Jonathan Keates, Author at Catholic Herald

Jonathan Keates

Fine art: The year that Picasso silenced the critics

March 29, 2018

Sometimes there is a positively frightening aspect to the dogged fecundity of Pablo Picasso. A single month in the artist’s long life might produce a dozen large canvases, a host of preparatory drawings, a scattering of oil sketches and the odd sculpture or two. Was this compulsiveness now and then in the nature of a

Fine arts: The artist who found Venice on the Seine

January 18, 2018

Amedeo Modigliani has suffered from being turned into the classic one-trick pony of 20th-century art. During the 1970s era of Athena posters, myriad student rooms were adorned with his recumbent nudes, their geometrical faces echoing the African masks which helped to inspire his brief foray into sculpture. The signature impact of these figures has since

Film: A portrait of the artist that’s blemish-free

August 17, 2017

When dealing with the lives of creative personalities, cinema nearly always gets things spectacularly wrong. Hollywood has been notorious in this respect. Remember Song Without End, in which Dirk Bogarde mugged his way hopelessly through the career of Franz Liszt, or Lust For Life, with Kirk Douglas as somebody called “Vincent Van Go” painting sunflowers

Fine art: Duffed up by Grayson in a padded room

June 22, 2017

Grayson Perry Serpentine Gallery, London, until Sept 10 Who’s a clever boy then? Grayson Perry, it seems, to his many admirers. Hitherto I’ve tended to be heretical, a sceptic as regards the performance, suspecting that the whole “Claire” shtick, complete with blobby lipstick, box-pleat party frocks and girly accessories, is too obviously a case of

Fine art: The sculptor who saw the body at its sparest

June 01, 2017

Giacometti Tate Modern, London, until September 10 In one important sense Alberto Giacometti was his own worst enemy. The stick-thin human forms he created during his post-war years in Paris, with titles such as Walking Man, Man Pointing and Tall Woman, have since become such signature works for the Swiss sculptor as to obscure practically

Fine art: Tiny masterpieces as splendid as any Botticelli

April 27, 2017

Most of our encounters with the religious art of Renaissance Italy are made in either churches or galleries. All too easily we ignore the broader spiritual context in which a Botticelli Madonna, a Luca della Robbia Annunciation or a Donatello John the Baptist was originally created. Artefacts as superb as these spring from a world

Fine art: A quest for the phantom genius of Italian painting

June 02, 2016

Giorgione – or Zorzi da Castelfranco, as he was known in Venice – was the phantom genius of Italian painting during the early 16th century, contemporary with an elderly Giovanni Bellini and a youthful Titian. During his brief existence (he died of plague in 1510, aged 33) almost nothing was known of him beyond the

Art review: Facing the Modern at the National Gallery

October 11, 2013

The National's exhibition of Viennese portraits offers a coherent narrative and striking cultural perspectives

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