Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 70
September 4, 2020
Spooky spirits and pandemic portraits – the week in art
Chichester raises a pint to a London Underground poster designer, Danh Vo explores where Catholicism and consumerism meet, and artists pay heartfelt tribute to Covid sufferers – all in your weekly dispatch
Not Without My Ghosts: The Artist As Medium
The Victorian medium Georgiana Houghton created swirling abstract artworks that record her encounters in the spirit world. She and William Blake, who portrayed the spirit of Milton from “life”, are among the artists past and present in this survey of spooky inspiration, with Suzanne Treister, Louise Despont and more bringing the uncanny tale up to date.
• At the Drawing Room, London, from 10 September until 1 November.
August 31, 2020
Picasso's desperate obscenities: show of late works captures a still raging genius
Atelier Picasso, Bastian Gallery, London
This thrilling, gruelling exhibition lays bare Picasso’s twilight years in a palatial villa in Cannes – outrageous, tortured and searching for the priapic energy of his youth
Everyone runs out of steam eventually. In the case of Pablo Picasso, the process was lengthy and he fought it with flashes of fury, lust and wit. He obviously didn’t think of himself as old when, in his 70s, he posed bare-chested for the photograph that appears at the start of Bastian Gallery’s nostalgic tribute to his last studio, in postwar Cannes. Picasso would work as energetically as ever, right up to his death aged 91, leaving a heap of late works. But does the last quarter-century of his career actually add anything to the miracles that came before?
In 1900, as a teenage prodigy from Malaga via Barcelona, he visited Paris for the first time and painted brilliantly lurid scenes of dance halls and brothels. In 1907, he painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, torching centuries of western art in a savage conflagration that simultaneously invents cubism and surrealism. Still to come were stupendous orgies of destruction and creation and his most unexpected transformation of all, from sensual diarist of private life to public painter of modern history in Guernica.
Continue reading...August 28, 2020
Grayson Perry gets crafty and Georg Baselitz goes for gold – the week in art
Two major museums reopen, Elizabeth Price comes to London and Picasso’s studio is remade – all in your weekly dispatch
Grayson Perry: Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman
As the British Museum reopens, Perry explores the universal human themes of death and mourning in its global exhibits.
• British Museum, London, ongoing.
August 27, 2020
Georg Baselitz: master of obscenity and Bowie's inspiration
Before David Bowie’s “Heroes”, the German artist painted a series of the same name, taking a past tainted by Nazis and making it new. Now two exhibitions celebrate his subversive brilliance
In 1977, at the Hansa studio in West Berlin, David Bowie was recording some new songs when he happened to look out of the window. The pop legend saw his musical collaborator Tony Visconti kissing his girlfriend in front of the heavily guarded concrete barrier built by communist East Germany to keep its citizens in. He wrote “Heroes”, one of his best loved songs, that contains the lines: “I, I can remember / Standing by the wall / And the guns shot above our heads / And we kissed as though nothing could fall.”
But Bowie wasn’t the first person to juxtapose totalitarian brutality and the frailty of the individual in a modern masterpiece called Heroes. A decade earlier, as the cold war began to intensify, a young German artist named Hans-Georg Kern painted a series of ironic paintings also collectively titled Heroes. They turn the happy smiling people who featured on propaganda posters of the time into bleeding, dismembered figures of pathos and tragicomedy. This September, both the early rage and the latest work of this great artist can be seen in two London exhibitions.
Baselitz does not merely parody totalitarian realism – these paintings are the revenge of degenerate art
Georg Baselitz: Darkness Goldness is at White Cube Mason’s Yard, London, from 4 September to 11 November. Georg Baselitz: I Was Born into a Destroyed Order is at Michael Werner Gallery, London, from 11 September to 24 October.
Continue reading...August 21, 2020
Masking up in the Science Museum and honouring a biscuit factory water feature – the week in art
Elsewhere, Mary Quant’s swinging London comes to Scotland, and Arthur Lanyon brings his Arcade Laundry to St Ives – all in your weekly dispatch
Medicine Galleries
The Science Museum has now reopened and if you want a wider view of the pandemic that closed it, you won’t find a more spectacular history of human responses to illness than its curious and fascinating gallery of medicine past and present.
• Science Museum, London, free permanent display.
