Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 62
May 9, 2021
David Hockney on joy, longing and spring light: ‘I’m teaching the French how to paint Normandy!’
While enjoying an idyllic lockdown in France, the 83-year-old artist has created perhaps his most important exhibition ever – offering hope to an injured world
‘I think it looks terrific,” says David Hockney. “It’s all on one theme, isn’t it? And there’s not many exhibitions like that, really, a show all about the spring.” The 83-year-old artist is taking a look around his new exhibition at the Royal Academy in London for the first time. He seems happy with it – and rightly so, for it is hypnotic and ravishing. But while I am getting a sneak preview in person, Hockney is here only virtually, his face appearing on two screens, one a giant TV, the other a small laptop.
He is at home, at what he calls his “seven dwarves house” in Normandy, wearing a red, black and white check jacket, a checkerboard tie, a blue-green pullover and round, gold-framed glasses. His kaleidoscopic choice of clothing, challenging the very limits of the video call’s bandwidth, is as vibrant and beguiling as the canvases hanging around us. Hockney has not just painted spring; he has come dressed as it.
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May 7, 2021
Psychedelic spring colours and some spectacular surf – the week in art
Jim Lambie’s pulsing palette returns, Carol Rhodes shakes up the landscape and the late great Takis unleashes some cosmic vibrations – all in your weekly dispatch
Jim Lambie
Pulsing psychedelic colours for spring, bursting with buttercup yellow, in this uplifting artist’s latest installation.
• Modern Institute, Glasgow, until 22 May.
May 2, 2021
Crude, obscene and extraordinary: Jean Dubuffet’s war against good taste
He was the inventor of ‘art brut’ who rebelled against his parents, his teachers and then art itself. Yet the impact of his wild provocative paintings, often culled from graffiti, can still be seen today
Which great artist of the 20th century has been most influential on the 21st? Neither Picasso nor Matisse, as they have no heirs. And not Marcel Duchamp, however much we genuflect before his urinal. No, the artist of the last century whose ideas are everywhere today was a wine merchant who took street art and fashioned it into something extraordinary more than 75 years ago.
After four years of Nazi occupation, you’d think Parisians would have been unshockable. But in 1944, the newly liberated city was sorely provoked by the antics of Jean Dubuffet. Even as the last shots were fired, he was creating newspaper collages bearing the fragmentary graffiti messages he saw in the streets: “Emile is gone again”, “Always devoted to your orders”, “URGENT”. In the next couple of years, he unveiled shapeless, childlike paintings that abandoned all pretence at skill.
Continue reading...April 30, 2021
Hockney beams into Piccadilly and Scots steal the limelight – the week in art
London gets high on Opie, Miró visits the countryside and legendary nightclubs fling open their virtual doors – all in your weekly dispatch
Julian Opie
This stylish and scientific student of perception playfully reveals how simply art can suggest the real.
• Lisson Gallery, London, 4 May to 12 June.
April 23, 2021
Ray Harryhausen’s killer skeletons and Georg Baselitz’s gnarled hands – the week in art
Restless LA artist Henry Taylor shows some edgy assemblages and the Gee’s Bend quilters show their haunting artwork – all in your weekly dispatch
Henry Taylor
Intimate, evocative paintings and disturbing, edgy assemblages from this poised yet restless LA artist.
• Hauser & Wirth Somerset.
Did art peak 30,000 years ago? How cave paintings became my lockdown obsession
Portraiture, perspective, impressionism, movement, mythology: cave artists could do the lot. And I have spent the past year on a virtual odyssey of their primordial wonders
I was recently awoken in the night by lions, their eyes glaring in the dark from blunt rectangular faces as they stalked bison through an ancient, arid grassland. As I came to, however, I realised I was not about to be eaten alive. This was simply one of the perils of spending too much time looking at images of cave art on the web.
