Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 9

Darkness from Serra, delights from Siena, and a polar bear sound asleep – the week in art

Richard Serra’s final works, phenomenal medieval art, Egypt for kids, Polish movie poster magic and nature photography at its finest – all in your weekly dispatch

Richard Serra: The Final Works
Glimpses of night and nothingness in the last works by this formidable abstract artist.

• Cristea Roberts Gallery, London from 13 March to 26 April

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Anselm Kiefer review – creative giant crushed under Van Gogh’s starry might

Van Gogh Museum and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
This alienating exhibition makes the German artist look like a kitsch cabaret version of the Dutch master – the comparison is catastrophic for Kiefer

Van Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum is so popular it has taken steps, it was recently reported, to reduce visitor numbers. I can only assume Anselm Kiefer’s alienating exhibition is part of this plan to scare off the punters.

A curator lent weight to the suspicion by telling me “the sort of people who come here” may be perplexed to see this giant of contemporary art next to their idol Vincent. To herd these people into the museum’s exhibition wing, they’ve moved some of Van Gogh’s most beloved works there from the permanent collection. It’s a fatal decision – for Kiefer.

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Siena: The Rise of Painting review – a heart-stopping show about the moment western art came alive

National Gallery, London
This epochal exhibition is full of works so intimate and expressive that the painters of a medieval Italian city 700 years ago suddenly seem close at hand

Seven centuries ago a poet penned the most ecstatic art review ever written. Francesco Petrarca, known as Petrarch, had commissioned the Sienese artist Simone Martini to paint a portrait of his beloved, Laura. The result was so marvellous, he wrote, that if all the famous artists of ancient Greece “competed for a thousand years they wouldn’t have seen a tiny bit of the beauty that’s conquered my heart”.

Petrarch’s rave review has it right. Conquering the heart is what Martini and other 14th-century painters from Siena do in the National Gallery’s devastatingly exact, epochal exhibition about the moment western art came alive. Simone’s painting of Laura is lost but you see why he was the artist for the job. He is so expressive, so tender, exploding any idea of medieval art as remote.

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Alison Watt: From Light review – hollow heads and spectral sheets loaded with meaning

Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery, London
Watt’s bleak nothingness casts spectral shadows – it is positively strange to look this hard at things nowadays

Sir John Soane was a melancholy soul. Not content with a skull as a memento mori, he acquired the stone sarcophagus of pharaoh Seti I, which gapes like the mouth to the Underworld in the shadow-filled basement of his museum at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Two hundred years on, at his country house at Ealing, his fellow spirit, the painter Alison Watt, stares at the world with the kind of bleak thoughts he savoured.

Watt’s exhibition starts with a painting of a broken plaster cast of a classical child’s head. Like all her still lifes, it is done with precision and craft. It is also totally eerie. The white plaster child’s eyes are blank, devoid of pupils. There is a blue-shadowed hole, where the hollow head has been broken off from its body, opening a lane to the land of the dead. Uneasy? Good, then the ghost story can begin.

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Cheeky monkeys, gored matadors and trompe l’oeil masks – the week in art

Alison Watt pays homage to John Soane, Ella Kruglyanskaya honours Manet, and chaos comes for civilisation – all in your weekly dispatch

Alison Watt

New paintings inspired by the sublime, poetic architecture of Georgian visionary Sir John Soane.

• Pitzhanger Manor, London, 5 March to 15 June

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‘Champagne for my real friends!’ Francis Bacon masterpiece escapes to the artist’s old drinking den

Seeing Bacon’s stunning depiction of his lover Peter Lacy hanging in a reincarnation of the watering hole where his skeletal friends would drink, stagger and cackle was a fleeting yet unforgettable experience

When a work of art fails to excite, interest or move me, the word that comes to mind is “dead”. Bad art is lifeless, good art is alive and great art is supervital. And it’s a supervital masterpiece I am looking at right now. Face as sharply hewn as a Congolese mask, with a flesh-coloured pullover melting into the shadows of his loins, Peter Lacy dominates the room, captured in a gold-framed portrait by his lover Francis Bacon.

