Crash: art and JG Ballard collide at the Gagosian gallery

A new London exhibition brings together works by artists tuned into JG Ballard's surreal, dystopian universe

Posted in Andy Warhol, Art, Art and design, Culture, Ed Ruscha, Editorial, Exhibitions, guardian.co.uk, Installation, Jeremy Deller, JG Ballard, Painting, Roy Lichtenstein, Sculpture | Comments Off

Private view podcast: Adrian Searle describes Crash, art’s homage to JG Ballard at the Gagosian

WARNING: contains explicit language

Posted in Art, Culture, Editorial, Exhibitions, guardian.co.uk, London listings | Comments Off

Star City: The Future Under Communism | Visual art review

Nottingham Contemporary

Star City is an unassuming new town a few miles from Moscow – but for many years its location was a closely guarded secret. That is because it was the hub of the Soviet space programme, where ­cosmonauts trained and lived with their families in splendid isolation.

These days, you are more likely to bump into artists in Star City than space pioneers. Among the first to ­undertake residencies there were Jane and ­Louise ­Wilson, whose film installation shows a surprisingly mundane-looking place. It is as if Letchworth secretly housed a ­collection of flight ­simulators and anti-gravity machines with the aspect of totalitarian fairground rides. Most threatening is a huge ­centrifuge that ­generates the crushing g-force ­cosmonauts experience on takeoff. Can it be entirely coincidental that this emblem of Soviet supremacy resembles a giant iron fist?

The Otolith Group artist collective took advantage of Star City's training facilities to experience a flight out of the earth's atmosphere. They intercut images of floating around in space with ­footage of a delegation of Indian women who travelled to Moscow in the early 1970s as ­representatives of India's own attempts to establish a space programme.

This well-presented show proves ­nothing looks quite so ­old-fashioned as recent visions of the future. A replica of a Sputnik ­satellite seems as enigmatically pointless as a ­constructivist sculpture. Cold war propaganda ­posters, ­meanwhile, promise a cosmic collectivism that seems more palatable than the earthbound variety – though Goshka ­Macuga's tube of ­genuine Soviet spacefood (­cottage cheese with blackcurrant flavour) ­suggests that maybe it wasn't so ­palatable after all.

Rating: 3/5

Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Exhibitions, Reviews, The Guardian | Comments Off

Paul Nash | Visual art review

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

The spirits of British poets and ­Romantic painters flit like moonbeams through fairy forests in this completely ­disarming exhibition. Paul Nash ­(1889-1946) painted the battlefields of both 20th-century world wars, and ­combined the ideas of the ­surrealist movement with a native feel for ­landscape. So much for the basic facts: Dulwich ­champions him with a passion that warms the heart.

The curator's clever choice is to show Nash's paintings outside chronology, which frees us from a prosaic trawl and enthusiastically draws attention to his strengths. Right from the start, you're in a distinctive, painted world that is part William Blake, part JRR Tolkien and all England. Red suns rise over chalk hills, grey breakers hit coastal defences. The landscapes of Kent keep recurring, along with unfamiliar views of London and, like a bass note building up to a ­sinister climax, the mudscapes of the first world war and the skeletal remains of ­Luftwaffe planes shot down in the Battle of Britain.

Surrealism was the one avant-garde movement of the early 20th century to which British artists took naturally. Its modern freedoms allowed Nash to paint his dreams, and mix up homely landscapes with personal myth in a way comparable to Dalì's ­mythologising of Catalonia.

Yet even when Nash takes ­surrealist photographs, his ­sensibility is as ­knotted as an English oak. Above all, his visions make you think of the ­nestled English village scenes painted by Blake's 19th-century ­disciple ­Samuel Palmer. It is a cliche that ­British ­Romantic art was always based on meticulous ­observation: it was pure inner revelation for Blake, for Palmer – and for Nash.

