Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 97
January 25, 2019
Ruskin blazes and the Queen unleashes the end of the world – the week in art
Her Majesty’s Da Vinci drawings of everything from anatomy to armageddon go on tour, the might of Michelangelo is challenged, and science washes up in Margate – all in our weekly dispatch
Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing
The Queen’s unrivalled collection of Leonardo’s drawings of everything from human anatomy to the end of the world goes on tour to 12 museums across Britain.
• Museums across the UK from 1 February until 6 May.
What to see this week in the UK
From Vice to John Ruskin, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...January 24, 2019
John Ruskin: The Power of Seeing review - oddball or visionary?
Two Temple Place, London
The influential critic, social reformer and troubled genius profoundly changed British culture. In his 200th anniversary year, can this exhibition help us see him clearly?
Art critic, geologist, botanist, Alpinist, architectural theorist and social reformer – maybe even revolutionary – John Ruskin gazes with troubled intensity from a watercolour portrait that dates from when he was on the verge of losing his mind. Half his face is in shadow, the other in mountain sunlight. His blue-green eyes stare almost too intently. There’s something wrong behind them. The following year, over Christmas 1876 in his beloved Venice, Ruskin would start to hallucinate. Breakdowns would follow and he eventually withdrew from the world, cared for at home on a healthy inheritance from his wine merchant father, until his death in 1900.
Ruskin’s manic portrait, attributed to Charles Fairfax Murray but quite possibly the critic’s own work, fits well into the late-Victorian interior of Two Temple Place, laden with rich wooden carvings, panelling and stained glass. Or does it? It’s safe to say its architect was influenced by Ruskin’s gothic vision of architecture. Yet it’s an equally safe guess that Ruskin would have loathed it, for this neo-Tudor fantasy was created for the American millionaire William Waldorf Astor. In his book The Stones of Venice, the bible of the gothic revival, Ruskin denounces the very opulence and selfishness this building represents. Medieval gothic, for him, is an art of communal togetherness, created by a morally superior age that respected honest work and condemned capitalist usury.
Continue reading...January 21, 2019
Mehretu's furious scrawls bite deeper than Bourgeois's spiders – review
★★★★★/★★ ☆☆☆
Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge
In these two contrasting solo shows, Julie Mehretu’s great and tragic introspections speaks starker truths that Louise Bourgeois’s trite and silly images
Now and then an artist comes along who turns every critical cliche on its head and proves the experts know nothing about where art is going. Julie Mehretu is one of those heroes. This Ethiopian-born, New York-based painter works in a style that has long been mocked and patronised by avant garde intellectuals as macho, pompous and even an instrument of US imperialism – a style that flourished in New York some 60 years ago. Mehretu is an abstract expressionist. And she is showing that the legacy of Jackson Pollock and Cy Twombly can bite deep into the madness of our time.
Mehretu takes on those titans at their own game of colossal ambition. Her 2017 diptych Howl consists of two abstract paintings 27 feet high and 32 feet wide that make Pollock’s One look teeny. Meanwhile, she has a show at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge that is smaller in size yet just as formidable and infectiously creative.
Sex and death seem to be fighting it out in these pounding headaches of graphic intensity
Continue reading...January 18, 2019
Mehretu meets her match and Kanye gets cosmic – the week in art
Pierre Bonnard storms Tate Modern, nature’s savagery is revealed and Banksy’s calling cards appear from Port Talbot to Tokyo – all in our weekly dispatch
Julie Mehretu and Louise Bourgeois
One of today’s most powerful abstract artists and the last of the 20th century’s great surrealists make a substantial double act.
• Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, 22 January to 24 March.
What to see this week in the UK
From the Beautiful Boy to Patti Smith, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...January 17, 2019
La Caixa collection review – Whitechapel's tapas leaves me hungry
This compact selection of art owned by the Spanish bank gains no greater meaning beyond the corporate through investing in an author’s explications
What does the end of a marriage look like? In 1993 the German painter Gerhard Richter made a startling image of his second wife, the provocative and fascinating artist Isa Genzken. This was the year they separated. In a small room at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, Genzken stands with her bare back to us – and to Richter – with her thin body and short hair. She hangs her head downward, as if commanded by the artist, or perhaps in despair. Her expression is anyone’s guess. This painting, as is Richter’s custom, was copied from a photograph. His smooth brushwork emphasises qualities of the photo – a Polaroid? – that reveal depths of anxiety and estrangement. She’s harshly lit and blurred. Is Richter saying goodbye through tears of suppressed anguish, or is he himself driving her to turn her back?
Continue reading...January 15, 2019
How The Scream became the ultimate image for our political age
Edvard Munch’s painting is a masterpiece for these troubled times. Ahead of an exhibition at the British Museum, Jonathan Jones charts its rise, from the 1893 original to today’s inflatables and emojis
The face is a greenish sock of sickly flesh stretched tight over the skull. Its features have been burned away by pain. All that remain in the elongated mask are two wide round eyes with dots for pupils, a pair of black nostrils and a mouth open in an oval scream. We’ve all been there.
The Scream was created by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch in 1893 but it has become a masterpiece – the masterpiece – for our time. There are comparably “iconic” works of art – the Mona Lisa, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers – but they exist in a world of art and beauty. The Scream is ugly and brutal and belongs in the here and now. It is a symbol we reach for as we might for a strong word, to express what we’re feeling this minute.
Continue reading...January 11, 2019
Riley splashes out at the National Gallery and Gateshead welcomes an apocalypse – the week in art
Bridget Riley unveils a site-specific work, Heather Phillipson’s fantastical images take over the Baltic and more – all in our weekly dispatch
Bridget Riley
The most brilliant abstract artist Britain has had unveils a wall painting called Messengers, whose constellation of colours evokes images in the National Gallery that range from angelic wings to Constable’s clouds.
• National Gallery, London, from 17 January.
What to see this week in the UK
From Colette to Bridget Riley, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...Jonathan Jones's Blog
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