Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 89
June 7, 2019
Gender kissing, the age of Galileo and Keith Haring's 80s – the week in art
The Hayward launches a gender-fluid blockbuster, Bartolomé Bermejo’s intense Renaissance art contrasts with its science, and Keith Haring gets his first UK exhibition – all in your weekly dispatch
Kiss My Genders
A gender-fluid blockbuster to rock your socks, with artists including Catherine Opie, Planningtorock, Christina Quarles, Victoria Sin and Del LaGrace Volcano.
• Hayward Gallery, London, 12 June-8 September.
Francis Bacon: Couplings review – a taboo-busting opus of sizzling flesh
Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, London
Sublime paintings of sex in all its guises unlock entire worlds of beauty and terror – and reveal Bacon as the true heir to Picasso
The authority of Francis Bacon’s art is papal. I am not referring to the paintings inspired by Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X that made him famous. It’s just that walking into Gagosian’s immaculate selection of his paintings feels like exploring the art treasures of St Peter’s and the Vatican, so sublime is this display. If these pictures really were in the Vatican, though, they’d have to be veiled, perhaps even in a secret room where only cardinals could peek. For this is a sustained exploration of how Bacon saw sex.
An imaginary curtain swooshes back as you enter a chapel-like space to see Two Figures, painted in 1953 and last exhibited in Bacon’s retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971. It has the sense of some supreme revelation. Two men make love on a bed that’s an expanse of crumpled white sheets. As they do it they look out of the canvas at us – but their faces are distorted, blurred. One might be grinning into a camera. It’s as if they are gleefully showing us their crime, their identities disguised for their protection. When Bacon painted this in the 1950s, he really was portraying a crime. That thrills him. The white bed is enclosed in a transparent box whose outline in perspective draws you towards the central act. It resembles the glass booths that enclose those renowned paintings of popes. Yet it has the opposite meaning.
At Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, London, until 3 August.
Continue reading...What to see this week in the UK
From Late Night to Bitter Wheat, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...June 6, 2019
Summer Exhibition review – a moronic monument to British mediocrity
Royal Academy, London
Obvious ideas get third-rate treatment as this life-draining spectacle showcases the artists of a nation adrift
I wish I had a time machine so I could go back to the moment before I entered the Royal Academy’s 2019 Summer Exhibition, and then turn away. This is a memory I don’t need. Since seeing this sprawling dustbin of has-beens and never-will-be’s I have been weighed down by its depressing dullness. It was like being locked for days in a garden centre.
Last year Grayson Perry turned the RA’s 250-year-old open-submission art show into something subversive and hilarious. Any doubts that its anarchic spirit should be credited to him and him alone are removed by this year’s return to abominable form. The latest selectors, led by Jock McFadyen, have assiduously removed every trace of the wit and cleverness with which Perry brought this bloated corpse of a tradition to temporary life.
At the Royal Academy, London, from 10 June to 12 August.
Continue reading...June 5, 2019
The Trump Baby Blimp review – triumph of protest art or big bag of wind?
Skies over London
It’s reaching national treasure status and the Museum of London is after it. But is the joke on us?
Donald Trump is a gift to caricaturists – and not just because of his unreal yellow quiff and angry orange face. He is a satirist’s dream because he reacts. The poor man has not got it in him to ignore a jibe. When protesters floated a big baby Trump blimp for his British visit last summer, he said it made him “feel unwelcome”. So like foxhounds scenting blood, his tormentors have relaunched the inflatable for his state visit. The Museum of London wants to put it on display. It is well on its way to becoming a national treasure.
So we will probably see this mildly funny balloon many more times. I could hear someone on video, as the nappy-wearing blimp was launched from a glum grey Parliament Square, lecturing reporters on its place in the history of British satire. So is this really a masterpiece of protest art – or does it pop when you take a sharper look?
Continue reading...June 4, 2019
Natalia Goncharova review – revolutionary visions from a lost Russia
Tate Modern, London
Goncharova’s vibrant, diverse, folkloric images transform our understanding of the Russian avant garde, and a peasant culture swept away by the Soviets
The Russia painted by Natalia Goncharova died long before she did. Goncharova passed away in Paris in 1962, at the age of 81, by which time the gaudy, vibrant popular culture of the peasant society that fascinated her was long gone, deliberately destroyed decades earlier by the forced “collectivisation” of agriculture by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Continue reading...May 31, 2019
Russian futurism, lunar visions and Bacon’s contorted flesh – the week in art
Natalia Goncharova blazes an avant-garde trail at Tate Modern and Artemisia Gentileschi goes on tour, while the Natural History Museum celebrates Apollo 11 – all in your weekly dispatch
Natalia Goncharova
This Russian futurist painted magically transformed glimpses of everyday life before the 1917 revolution.
• Tate Modern, London, 6 June to 8 September.
What to see this week in the UK
From Sunset to Snail Mail, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...May 30, 2019
Apocalyptic visions from a shunned giant of British art – Frank Bowling review
Tate Britain, London
He is up there with Turner, Rothko and Pollock. This magnificent show, which swings from joyous foam-filled works to serious meditations about slavery, is long overdue
Why hasn’t 85-year-old Frank Bowling been honoured with lots of big museum shows before now? Born in 1934, in what was then British Guiana, he studied at the Royal College of Art alongside David Hockney and Patrick Caulfield. Yet many of his 1960s paintings were so undervalued they have long since vanished, including a self-portrait as Othello. Bowling’s neglect, however, is not just because he is black. It also has to do with the deeply unfashionable character of his painting for much of his career. His sin was to be an abstract expressionist in the wrong time and place.
At Tate Britain from 31 May to 26 August.
Continue reading...May 28, 2019
'I see pain in her eyes' – the £3.6m masterpiece that went to jail
A powerful painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, depicting the torturing of Saint Catherine, is touring Britain. What did the women of Send Prison make of the chilling work?
Two women are chatting in front of a painting of Catherine of Alexandria, a saint martyred in the fourth century. The figure is shown leaning on a wheel studded with iron spikes, part of the instrument of her torture. “She’s my friend now,” says one of the women. “Strong lady,” says the other. “Like the girls where I’m from.” They move on to the subject of Catherine’s fate. “These martyrs aren’t martyrs like you and me,” says one. “I’m not dying for no cause,” adds her friend.
The women, who cannot be named, are inmates at HMP Send, a prison for high-risk female offenders in Surrey. The painting, by a woman who suffered appalling abuse and violence in 17th-century Italy, is hanging in the jail library. It was bought by the National Gallery for £3.6m last year and, as part of a tour of unlikely venues that has so far included a doctor’s surgery and a school, the gallery has sent it here.
Related: Brushes with the law: how teaching art to women in prison changed their outlook
Continue reading...Jonathan Jones's Blog
- Jonathan Jones's profile
- 8 followers
