Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 82
October 18, 2019
What to see this week in the UK
From The Laundromat to Hedda Gabler, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
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October 15, 2019
Nam June Paik review: move over Tim Berners-Lee, here's the real web prophet
Tate Modern, London
He built a garden of tellies, revelled in digital overload and foresaw the internet back in 1974. What a shame this revealing show smothers Paik in seriousness
The first room says it all. By which I mean it shows you all the work by Nam June Paik you need to understand his contribution to modern art. There you will see, among other things, his masterpiece: TV Garden, an array of different-sized monitors embedded among greenery, their multicoloured screens blossoming like flowers in a gorgeous electronic pastoral.
The more you think about this installation, the more insidiously provocative it is. Paik, who died in 2006 at the age of 73, was a polymath philosopher who prophesied our technological age. In 1974, he predicted the coming of an “electronic super highway” that would link everyone on Earth. Move over, Tim Berners-Lee. In 1994, when his vision was coming true, Paik celebrated it with a work called Internet Dreams, in which multiple ever-changing screens glory in information overload.
His friend Joseph Beuys keeps intruding memorably into the show
At Tate Modern, London, from 17 October to 9 February.
Continue reading...October 11, 2019
Victorians on Tyneside and a red-hot ski lodge – the week in art
A dadaist rebel comes to Tate Modern while Warwickshire feasts on photo glamour – all in your weekly dispatch
Nam June Paik
The dada maverick who invented video art gets a well-deserved survey of his witty works.
• Tate Modern, London, 17 October to 9 February.
What to see this week in the UK
From The Day Shall Come to [Blank], here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...October 10, 2019
George Stubbs review: sleek, sublime animals versus enslaved, absurd humans
MK Gallery, Milton Keynes
As this wonderful show makes clear, the artist celebrated for his paintings of horses was no less adept at other animals – while his portraits of humans drip with disdain
Surely George Stubbs can’t have recalled his own birth? In his icily brilliant illustrations for a book on midwifery, the 18th-century artist and anatomist depicts the process of delivering a child. Compressed and twisted babies lie in dissected wombs, or aim their heads at a narrow pelvic opening. Is it too much to see – in this uncomfortable study of birth – the early autobiography of this curious genius?
While Stubbs may not have been recalling his own birth, it’s worth pointing out that John Burton, the author of the midwifery book, is the model for Dr Slop in Tristram Shandy. The narrator of Laurence Sterne’s madcap 1759 novel actually does remember how he came into the world – starting with his conception. So it’s fitting that this uneasily beautiful survey of Stubbs begins with images of what Sterne called the little human “homunculus”.
Continue reading...October 9, 2019
Hogarth: Place and Progress review – a heartbreaking epic of London squalor
Sir John Soane’s Museum, London
From corrupted country girls and rough sleepers to sleazy judges and drunken toffs, no one has captured London’s dark underbelly better than Hogarth
The rough sleepers in William Hogarth’s painting The Four Times of Day: Night huddle under a wooden stall on St Martin’s Lane while a drunk staggers by without seeing them and a man gets a midnight shave in a candlelit barber’s shop. It’s a shock to see all Hogarth’s visual narratives of London in one place and realise how insistently he portrays inequality. There is barely a picture here that doesn’t include paupers, beggars or street children. A shoeless boy watches as a spendthrift gentleman is arrested for debt in Scene Four of The Rake’s Progress: a troubling detail that reminds us the Rake was born lucky, in a London teeming with people who never had his chances to waste. In the next scene, a ragged child clings to the silk skirt of an old widow who the Rake is marrying for her fortune. Most horribly of all, in Scene Three of Marriage A-la-Mode, a paedophile aristocrat takes a child who has been trafficked for sex to the pox doctor.
Sir John Soane’s Museum has brought together all of Hogarth’s visual narratives in one place, among them The Harlot’s Progress, The Rake’s Progress and The Four Stages of Cruelty. These raw stories of London life join together here, as never before, to make one great epic of laughter and squalor. Call it London: the Graphic Novel. It will break your heart.
At Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, from 9 October until 5 January.
Continue reading...October 7, 2019
Inspired by the East review – a glorious show Boris Johnson really ought to see
British Museum, London
With its harems, palaces, markets and dice-players, this magisterial exhibition highlights the debt western art owes to Islam – and the mutual fascination and inspiration of the two worlds
Boris Johnson should visit this exhibition that reveals Europe’s artistic debt to Islam. The prime minister claims the Muslim world has produced “nothing like” the Sistine Chapel, a wonder “beyond the technical accomplishment of Islamic art”. Tell that to Diego Fernandez Castro. In the late 19th century, this Spanish artist created a loving model of the Alhambra palace in Granada that expresses the exact opposite: this glorious medieval Andalusian palace is indeed an Islamic equal of the Sistine Chapel.
Far from being enemies locked in a culture war, the Christian and Muslim worlds, until recent times, looked at each other with mutual fascination
At the British Museum, London, 10 October-26 January.
Continue reading...October 4, 2019
Dancefloor debauchery and a brush-wielding paparazzi – the week in art
Islamic art’s global impact is laid bare while Hogarth is revealed in all his hilarious horror – all in your weekly dispatch
Inspired By the East: How the Islamic World Influenced Western Art
Five-hundred years of European admiration for Islamic art are revealed in a fascinating perspective on global art history.
• British Museum, London, 10 October to 26 January.
What to see this week in the UK
From Joker to Hogarth, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...October 3, 2019
Gauguin Portraits review – a buttoned-up, nervous and nude-light cop-out of a show
National Gallery, London
In a gallery that is elsewhere stuffed with naked white women, this exhibition’s avoidance of Gauguin’s unclothed Tahitians feels like an act of prudery – and even censorship
Paul Gauguin was the first European artist to find brown skin more beautiful than white. He makes that plain in his 1902 painting Barbarian Tales, a highlight of the National Gallery’s ultimately frustrating exhibition. Who is the “barbarian” of the title? The gnome-like European who squats like Rumpelstiltskin, or the two serene Pacific women he is next to? It’s not quite right, however, to call the male colonial interloper who gloats over the pair’s unabashed bodies “white”. His flesh is a horrible bright pink.
Gauguin painted this self-excoriating work just a year before his death in the Marquesas Islands in 1903. The grotesque European voyeur is surely a guilty expression of his own appetite for “exotic” female flesh. In 1891, aged 43, he set sail for Tahiti with funding from the French government. He lived in and painted the Pacific world for the rest of his life, apart from a short return to France. More particularly, he portrayed Oceanian women, naked as often as not.
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