Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 7

Existential encounters, a birthday bash and forensic feminism – the week in art

Jane Austen meets JMW Turner, Huma Bhabha takes on Giacometti and the Secret Lowry’s work is taken seriously at last – all in your weekly dispatch

Encounters: Giacometti – Huma Bhabha

A season of sculptural “encounters” with Giacometti’s primal, existentialist figures kicks off with this Pakistani-American artist taking him on.

• Barbican, London, from 8 May to 10 August

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Ian Hamilton Finlay review – under the classical veneer, this artist was an idiot

Victoria Miro Gallery, London
Finlay was a defiantly archaic figure with a fondness for plinths and marble. But this show’s glorification of the guillotine proves he had a shallow, adolescent mind

We all respect a classicist. So it’s hard not to be impressed by Ian Hamilton Finlay’s learned citing of the Aeneid, Book X, on a stone column in this exhibition marking the centenary of his birth. The poet, artist and creator of Little Sparta – his renowned art garden – revived the neo-classical style at a time when artists were more likely to quote Warhol than Virgil. He appeals to anyone who’s sick of illiterate pop culture – a defiantly archaic figure who made no apology for his erudition.

Unfortunately, under the marble veneer, Finlay was an idiot. He flirted – more than flirted, claim some critics – with Nazi imagery, apparently fascinated by Panzer tanks and the SS logo. His fans insist it was all very nuanced but the Little Sparta website acknowledges “letters in which Finlay had made ‘anti-semitic’ remarks”. (Their quote marks on antisemitic, not mine.)

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Hiroshige: Artist of the Open Road review – ‘I could look forever at these passing moments in cosmic colours’

British Museum, London
The Japanese master’s weightless gaze birthed not only French impressionism but also the whole ideal of art as a way of capturing momentary glimpses of everyday joy

The only thing wrong with the British Museum’s rapturous trip through the Technicolor world of Utagawa Hiroshige’s prints is its final section, which explores this early 19th-century Japanese artist’s continuing global influence. A patchy sampling of Hiroshige’s imitators is all a bit rushed. But then, to do justice to his after-echoes would take a blockbuster in itself, not an epilogue.

Everywhere I looked up to this point, it was evident how precisely French impressionism followed Hiroshige’s cues. Take rain. It becomes a pleasurable urban event in Renoir’s The Umbrellas, but it was Hiroshige who first saw rain as a lighthearted excuse to put up umbrellas – in works such as his print Tarui, created in the 1830s. The impressionist theme of snow, enjoyed by Monet, is also delightfully anticipated by Hiroshige’s 1832-34 work Snow-viewing Along the Sumida River.

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Something to look up to: how Michelangelo’s love and humility could influence the Sistine Chapel conclave

The artist’s frescoes hold many lessons for the cardinals who have to decide upon the next pope

It must be hard for the College of Cardinals gathered in the Sistine Chapel not to gawp at Michelangelo’s frescoes when they should be thinking only of electing a new pope. The only flaw in Robert Harris’s brilliant novel of clerical politics Conclave is that, as they scheme, none of the prelates seem bothered about the ceiling Michelangelo painted with scenes from Genesis between 1508 and 1512 or the Last Judgment he painted on the altar wall much later, from 1536 to 1541 – let alone the earlier paintings by Botticelli and others on the side walls.

When a bomb blows in a window in last year’s award-winning film of the book, the conclave carries on without even pausing for restorers to check the damage. As if.

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Oh to Believe in Another World review – Gripping Kentridge and Shostakovich bring Stalin’s age of betrayal to life

Multitudes festival, London
The artist’s potent animated film played against a superb live account of the 10th Symphony from Marin Alsop and the Philharmonia Orchestra

The 20th century is a cruel farce performed by puppets in a cardboard museum in South African artist William Kentridge’s grotesquely funny, constantly disconcerting film interpretation of Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony. Lenin and Stalin, their faces’ photographs fixed on jerky figures made from scraps, transforming sporadically into living dancers hidden under collaged costumes, monstrously dominate a puppet cast that also includes the bullish-looking but revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky along with Trotsky and Shostakovich himself.

It would be stirring in an art gallery with recorded music, but on a big screen in the Royal Festival Hall above Marin Alsop conducting a gripping performance by the Philharmonia Orchestra as part of the Southbank’s Centre’s multidisciplinary Multitudes festival, it became a magic key to both the music and the age of betrayal and mass murder it witnesses.

