Born in Germany as the Nazis fell, Anselm Kiefer’s back catalogue is an astonishing look at the awful burden of history. Anselm Kiefer was born in Germany in 1945. A new life can rarely have started in a less promising place and time. To enter the world as the Third Reich fell was to be […]
Beuys, Richter, Kiefer, Polke, Ernst … such a formidable lineup shows up British contemporary artists for the commercial, over-hyped and celebrity focused lightweights that they are. Germany has proved its global footballing eminence by winning the 2014 World Cup, yet soccer is just one of many things Germans excel at. There’s also art. What is the […]
Forget the bloody martyrdoms and hot pincers … Viola’s glorious new video installation is a hi-tech Caravaggio that redefines religious art. Bill Viola has created a powerful modern altarpiece for St Paul’s Cathedral that perfectly suits the restrained spirituality of this most English of churches. Coming into Christopher Wren’s great building on a weekday morning when crowded buses […]
The row around Marina Abramović is redundant, as the story of art is one of homages and remakes. But that’s not to say there isn’t a problem. “Good artists copy, great artists steal,” said Pablo Picasso. Or at least he gets the credit for saying it. Perhaps he pinched the words from Oscar Wilde. For there […]
Pistoletto shook up the 60s with his arte povera revolution. What’s the legendary mirror-smasher doing now? Designing houses made of rice at his eco HQ. Born in Biella in 1933, Pistoletto grew up under fascism. “You had to believe – in God and in Mussolini. I felt there was a terrible contradiction in believing in a […]
From Picasso’s formidable whores and Magritte’s provocative pipe to Pollock painting like and angel, the best 20th-centrury art reflects a world of flux, abstraction and imagination. The century was not yet out of its teens. For most of the small minority aware of the experiments of modern art, the bright colours of Matisse were still […]
From Bacchus weaving his spell in a Spanish street to Gilbert and George getting gradually drunk on Gordon’s, here’s our pick of pieces in which booze plays a key part. Velázquez – The Triumph of Bacchus or The Drinkers (1628-1629) In this ironic masterpiece, the Spanish painter whose career took him from portraying the street […]
The comedy of a naive self-portrait apparently helped humanise the man most responsible for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. His portrait of Putin actually looks like something you would find in one of America’s trash-rich Salvation Army stores and buy to laugh at. It’s got a classic amateur clumsiness and oddity to it. Bush has […]
This photographer once dismissed as a shallow sensation-seeker of the 80s is getting the recognition he deserves with a show at the Grand Palais, Paris’s high temple of art – and it’s all down to Smith. The Grand Palais in Paris is one of Europe’s most serious exhibition spaces. It is where France honours its great artists. […]
Monstrous as the Wall was, it offered artists like Noir – and musicians like Bowie – a dark subject matter that is lacking in safe consumerist societies. Has culture ever recovered from the fall of the Berlin Wall? Seriously. The division of Berlin and state surveillance endured by people trapped in the eastern half of the […]
He may be in his 80s and in need of a wheelchair to get about, but Howard Hodgkin still paints with staggering power. Jonathan Jones meets a ‘living master’. Howard Hodgkin sits in a wheelchair in his studio. Light falls through the glass roof on to big boards propped against white-washed brick walls. One by one, […]
Art dealer Larry Gagosian pushes the best work – Richard Serra, Cy Twombly, Richard Wright, Urs Fischer – and fills the gap in our public galleries with real taste and belief.Is the Gagosian empire like the Starbucks of contemporary art? A megalomaniac attempt to corner the art market? It may seem so, but this chain store of […]
From mysterious 30,000-year-old cave paintings to a ‘cathedral of the mind’ by Jackson Pollock, art critic Jonathan Jonesnames his favourite artworks of all time – and where in the world you can see them. What would make your top 10?
In laying bare his first pieces, the British painter reveals how he bubbled over with excitement in his student days – and teaches a valuable lesson in how artists can find their signature style. It takes a special kind of courage for a famous artist to drag 40-year-old apprentice pieces out of the attic and […]
From sexy heels trussed and presented on a silver platter to Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde shark, a tour through some of the strangest, most shocking surrealist art around. Check it out.
Bilbao exhibition of installations, music and films demonstrates avant-gardiste’s true talents, her reach and influence. ‘The ladder John had to climb up was very high,” recalls Yoko Ono as we chat about one of her most famous works. It is called Ceiling Painting or Yes Painting, and it is one of the classics of conceptual art that […]
To have “taste” in art and know a bit about it is part of the battery of glib accomplishments that mark out the elite from ordinary folk. This hateful art snobbery has nothing to do with a true love of art – it is just about being able to talk the talk. The French sociologist Pierre […]
An attack on the Chinese artist’s installation in Miami has been condemned as an act of vandalism. Why is smashing art only acceptable if an acclaimed global artist does it? A “protest” at a Miami art museum raises some questions about what exactly art is, now.
When Creed opens a retrospective at London’s Hayward Gallery on Wednesday it will be the latest chapter in one of contemporary art’s most glittering careers. It’s hard to believe he was once such a nobody that when this unknown artist sent Work No 88, A sheet of A4 paper crumpled into a ball, to Nicholas […]
Any sense of real subversion or originality Emin ever conveyed has long since been packaged, copyrighted, and reproduced as kitsch self-caricature. An interview in the latest issue of Time Out reads like a cut-and-paste summary of previous public statements: Emin’s views on life boiled down to bullet points: • She is oppressed as a woman artist. […]