Cave artists could do it all. The faces of the animals they painted are exquisite portraits, while their bodies are rendered in perfect perspective. But wait – weren’t these supposed to be the great achievements of European art? After all, in his classic study The Story of Art, EH Gombrich tells how western art took off when the ancient Greeks learned how to show movement, that the perspective was discovered in 15th-century Europe, and that the communication of sensation rather than the seen was the gift of the impressionists. Gombrich had probably not seen much cave art. Lascaux, a series of caves in the French Dordogne, was a recent discovery when he published his book in 1950 – and Chauvet, also in France, wouldn’t be found until 1994.
Continue reading...April 16, 2021
Haunted portraits, a lost church and the mystery of colour – the week in art
Elizabethan portraiture, a digital recreation of a Saxon church, and Damien Hirst – all in your weekly dispatch
Love’s Labours Found
Haunted portraits to spook the imagination - or, as the gallery has it, important new discoveries in Elizabethan and Jacobean portraiture. As commercial galleries open before museums, this is your best bet for a historical show this month.
• Philip Mould and Co, London from 21 April until 29 May
April 12, 2021
‘At last, a lockdown masterpiece’ – Rachel Whiteread: Internal Objects review
Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, London
These alarming, engrossing works take the artist’s seminal House and add horror, reflecting the turbulence of lives upended and exploded by the pandemic
I bet plenty of us have grappled with metaphorical ghosts in the loneliness and unease of lockdown, with all that uncomfortable time to think. But Rachel Whiteread has quite literally been coming to terms with her Ghost. In 1990, she showed a sculpture of that name at the Chisenhale Gallery in London. It was bought by Charles Saatchi and became an icon of a new kind of British art. A plaster cast of a room in a ordinary old house, Ghost is a memory of a vanished space, complete with touching archaeological imprints of a fireplace, window and door in its frozen, impenetrable surface. From casting Ghost, Whiteread went on to the next step, casting the interior of an entire vacated family home for her 1993 modern masterpiece, House. It stood like a grey concrete revenant on a London green until the council bulldozed it.
In the pandemic, Whiteread has created two alarming, utterly engrossing sculptures that revisit her first hauntings. These deathly white entities have titles that summon up Ghost and then some. They’re called Poltergeist and Doppelgänger. Not just supernatural entities but nasty ones: active, not passive. Where Ghost, owned by the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, simply stands there refusing access or comment, these haunted huts reach out with branch-like fingers to clutch at you.
Rachel Whiteread: Internal Objects is at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, London, 12 April to 6 June.
Continue reading...April 9, 2021
Rachel Whiteread’s world of interiors and Francis Bacon’s dead elephants – the week in art
A new show from the Turner winner, Gilbert and George share their new normal and eco-activists fight for the rights of salmon – all in your weekly dispatch
Rachel Whiteread: Internal Objects
The sculptor of the hidden spaces of our lives gets to grips with her ghosts.
• Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, London, 12 April to 6 June.
April 6, 2021
The horror safari: why was Francis Bacon so triggered by dead elephants?
When the great painter died, 200 macabre photographs of elephant carcasses were found in his studio. They were by Peter Beard – and they propelled the artist into the heart of darkness
If you look into the eyes of a portrait, especially a self-portrait, by Rembrandt, you seem to see a “soul”. Such religious ideas and readings have shaped the story of art from its very beginnings and continue to seduce us today. But Francis Bacon was the first artist to paint people as animals. His subjects are rendered without souls, as flesh and bone, as blood and brain – in short, as animated meat. This ruthless Darwinian vision of the struggle of life makes him one of the most unnerving of artists. And his radical eye for humankind’s natural history gives a certain resonance to his friendship with one of the most brilliant wildlife photographers of the 20th century.
After the Irish-born British painter died in 1992, more than 200 photographs of dead elephants were found in his London studio. They were given to him by Peter Beard, who took many of them from an aeroplane flying low over the grasslands of Kenya. The two would converse avidly about Beard’s images of these great, grey giants slowly rotting into monuments of white bone and ivory in the African sun. They inspired some of Bacon’s most pungent thoughts about art and life. “I would say the photographs of elephants,” he said, “are naturally suggestive.” What he saw was “a trigger – a release”.
Dead elephants trigger off more ideas than living ones. They are suggestive of all types of beauty
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