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Hiroshige’s peerless prints, McCartney’s unseen snaps and Vancouver’s blue skies – the week in art

Van Gogh’s favourite Japanese artist is at the British Museum, Lisa Milroy’s memories of Canada are on show in London, and new thresholds are crossed by Do Ho Suh – all in your weekly dispatch

Hiroshige: Artist of the Open Road
It’s not hard to see why Hiroshige was Van Gogh’s favourite Japanese printmaker – his colours have a radiant intensity almost without equal in art.

• British Museum, London, from 1 May until 7 September

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An irrelevant bourgeois ritual: this year’s Turner prize shortlist is the soppiest ever

Holy balls of wool! From pointless paintings to emotionless snapshots, the once-controversial award tiptoes too earnestly across the minefield of today’s culture wars

Remember when controversy was fun? If not, that’s because you’re too young. But back in the 1990s, my child, Britain got itself in hilarious knots about conceptual art, the readymade and whether a pickled shark or elephant dung can be art, with the Turner prize as battleground. It was a culture war but with laughs, because no one’s identity was at stake and it wasn’t like Brian Sewell was going to become prime minister and have Rachel Whiteread jailed.

It is by embracing the earnestness of today’s high-stakes culture wars that the Turner prize has lost its edge, the art getting more careful as the ideologies loom larger. This year’s shortlist is the soppiest yet. Two of the artists nominated are painters. Painters, I ask you! This makes some sense of the shortlist announcement taking place on JMW Turner’s 250th birthday. But as painters go, do Mohammed Sami and Zadie Xa (who also creates bland installations) compare with the boldness of Mr Turner? Neither is pushing back the boundaries of what a painting might be, or redefining this art for the 21st century in scale, freedom, audacity.

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Why JMW Turner is still Britain’s best artist, 250 years on

The revered artist conjured groundbreaking scenes of gods, legends and lost civilisations, but, more than anything, his work came to represent the complex soul of Britain like that of no artist before or since

He never crossed the Atlantic. Never sailed the Aegean. A cross-channel ferry was enough for Joseph Mallord William Turner to understand the might and majesty of the sea. His 1803 painting Calais Pier records his feelings on his first arrival in France as foaming green mountains of waves look as if they’re about to sweep away the frail wooden jetty where passengers from England are expected to disembark. He is fascinated and appalled by the water, so solid in its power but always shifting, dissolving, sheering away.

If JMW Turner, born 250 years ago this spring, is Britain’s greatest artist – and he is – it is partly because he is so intensely aware of a defining fact about his country: it’s an island. For Turner, Britain is bordered by death, terror and adventure. Just one step from shore takes you into a world of peril. In the Iveagh Seapiece, fishers are hauling up their boats on a soaking beach while a wave like a wall surges towards them. One fishing boat is still out on the wild waters, so near to shore yet so far from safety.

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Gormley’s early mettle, AI paint pals and sky-high snogs – the week in art

The sculptor’s macabre early works get an airing, robots remix David Salle’s postmodern paintings and Rodin’s The Kiss heads under the hammer – all in your weekly dispatch

Antony Gormley
Gormley’s early sculptures are cast from his own body and have a macabre, almost archaeological beauty that recalls prehistoric and ancient Egyptian art.

• White Cube Mason’s Yard, London, until 8 June

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‘Muscle-flexing or urgent threat?’ How Trump’s assault on culture echoes the Nazis targeting ‘degenerate art’

As the US president hangs a fist-pumping portrait of himself in the White House and seeks to purge museums of ‘improper ideology’, our writer finds chilling parallels at a new show about the Nazis’ ridiculing of modern art

Donald Trump has unveiled a new portrait of himself and it’s the most autocratic yet. A painted version of his fist-pumping stance after being shot in July 2024 now greets visitors in the entrance hall of the White House. This “Fight, fight, fight!” canvas is true strongman art.

It is just the latest in a series of artistic moves by Trump that look disturbingly tyrannical. When he complained that a portrait of himself in the Colorado State Capitol building was “purposefully distorted” it was taken down as quickly as if the US were Stalin’s Soviet Union. And he has ordered JD Vance to purge the Smithsonian museums of “improper ideology”. But how seriously should any of this be taken? Is it an urgent threat to democracy and culture or mere muscle-flexing?

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