In the last room, the underlying note of war gets louder as you face Totes Meer (1940-41), a "dead sea" of German aircraft whose wings crash like metal waves on the English countryside. It is as if they have been absorbed into the timeless downland to become a new fairytale in this masterpiece, whose compassion for the enemy, given its date, is remarkable and inspiring.

Nash has always been an artist worthy of respect. Here he is rediscovered as one worthy of love.

Rating: 4/5

Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Exhibitions, Painting, Reviews, The Guardian | Comments Off

Michelangelo’s drawings at the Courtauld gallery are intimate encounter with an artist in love

In one room, this sensational exhibition shows the greatest drawings that survive from Michelangelo's hand

The Courtauld gallery, that sombre, academic institution, dares to go where Irving Stone never went in his bestselling novel about Michelangelo, The Agony and the Ecstasy. It refutes, with all the authority at its command, centuries of bowdlerisation that have left the nude saints in Michelangelo's painting The Last Judgment still – in 2010 – emasculated by prudish drapes. It gives us the unmade movie Michelangelo in Love, pouring out his soul in art and verse to a handsome youth whose beauty crystallised all the longings inherent in Michelangelo's art ever since he carved his teenage masterpiece The Battle of the Centaurs, with its vision of life as a tumult of wrestling male bodies.

This is a sensational exhibition in more ways than one. It is the most intimate encounter with Michelangelo yet staged by a British gallery but, if you come for the story, you will stay for the art, for here in one room are the greatest drawings that survive from his hand. Most of Michelangelo's surviving sketches are just that, sketches for the sculptures, paintings and buildings that awe visitors to Italy: only a handful of his drawings were intended to be enjoyed as works of art in their own right, and he made most of these as love gifts for Tommaso de' Cavalieri. They are brought together here to release you soaring among winged, ascending and falling beings in the strange and wonderful atmosphere of Michelangelo's "chaste desire", as he described his passion for Tommaso.

Michelangelo's devotion is right there to see, in an amazingly slavish note he scribbled on a drawing of the hubristic Phaeton falling from the sky after he tried to drive the sun god's chariot: "Master Tommaso, if this sketch does not please you, say so …" It must truly have been an overpowering love to reduce Michelangelo, who refused to take orders from popes, to such servility. And what a drawing it is: horses sculpted in delicate black chalk fall in a nightmarish vortex towards twisting mourners whose grief is literally rooting them to the spot. Beside it his finished drawing of the same tragedy, presumably completed after listening to Tommaso's comments, portrays Jupiter high in the heavens hurling a thunderbolt from the back of an eagle. Images of eagles keep recurring, as if in a sex dream scripted by Freud. Michelangelo's most explicit present for Tommaso portrays the classical myth of Ganymede, the beautiful boy carried away by lustful Jupiter who has taken the form of an eagle to achieve his rapture; imagine being young Cavalieri and getting this gift from your famous, older admirer.

Love was in the air in Renaissance Italy, and Michelangelo's drawings compete with the heterosexual hedonism of Titian's paintings: his wonderful red chalk Bacchanal responds to Titian's Children's Bacchanal. But Michelangelo's drawings for Cavalieri are more personal and confessional than any other Renaissance renderings of saucy Roman myth, and what you are left with, as you contemplate the Courtauld's magnificent possession The Dream, which sums up all existence as a striving of bodies and a yearning of souls, is an immense love for this most courageous and human of artists.

Jonathan Jones's book about Michelangelo is published by Simon and Schuster in April.

Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Exhibitions, Features, Michelangelo, Museums, The Courtauld Institute of Art, The Guardian | Comments Off

Michelangelo’s dreams of male muse go on show at Courtauld

London gallery displays finest of Renaissance artist's drawings for his friends, with loans from the Vatican and the Queen

Some of the most magnificent drawings ever executed – physical manifestations of Michelangelo's love and infatuation for a handsome and intelligent teenage boy – will on Thursday go on display as a group for the first time.

