Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 101
November 14, 2018
Penises of the ancient world: phallus found in Roman toilet was far from the first
A mosaic of a young man holding his erect penis has been found in a Roman toilet in Turkey. But portraying the male member is a tradition that stretches much further back in human history
When excavations began at the ancient Roman city of Pompeii in the 18th century, the place turned out to be full of penises. The ancient art preserved under ash from the 79 AD eruption of Vesuvius was so rich in willies that the English antiquarian Richard Payne Knight argued for the existence of an ancient fertility cult there. After all, there was one still alive in southern Italy at the time. His 1786 book An Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus has an engraved frontispiece showing an array of contemporary wax phalluses made as votive offerings.
More than 200 years later, the priapism of the ancient world can still astound us. Archaeologists have uncovered a Roman public toilet in southern Turkey with some filthy and funny floor decorations. As they hitched up their togas or reached for sponge on a stick, users of this men’s loo could look down at a mosaic of a young man holding his cock. He is labelled in the mosaic as Narcissus, who in Greek myth fell in love with his own reflection and wasted away gazing at it. Here, his attention is more focused: he’s obsessed with his own erection. As he plays with it, he looks sideways to reveal a ludicrous phallic nose. “Narcissus, what are you doing in that latrina?” his mater might be demanding from outside the door, in a gag that anticipates Portnoy’s Complaint by around 1,800 years.
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November 9, 2018
What to see this week in the UK
From Wildfire to Interpol, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...November 5, 2018
'Some of the most appalling images ever created' – I Am Ashurbanipal review
British Museum, London
Whether wrestling lions or skinning prisoners alive, the Assyrian king ran a murderously efficient empire. This is the art of war – and it’s terrifying
You have to hand it to the ancient Assyrians – they were honest. Their artistic propaganda relishes every detail of torture, massacre, battlefield executions and human displacement that made Assyria the dominant power of the Middle East from about 900 to 612BC. Assyrian art contains some of the most appalling images ever created. In one scene, tongues are being ripped from the mouths of prisoners. That will mute their screams when, in the next stage of their torture, they are flayed alive. In another relief a surrendering general is about to be beheaded and in a third prisoners have to grind their fathers’ bones before being executed in the streets of Nineveh.
These and many more episodes of calculated cruelty can be seen carved in gypsum in the British Museum’s blockbuster recreation of Assyria’s might. Assyrian art makes up in tough energy what it lacks in human tenderness. It is an art of war – all muscle, movement, impact. People and animals are portrayed as fierce cartoons of merciless force.
I am Ashurbanipal is at the British Museum, London, from 8 November to 24 February.
November 2, 2018
Viennese sexuality from Klimt/Schiele and art from Coca-Cola – the week in art
The Assyrian empire in all its glory, human psychology from Lorenzo Lotto and Patrick Heron by the seaside – all in our weekly dispatch
Klimt/Schiele Drawings
This is a beguiling and engrossing show of sensuality and reverie from Sigmund Freud’s sexually supercharged Vienna.
• Royal Academy, London, from 4 November until 3 February.
What to see this week in the UK
From Peterloo to War Horse, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...November 1, 2018
Dreamers, lovers and zealots: Lorenzo Lotto's portraits – review
National Gallery, London
Real people meet our eyes in Lotto’s pioneering portraits, making us feel the fire in their 16th-century souls
Lorenzo Lotto lived in an age when artists and doctors were digging under the surface of human life. Leonardo da Vinci spent his nights dissecting and drawing the dead. The Padua-based surgeon Vesalius would publish a revolutionary – and gorily illustrated – book of human anatomy in 1543. That new knowledge glistens in the shaven scalp of a friar portrayed by Lotto in about 1526. You can see blue veins under the translucent skin of his forehead.
Lorenzo Lotto Portraits is at the National Gallery, London, from 5 November to 10 February
Continue reading...October 30, 2018
Klimt / Schiele review – the double act who saw the profound in the pornographic
Royal Academy, London
This sumptuous collection of drawings reveals how the master and his protege caused a scandal by bringing sex and death into collision
A model lies on her back on soft pillows, clutching the flesh of her raised left thigh as, with her right hand, she strokes her clitoris. Her eyes close in enjoyment. The artist watches with a pleasure his drawing fully communicates.
When I saw this drawing the caption next to it seemed to be in the wrong place, for it was labelled as a work by the notoriously sensual Austrian artist Egon Schiele. In fact the drawing is clearly signed, in elegant art nouveau capitals, GUSTAV KLIMT. Like pupil, like teacher. The Royal Academy’s mix and mashup of drawings by Klimt, born in 1862, and his protege Schiele, born in 1890, is a surprising, enriching, rewarding comparison of two geniuses who influenced and supported each other and whose imaginations turn out to have much more in common than I thought.
Klimt / Schiele: Drawings from the Albertina Museum, Vienna, is at the Royal Academy, London, from 4 November to 3 February 2019.
Continue reading...October 26, 2018
A portrait created by AI just sold for $432,000. But is it really art?
An image of Edmond de Belamy, created by a computer, has just been sold at Christie’s. But no algorithm can capture our complex human consciousness
From a distance, Portrait of Edmond de Belamy, which has just sold at Christie’s in New York for $432,000 (£337,000), looks almost plausible. Up close, however, the paintwork becomes a grid of mechanical-looking dots, the man’s face a golden blur with black holes for eyes. Look into those eyes. They show no sign of feeling or life. Did a computer make this?
The answer is yes. The first artwork generated by AI to be sold at Christie’s, its impressive price would seem to suggest that in future we will get computers to make art for us. Robot van Gogh will harmlessly cut its ear off and robot Picasso will be a genius, minus the misogyny.
Continue reading...Vuillard thanks his mum and Jean Genet meets the Black Panthers – the week in art
Sydney’s seaside is resculpted, boulders roll in Liverpool and Artes Mundi gets political – all in our weekly dispatch
Vuillard
This sensitive painter of everyday life portrays his mother in his many homages to her support for his work.
• Barber Institute, Birmingham, until 20 January.
What to see this week in the UK
From Bohemian Rhapsody to Nicolas Hodges, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
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