs. But its glory is to make the art of the middle ages come alive. The emotional story of Becket’s slaying and the strangeness of the rites and rituals that celebrated him provide a direct human connection with the people and images of a remote world. Suddenly the art of that faraway time seems brutally contemporary.
From 20 May until 22 August.
Continue reading...May 12, 2021
Tracey Emin on her cancer self-portraits: ‘This is mine. I own it’
As she starts to rebuild her life after surgery, the artist shares her unflinching self-portraits taken during treatment, talks about seeing dead people in hospital walls, and explains why she’s buying herself a punchbag – and kittens
‘I’m smiling and talking to you,” says Tracey Emin, sitting at her kitchen table. “But it’s not always like this.” We’ve been delaying this conversation until she finally felt well enough. She has been spending a lot of time in bed, just resting. On the phone, she sounded weak, but today she is indeed smiling, getting excited as she speaks – the Tracey who I have been fortunate enough to get to know.
“Now I’ve got a terrible pain in my legs, it’s unbearable. That’s why I’ve been in bed. I’m determined to go for a walk later because I hardly ever go out. I have a urostomy bag, so I have a major disability. The more well I get, the more annoying it is. Previously it was all right because I was on morphine. But now I want to do things and I can’t.”
A nurse asked if I'd seen anything funny. And I went, 'Yeah, I saw dead people come out of the wall' … They looked like roundheads coming to get me'
Continue reading...Tracey Emin on beating cancer: ‘You can curl up and die – or you can get on with it’
As she starts to rebuild her life after surgery, the artist shares her unflinchingly honest cancer self-portraits, talks about seeing dead people in hospital walls, and explains why she’s buying herself a punchbag – and kittens
‘I’m smiling and talking to you,” says Tracey Emin, sitting at her kitchen table. “But it’s not always like this.” We’ve been delaying this conversation until she finally felt well enough. She has been spending a lot of time in bed, just resting. On the phone, she sounded weak, but today she is indeed smiling, getting excited as she speaks – the Tracey who I have been fortunate enough to get to know.
“Now I’ve got a terrible pain in my legs, it’s unbearable. That’s why I’ve been in bed. I’m determined to go for a walk later because I hardly ever go out. I have a urostomy bag, so I have a major disability. The more well I get, the more annoying it is. Previously it was all right because I was on morphine. But now I want to do things and I can’t.”
A nurse asked if I'd seen anything funny. And I went, 'Yeah, I saw dead people come out of the wall' … They looked like roundheads coming to get me'
Continue reading...May 11, 2021
The Making of Rodin review – not a radical, just a plain old genius
Tate Modern, London
All the plaster casts in the world cannot convince me Rodin was a modernist. Luckily his fantastic, eloquent art is amazing
The daylight streams in through Tate Modern’s big windows perfectly illuminating the novelist Balzac. His face is angry and stern, his body swathed in a massive, shapeless gown. This lack of defined form is exactly what horrified Parisians when Rodin’s full-sized plaster model for a monument was unveiled in 1898.
For the novelist and art critic Émile Zola, Rodin was the perfect artist to make a monument to the sprawling chronicler of politics and modern life, and he helped him get this prestigious commission. But when Rodin exhibited the model, all hell broke loose. Looking at its bizarre presence, I see why Rodin could be regarded as the founder of modern sculpture.
The Making of Rodin is at Tate Modern, London, from 18 May to 21 November.
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