[ad_1]
Exhibition of the week
Picasso and Paper
The boundless creativity of the greatest modern artist is dazzling even when confined to a single, fragile material.
• Royal Academy, London, from 25 January to 13 April.
Also showing
Filthy Lucre
Darren Waterston’s decadent recreation of James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Peacock Room is fun but lacks real punch or depth – although it’s nice to be reminded of Whistler’s brilliance.
• V&A, London, from 25 January to 3 May.
American Pastoral
Survey of artists from Albert Bierstadt to Diane Arbus who reveal the dark side of the American dream.
• Gagosian Britannia Street, London, until 14 March.
Don McCullin
Romantic views of nature by the photographer better known for recording human tragedy.
• Hauser and Wirth, Bruton, Somerset, from 25 January to May 4.
Utopias
An exploration of the undying legacy of Thomas More’s 1516 book about a perfect society.
• Whitworth, Manchester, from 31 January to 27 September.
Image of the week
Seminole Hard Rock hotel, Florida
This $1.5bn building, more than any other, embodies the end-of-the-world hedonism of the new roaring 20s. It is the work of the Seminole tribe, a Native American group whose population on the Florida peninsula numbered 200,000 when Spanish colonisers first arrived in the 1500s, now down to 4,000 members. In many ways, the edifice is a fitting symbol of Seminole defiance: the tribe have long boasted being the only Native Americans to refuse to sign a peace treaty with the US government. With a name deriving from the Spanish word “cimarrones”, meaning untamed ones, the Seminoles have proved a force to be reckoned with ever since.
What we learned
Why mushrooms feature in the work of many artists
Jarvis Cocker is a fan of vintage sweet wrappers
Female sexuality and vaginas are celebrated on the London Underground
The 50-year history of video art is surveyed in five trailblazing works
How children made museums take fun more seriously
Two major 20th-century artists are rediscovered
Instagram is influencing the way art is being promoted and displayed
A gloomy self-portrait has been authenticated as a genuine work by Vincent van Gogh
Life magazine photographer Bill Ray died aged 84
And one of Australia’s greatest museum directors, James Mollison, died aged 88
Dior’s haute couture show paid tribute to artist Judy Chicago
The Brooklyn Museum put on a show of rarely seen work by female artists
Art thieves admit to stealing and returning Klimt’s Portrait of a Lady
Ai Weiwei revealed his latest work, a virtual reality video about Myanmar
Danielle Peck’s photographs show the coastal resort of Margate at a moment of change
The annual festival of music and art at Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art is nonsense …
… while New South Wales’s coastal swimming pools are amazing works of art
Andrew White reveals his best shot to be a photo of a besequined Beyoncé exiting the stage
The restored Van Eyck alterpiece, Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, left many people speechless
Women, trans and non-binary photographers staged a visual rebellion
Sicilian photographer Ferdinando Scianna has spent half a century capturing the world’s extremes …
Satirical signs poking fun at Sydney’s nanny state are being taken for real
Masterpiece of the week
Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, circa 1869, by Puvis de Chavannes
This is one of the first of a wave of artistic, literary and musical treatments of the death of John the Baptist at the behest of Herodias and Salome that helped to seed modernism. In culturally advanced 19th-century France, the story was written about by Flaubert and Huysmans and painted by Moreau in ways that shaped a new aesthetic of sex and death. Oscar Wilde’s play Salome, written in French in homage to these pioneers, made this new-old myth both popular and controversial. When Richard Strauss turned Wilde’s Salome into an opera, modernism hit music.
Puvis de Chavannes was ahead of the pack by being behind it. This painting was done when the impressionists were emerging, but this idiosyncratic artist ignored modern life in favour of eerie frozen tableaux. Here, the majestic muscular figure of the executioner ripples his back like a Michelangelo nude. The killing is a stately ritual enacted in a dreamy twilight. It anticipates the escape into dreams and symbolism that was to make fin de siècle art so intense. Aubrey Beardsley, whose illustrations for Wilde’s Salome are masterpieces of abstract Freudian dream art, visited Puvis de Chavannes and surely knew this painting.
• National Gallery, London.
Don’t forget
To follow us on Twitter: @GdnArtandDesign.
Sign up to the Art Weekly newsletter
If you don’t already receive our regular roundup of art and design news via email, please sign up here.
[ad_2]
READ SOURCE