The groundbreaking show at the Courtauld gallery in London, with loans from the Vatican and the Queen, is essentially a joyously gay love story.

The drawings were done by Michelangelo when he was about 57. In the winter of 1532 the artist met ­Tommaso de' Cavalieri, a Roman nobleman celebrated for his dreamboat good looks, his superior intellect and his ­gracious manners, and fell head over heels in love with him.

Stephanie Buck, the show's curator, said it was, at heart, an extraordinary romance. "These drawings were meant to be looked at and studied, people looked at them with magnifying glasses and mirrors for hours and hours. With these drawings you can't reach higher."

The exhibition is built around The Dream of Human Life (Il Sogno, or The Dream) which was bequeathed to the Courtauld in 1978 by one of the century's most important collectors, Count Antoine Seilern. It is considered one of the finest of all Renaissance drawings. In it Michelangelo focuses on the beauty of the body, depicting a nude young man being roused from sleep, and human vices, by a winged spirit.

Buck is in no doubt The Dream is one of Michelangelo's "presentation drawings" made for Cavalieri in 1533. Others on display include The Punishment of Tityus, The Fall of Phaeton, The ­Bacchanal of Children, and The Rape of Ganymede. They would have been seen by the pope and the Medicis and on one level were teaching Cavalieri how to draw, and perhaps offering moral guidance. But they were also expressions of the artist's consuming love for the boy.

Michelangelo as an artist was at the height of his powers and fame, and almost deified. The quality is indisputable. In 1568 his biographer, Giorgio Vasari, called the works "drawings the like of which have never been seen".

Buck said it was unclear how old Cavalieri was when Michelangelo fell for him. The Courtauld research put him at between 16 and 17, she said.

The exhibition also shows that it was more than just physical infatuation. Michelangelo clearly held Cavalieri's intellect in high regard. Alongside The Fall of Phaeton is an earlier and different version on which the artist writes, saying that if the sketch does not please Cavalieri he should say so.

"The point is," said Buck, "that ­Cavalieri, although he was so young, must have played quite a role in the making of it because he was able to ­criticise it and send it back."

The Vatican has also lent for the ­exhibition ­Michelangelo's original poems, which he composed in the early stages of the friendship. Again there is little doubt as to how he felt. One reads:

"You know that I know, my lord, that you know that

I come here to enjoy you nearer at hand, and you

know that I know that you know who I really am: why

then this hesitation to greet each other, even now?

If the hope that you give me is true, if the great desire

that has been granted me is true, let the wall raised

up between these two be broken down …"

The Courtauld show is already attracting considerable academic interest, and it represents the first time that The  Dream has been exhibited alongside the other presentation drawings. The last time they were together (without The Dream) was in 1988 for exhibitions in Paris and Washington.

The debate about Michelangelo and his sexuality continues. He never made any secret of his love of male beauty – just look at David – but he always maintained it was a celibate love, a platonic love. That goes, too, with Cavalieri.

Buck said: "The whole idea, which he repeats in his letters and poems, is that he doesn't want to chase Cavalieri off. He speaks of his physical desire but it is a chaste love and he is not approaching him in a manner that would make it ­difficult for Cavalieri."

Having said that, Buck believes Michelangelo was certainly gay and that he would have slept with men. But Cavalieri was from such a ­high-ranking family in papal Rome that the two of them going to bed was never going to happen. Yet Cavalieri, who later married and had children, was clearly honoured to be held so highly in the affections of Michelangelo; they stayed close friends. He was with Michelangelo at his deathbed and was later instrumental in ensuring unfinished projects were completed.

Of course the one question that wants to be answered is what did the boy look like, how handsome was he? "We know there was a portrait of Cavalieri but it is lost," said Buck. "Unfortunately."

Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Exhibitions, Michelangelo, Museums, News, The Courtauld Institute of Art, The Guardian, UK news | Comments Off

Private view podcast: Adrian Searle describes Crash, art’s homage to JG Ballard at the Gagosian

WARNING: contains explicit language

Posted in Art, Culture, Editorial, Exhibitions, guardian.co.uk, London listings | Comments Off

Private view podcast: Adrian Searle describes Crash, art’s homage to JG Ballard at the Gagosian

WARNING: contains explicit language

Posted in Art, Culture, Editorial, Exhibitions, guardian.co.uk, London listings | Comments Off

Smart art: how to sell out without selling out

For London's smaller art galleries, such as the Courtauld, Wallace and Dulwich, getting crowds in can be done intelligently ... or in a way that suggests desperate fashion-chasing

It's a peculiar destiny to be a small art museum in London. A city whose big galleries are so famous and so well-attended must be an unnerving place if you are responsible for attracting audiences, press coverage and funding to one of the quieter, more taken-for-granted institutions. These smaller London venues have their own "big three". The Courtauld Gallery, the Wallace Collection, and Dulwich Picture Gallery are all outstanding collections that offer unique pleasures of their own.

At the Courtauld, you can see one of the choicest collections of late-19th century French art anywhere in the world. At Dulwich, you can take in such great old master paintings as Rubens's Venus, Mars and Cupid in the setting of an architectural masterpiece by Sir John Soane. And the Wallace Collection can boast such a universal masterpiece as The Laughing Cavalier.

In a sane world these galleries would not have to compete for attention. It would be fine if they were empty of people. They could just concentrate on presenting their collections well, and perhaps putting on the occasional erudite exhibition of old master drawings – indeed, the Courtauld is about to do just that.

But this is not a sane world. Art is as nuts as everything else. If you don't get people in, you're not accessible, you're elitist – and your budget becomes vulnerable. The monies that can be got from gift shops, cafes, and ticket sales are considered indispensable. And besides, these collections doubtless have a genuine democratic urge to share their riches.

These galleries provide three very different models of how a venerable, small but choice collection might do that. The Wallace Collection has been most fazed by the fame of contemporary art, rattled by the roar of the publicists. Its recent D****n H***t exhibition was just the latest in a series of attempted crowd pleasers. And it did get in the crowds: gift-shop sales mutliplied many times over, I hear.

But at what cost has the Wallace Collection modernised itself? This used to be the quietest, most forgotten and therefore most thoughtful museum in London. It was great in its remoteness. Now it feels neurotic: always trying one glib idea after another, ending in this recent unholy car crash.

When all the papers were covering this worthless event, a superb Frank Auerbach exhibition at the Courtauld got far less notice. Yet, that does not mean the Courtauld is failing. Lots of people were at the Auerbach – lots were loving it. This gallery seems busier all the time, indeed, with keen, interested visitors of all ages. That was also true when I went last Friday to see the fine Paul Nash exhibition at Dulwich.

Both the Courtauld and Dulwich are pursuing intelligent, worthwhile exhibition programmes that add to their excellent collections without spoiling their meditative atmospheres. They prove it is possible to modernise without losing your soul - and it is the Wallace Collection, desperately chasing fashion, that looks silly.

Posted in Art, Art and design, Blogposts, Culture, Exhibitions, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off

Anthony Hopkins art exhibition opens

50 landscape and abstract paintings by Silence of the Lambs actor go on show at Mayfair's Gallery 27

The first British exhibition of paintings by the Oscar-winning Welsh actor Sir Anthony Hopkins opens in London tomorrow . The 50 landscape and abstract paintings by the Silence of the Lambs actor, who has exhibited throughout the US, will be displayed at Gallery 27 in Mayfair, central London, until Saturday before moving to The Dome in Edinburgh for four days on 2 March. Hopkins began painting in 2002, paints every day in his Malibu studio and "takes his art very seriously", according to exhibition promoter Jonathan Poole. Five limited-edition prints will be available for purchase.

Posted in Anthony Hopkins, Art, Art and design, Culture, Exhibitions, Film, London, News, The Guardian, UK news | Comments Off