Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 100
November 27, 2018
Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen review – as artistic as tartan trousers
National Gallery, London
Pairing this trite painting of a stag with Rachel Maclean’s surrealist video about Scottish stereotypes may have viewers reaching for the whisky
The National Gallery has apparently had enough of masterpieces. You can see how its curators might be sick of seeing paintings by great artists such as Titian and Piero della Francesca wall-to-wall, day in, day out. So they’re treating themselves to the lowbrow fun of exhibiting a bit of nonsense by a painter who has been slighted for a century and on this evidence deserves to be slighted for several more.
Or so I am trying to rationalise the gallery’s mystifying attempt to redefine Edwin Landseer’s ludicrous The Monarch of the Glen as a great painting. It’s hard to understand how anyone can see this as anything but the lousy, lifeless relic that it is. Landseer’s mid-19th century painting of a stag posing majestically against a backdrop of Scottish mountains is trite in feeling and mechanical in execution. Far from a sublime romantic vision, it looks like an advert – and that is what it has often been used as. The accompanying book – does this little grouse-dropping of a show merit one? – reproduces a 1927 whisky ad among other uses of this painted answer to tartan golf trousers.
After a while the room starts to turn brown, as if you were locked in Jacob Rees-Mogg’s brain
Related: Rachel Maclean: my month in hell as the Bullring bunny
Landseer’s The Monarch of the Glen and Rachel Maclean: The Lion and The Unicorn are at the National Gallery, London, from 29 November to 3 February
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Why populists adore cats – and use them in their political propaganda
Italy’s rightwing deputy prime minister is using cat pictures to soften his anti-migrant posts on Facebook. This is no surprise. The whitewashed cats of the internet are pure phoneys
Fans of Matteo Salvini, Italy’s rightwing, populist deputy prime minister, have been sending him images of their cats so he can post the cute, furry faces on his Facebook page and give his relentless attacks on migrants a more cuddly setting. Yet the idea that cat pictures are sweet is an internet-era development. In art, until recently, the cat was an evil creature.
It is positively diabolical in Renaissance images of witchcraft. The German artist Hans Baldung Grien regularly included cats in his drawings of witches cavorting naked. While his witches offer themselves to Satan, their feline familiars, nicely observed, sit enigmatically, as cats will. In fact, 500 years ago, cats were considered so malign they were sometimes sealed alive inside wattle-and-daub walls.
Continue reading...Fake views? What we can learn from the V&A’s Cast Courts
The V&A’s restoration of its masterly collection of replicas of great European works of art - from Trajan’s Column to Michelangelo’s David - is a timely reminder of the Victorians’ cultural Europhilia
The full-scale replica of Trajan’s Column that stands in two halves in the V&A’s Cast Courts has always been a gobsmacking object to come across indoors. Now its interior is about to reveal a steampunk secret. As part of the restoration of the Cast Courts, which reopen this weekend, a door has been opened at the base of this monument. What can be in there? The darkness reveals … a chimney. It turns out that with typically Victorian practicality the creators of the Cast Courts built two solid brick cylinders like industrial chimney stacks to support the two halves of this ancient – and modern – wonder.
Why did they do it? Why did the Victorians not only create this stupendous replica of one of Rome’s most sublime monuments but fill two vast rooms in South Kensington with full-size casts of everything from the ceremonial doors of Santiago de Compostela’s cathedral to Michelangelo’s David? The answer is all around you as you meditate inside Trajan’s Column. The Cast Courts are relics of a cultural Europhilia that’s clearly not shared by modern Britain. These loving educational artworks bear witness to a passion to know, to see, and most of all to understand the cultural heritage of Europe: to bring the continent’s artistic jewels to these rainy shores.
Continue reading...November 23, 2018
Surreal meditations on Scottishness and Dickens saved from hard times – the week in art
Edinburgh has a new contemporary art space, Charles II’s enthusiasm for sex is surveyed and Cornelia Parker crushes brass – all in our weekly dispatch
Rachel Maclean
Surreal meditations on modern Scottish identity from this audacious creator of grotesque video masquerades.
• National Gallery, London, from 29 November to 3 February.