That room is the Colony Room Green in London, not the original Colony Room but a bar nearby that lovingly recreates, with the precision of an art installation or stage set, the bohemian drinking den run by Muriel Belcher where Bacon would order drinks all round with his famous toast: “Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends!” Its green walls are covered with art and memorabilia, including a wanted poster made by artist Lucian Freud to recover his own lost portrait of Bacon.

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‘Lucian Freud was thrilled when Leigh Bowery stripped naked’: how a wild club kid became the great painter’s muse

When outrageous clubbers Sue Tilley and Bowery posed for the eminent artist, some of the most spectacular portraits of the century were born. Tilley talks about sex, cash and Bowery’s untimely death

‘Leigh would have been livid that it wasn’t a painting of him that broke the record,” says Sue Tilley with a laugh. She’s talking about the £17.2m paid by Roman Abramovich in 2008 for a Lucian Freud nude of her, called Benefits Supervisor Sleeping. It was then the highest price ever paid for work by a living artist and Tilley thinks Leigh Bowery, the fashion icon and performance artist, would have found a way to claim the credit. After all, it was Bowery, her great friend, who got her the modelling job.

Tilley is now repaying the debt by telling the Australian’s story in a new edition of her book Leigh Bowery: The Life and Times of an Icon, featuring never-before-seen photos and an extra chapter on his legacy. You can’t really understand Bowery – his looks, his performances, his club Taboo, his band Minty – without thinking about Freud. The artist’s naked paintings of Bowery and Tilley are today’s equivalents of the great nudes of the western artistic canon. When he painted these two larger than life people in the 1990s, Freud had finally found subjects who could unlock his full and thrilling mastery of the human form, its flesh and its spirit. Yet, says Tilley, Bowery was not so much muse as collaborator, guiding the older man into preserving him and his friends on canvas.

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Fashion disruptors, phoney Picassos and St Paul’s goes psychedelic – the week in art

Leigh Bowery and The Face magazine get their eclectic retrospectives while St Paul’s Cathedral becomes an immersive artwork – all in your weekly dispatch

Leigh Bowery!
The performance artist, alternative fashion icon and all-round iconoclast gets a retrospective that should be an emotional encounter.

• Tate Modern, London, 27 February to 31 August

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Titanic talents, fabulous florals and a river of black stone – the week in art

Emii Alrai homes in on Vesuvius, Cézanne and Manet go on display and Yayoi Kusama shows us her green fingers – all in your weekly dispatch

Emii Alrai: River of Black Stone

Sculptures and installations that respond to Compton Verney’s collection of paintings of Vesuvius, the volcano that buried Pompeii.

• Compton Verney, Warwickshire, 15 February to 15 June

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Goya to Impressionism review – three salmon steaks blow the soppy jugs and flowers away

Courtauld Gallery, London
Is there an ulterior motive to this drearily grand exhibition of paintings borrowed from a Swiss collection? Could it be to show how vastly superior the Courtauld’s own works are?

The bland title of this show reads a bit like a confession, in terms of how little it has to say. Goya to Impressionism – so? Why do we need to see the troubled Spanish painter of war and witchcraft juxtaposed with soft scenes by Renoir and Sisley? No reason, except they all belong to a collection whose home in Winterthur, Switzerland, is closed for renovation, meaning the Courtauld can borrow them as a job lot. The trouble is that the Oskar Reinhart Collection is too similar to the Courtauld’s own to be an overly exciting proposition.

Both hoards were gathered in the early-20th century by wealthy private collectors with a penchant for French art of the late 1800s, yet by and large Samuel Courtauld got the best stuff. Reinhart’s Manets are minor compared with the dazzling masterpieces owned by the Courtauld. This is also true of Renoir. The Courtauld owns La Loge, Renoir’s scintillating early painting of modern love, but Reinhart’s row of soppy, second-rate Renoirs live down to every stereotype of this big impressionist softy.

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