August 14, 2020
Rembrandt's rise, China's internet and a McQueen retrospective – the week in art
The Ashmolean explores the work of the miller’s son from Leiden while the National Gallery looks at a 17th-century Dutch master of secrecy and sin – all in your weekly dispatch
Young Rembrandt
Come face-to-face with the miller’s son from Leiden as he paints his way to fame, profundity and genius. Young Rembrandt could have gone to university but convinced his parents to let him study art instead. He soon set himself apart with audacious history paintings and searching self-portraits. A chance to see how one of art’s all-time greats started out.
• Ashmolean, Oxford, until 1 November.
August 7, 2020
New myths, Manet and an intimate guide to the Amazon – the week in art
Toyin Ojih Odutola’s powerful drawings are like a graphic novel brought to life, while rare Renoir and Gauguin are at the Royal Academy and Colombia’s Abel Rodríguez heads to Gateshead – all in your weekly dispatch
Toyin Ojih Odutola
Powerful expansive drawings and a Blake-like invented mythology make this Nigerian-American artist’s first British show, titled A Countervailing Theory, seem like a walk-through graphic novel. Includes an immersive soundscape by Peter Adjaye.
• The Curve, Barbican, London, 11-24 August.
August 6, 2020
Es Devlin and Machiko Weston: I Saw the World End review | Jonathan Jones
Imperial War Museum online
Marking 75 years since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, stage designers Es Devlin and Machiko Weston have made a film of immense power – but it won’t be seen as it was meant to
We live in an age that is morally confused. Someone with more sensitivity than sense has cancelled the scheduled screenings in Piccadilly Circus today and on Sunday morning of Es Devlin and Machiko Weston’s thoughtful and moving film to commemorate the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 75 years ago. The piece, commissioned by the Imperial War Museum, was to have been shown on the giant Piccadilly Lights screen but has now been relocated to the museum’s website, “Out of respect for the suffering caused to the people of Lebanon by the recent explosion in Beirut.” But surely it does not in any way disrespect the victims of Beirut’s terrible accident to remember those killed, maimed and poisoned in a calculated act of war in 1945.
Related: Imperial War Museum unveils film marking 75 years since Hiroshima bomb
Watch I Saw the World End here, on the Imperial War Museum website.
Continue reading...July 31, 2020
Ai Weiwei terrifies us and Audrey Hepburn takes a dip – the week in art
The artist and activist tackles weapons of mass destruction and Terry O’Neill’s most celebrated photographs of A-listers are on display – all in your weekly dispatch
Ai Weiwei: History of Bombs
A seductive and terrifying array of fetishised weapons of mass destruction is mapped across the main hall of the Imperial War Museum in this powerful intervention that – like the museum itself – provokes uneasy thoughts about war, history and the modern world.
• Imperial War Museum, London, from 1 August to 24 May.
July 28, 2020
Ai Weiwei: History of Bombs review – high-impact reminder of our insatiable desire for destruction
Imperial War Museum, London
This site-specific work across the floor of the museum shows in chilling detail the horrible ingenuity of the weapons we innovate to kill each other. It’s nightmare-inducing
The bomb reproduced in a life-sized 3D image on the floor of the Imperial War Museum seems almost comical – so big and clumsy, like something out of an old film of a Jules Verne story. Surely this monster was never used. But the Soviet Union’s Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever created, was once detonated. Suspended beneath a bomber because it was too big to fit inside, it was dropped over the Barents Sea and exploded with a force of 57 megatonnes, more than 1,500 times the combined strength of the two atomic bombs America dropped on Japan.
Ai Weiwei’s History of Bombs is an artwork about incalculable destruction in the form of an encyclopaedic collection of bombs and missiles, depicted with clinical precision across the floor of the Imperial War Museum’s central hall and flowing up a staircase. At a time when the world is quaking from a natural pandemic, he reminds us of our mind-boggling capacity to obliterate ourselves. It’s a mesmerising piece of popular history that shows in detail how the human race has accumulated a murderous arsenal since the early 20th century, when the invention of flight unleashed explosive new possibilities in warfare. There was barely more than a decade’s leap between the Wright Brothers taking off at Kitty Hawk and aerial bombing. The earliest weapons here are small enough to be chucked from a biplane.
Ai Weiwei: History of Bombs is at London’s Imperial War Museum, from 1 August to 24 May.
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