What to see this week in the UK
From Shoplifters to Martin Creed, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...November 20, 2018
'Portraits by an 18th-century feminist dad' – Gainsborough’s Family Album review
National Portrait Gallery, London
Thomas Gainsborough was often dismissed as a flatterer of the elites, yet these personal paintings of his two daughters are so full of life you sense they could walk out of the gallery
The love that glows in Thomas Gainsborough’s portraits of his daughters Mary and Margaret has not faded in 260 years. It manifests itself as actual light, illuminating their young faces, in his first painting of them together. They are romping through a bit of wild nature in about 1756, when Mary was around six years old and her younger sister Margaret was five. As Margaret reaches out to touch a white butterfly, her sister holds her hand warily, holding her back. They themselves make the shape of a butterfly, two wings of one fragile entity. In the National Portrait Gallery’s moving encounter with an 18th-century family, you see that butterfly grow, and see it broken.
The story of Margaret and Mary is like Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, but with a tragic ending. Which is another way of saying it is a true story about women in the Georgian age. Yet it is not a sociological abstraction. It’s the intimate story of two sisters and their well-meaning father, and it has never before been told as clearly as by this lovely exhibition. The BBC should adapt it into a Sunday night drama. It’s got everything – frilly dresses, debonair youths, comic relatives – but instead of yet another posh house, it takes us into a world that’s joyously middle class.
Related: Restored Gainsborough painting on show at National Portrait Gallery
Continue reading...November 19, 2018
David Hockney’s $90.3m painting reminds us what great art looks like | Jonathan Jones
The record-breaking Portrait of an Artist, painted in 1972, speaks from the heart. Not enough newer work does the same
Bittersweet – you don’t really know what that word means until you have contemplated David Hockney’s 1972 Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures). This painting is a calm distillation of love and sorrow, a sad song about a broken heart – and that heart was Hockney’s. Its sale at Christie’s for an awe-inspiring $90.3m (£70.2m), a new world record for a living artist, adds more layers of bittersweetness. For Hockney at 81, this is a recognition of his place as one of the most remarkable artists of the past 60 years. Yet it comes with barbs.
Related: David Hockney painting earns record $90.3m for living artist
Continue reading...November 16, 2018
'If only we all took selfies like Warhol' – Andy Warhol/Eduardo Paolozzi review
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
From his lipsticked selfies to his troubling first world war work, Warhol shows there’s no end to his genius. Poor Paolozzi just can’t keep up
In 1963, just as pop art was getting famous, Andy Warhol, its coolest exponent, told an interviewer he painted the way he did because: “I want to be a machine.” It was a great line – and it makes a provocative title for the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s stimulating juxtaposition of his work with that of the British pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi. If it had any truth, Warhol failed in his ambition: there is nothing remotely machine-like about his art. Emotion and desire beat through it as insistently as Lou Reed’s staccato rhythm guitar in I’m Waiting for the Man, by the Velvet Underground, the house band at Warhol’s studio.
One of the early drawings in this exhibition anticipates that song about addiction. Entitled The Nation’s Nightmare, it depicts a young man injecting heroin. Warhol drew it in 1951 to advertise a radio documentary series about America’s “social problems”. Yet it is in no way a hack job. There’s a sensuous compassion in his portrait of the youth, an empathy intensified by Warhol’s adoring delineation of his beautiful face. For years, biographers wrote about Warhol’s career as a commercial artist in New York in the 1950s as, at best, a preliminary to his real art. At worst, it was proof of his true nature as a commercial sellout. The superb selection of his 50s drawings makes that cynical view of him seem plain stupid.
Related: Pop's dark star: the return of Andy Warhol
Continue reading...Hockney hits a new high and Spandau Ballet capture the cold war – the week in art
Hockney’s swimmer breaks a record, the Spands feel the chill and Fernand Léger imagines a female utopia – all in our weekly dispatch
Gainsborough’s Family Album
This artist who made a living profiling the rich painted some of his greatest portraits for himself, to record his love of his family.
• National Portrait Gallery, London, until 3 February.
What to see this week in the UK
From The Ballad of Buster Scruggs to Unknown Mortal Orchestra, 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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