Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 102
October 22, 2018
Edward Burne-Jones review – art that shows how boring beauty can be
Tate Britain, London
The pre-Raphaelite artist mastered detail perfectly but failed to see the bigger picture – life itself
Halfway through Tate Britain’s loving homage to the Victorian “visionary” Edward Burne-Jones I was startled to see a painting I gave a damn about. It’s a portrait of William Graham, colonial businessman, Liberal MP and art collector. His emaciated, sick-looking face stares straight at you from a small dark canvas. Two mad sweeps of white hair sprout from either side of his balding crown. His eyes are gelid and numbed. He looks utterly tortured.
Why is this small, unpretentious portrait so much more interesting than the depictions of mythology and legend that fill this exhibition? Because it looks real. Graham was Burne-Jones’s patron and there must have been true intimacy between them. For once, Burne-Jones paints with a raw simplicity that gives you the awkward and irreplacable sense of being confronted by life, not art.
What Burne-Jones needed, apart from a slap in the face with a wet fish, was to read more Oscar Wilde
Edward Burne-Jones is at Tate Britain, London, from 24 October until 24 February.
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October 21, 2018
Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms review – barbaric splendour and fierce vision
British Library, London
With the Codex Amiatinus, the earliest surviving text of Beowulf and serpents galore, this blockbuster exhibition reveals a Britain not very English at all
The gallery is full of snakes that twist and slither in hypnotising coils of green and gold. It is hard to stop looking. That fascination leads you into a world that gradually ensnares the imagination. To spend time in the British Library’s blockbuster exhibition about the Anglo-Saxon world is to discover a culture of barbaric splendour and fierce vision, where the real and supernatural entwine.
The snakes are cast in gold and painted in books. You see them on a belt buckle from Sutton Hoo and the abstracted illuminations of Northumbrian gospels. The Germanic people who invaded Britain after the Romans left in AD410, pushing the native Celts into what became Wales, brought these swarming serpentine images from deep in the mists of Eurasian prehistory.
Related: Behemoth Bible returns to England for first time in 1,300 years
Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War is at the British Library, London, until 19 February.
Continue reading...October 19, 2018
Grotesque realism and a blood-soaked blockbuster – the week in art
Edward Burne-Jones’ Arthurian visions arrive at Tate Britain, the British Library celebrates art, words and war, and Monster Chetwynd takes over Edinburgh – all in our weekly dispatch
Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms
A blood-soaked blockbuster full of dragons, Vikings, magic … and some remarkable illuminated manuscripts.
• British Library, London, until 19 February.
What to see this week in the UK
From Dogman to Kacey Musgraves, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...October 18, 2018
The haunting genius of a gothic giant – Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill review
Strawberry Hill, London
Horace Walpole, the inventor of modern gothic, returns to haunt the spooky house he built in a revealing exhibition of masterpieces and grim curiosities
Horace Walpole was an aesthetic rebel against convention a century ahead of Oscar Wilde. He built himself Strawberry Hill, a house that aped the “barbaric” middle ages, then, while daydreaming among its pointy arches, fan vaulting and spooky niches, got the idea for The Castle of Otranto, the first modern work of horror fiction, which still influences every haunted-house story. As the inventor of modern gothic he is a giant of modern culture. Now he has returned to haunt the house he built.
The custodians of Walpole’s seismic home have brought back, from collections all over the world, the paintings, sculptures and surreal objects that originally decorated it and were sadly dispersed after his death. Installed for a few months in their original locations in his house, Walpole’s masterpieces and curiosities paint a picture not just of Strawberry Hill in its original splendour but the strange and fertile mind that created it.
on a lofty vase’s side,
Where China’s gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers that blow
Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill, London, 20 October until 24 February
Continue reading...October 16, 2018
'A soaring miracle of art' – Albukhary Gallery of the Islamic World review
British Museum, London
Two new rooms present an alternative history of the world, beginning with works with a geometric sophistication and abstract calm that western art could not achieve for another 10 centuries
The best way to get to the British Museum’s new gallery of Islamic art is via the Sutton Hoo gallery. That way, you first take a trip through Anglo-Saxon England, past Celtic gold, Viking jewels and treasures from the burial of a seventh-century king. These artefacts, lurking in shadow, all date from a time that is often called the Dark Ages. Then you step out of that gallery and into a world of light.
Streaming in through patterned screens and coloured glass, the light spills over lustreware, the glazed ceramics invented by medieval Islam that have an iridescent quality. Such luminous clarity seems to shine right through Islamic art: what you see here resembles the Enlightenment in 18th-century Europe – an age of reason that, in this case, started in the eighth century.
Continue reading...October 15, 2018
Jeremy Hunt poses in a maze. Behind him lurks the Brexit Minotaur | Jonathan Jones
The moment over the weekend when the foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, and his fellow European foreign ministers posed grinning and waving for a picture in the middle of a maze must have been one of those brief pauses of optimism in the Brexit process when a happy outcome seemed just a few laughing circuits of the greenery away – only for Arlene Foster or Jacob Rees-Mogg to appear at the next turn of the labyrinth with axe in hand and a determination to stay entrenched for ever and ever and ever.
A softly melancholic autumnal scatter of brown leaves across the emerald hedge-tops hints at winter closing in and the possibility – probability? – that the government’s cursed meanderings will leave Britain by the end of it completely and utterly lost. It was taken at Chevening, a country house in Kent at the prime minister’s disposal, which has a special association with the Foreign Office and whose maze is suggestive of a different age of elite diplomacy, when John le Carré’s George Smiley might have given his latest unsmiling account of the labyrinthine games of cold war espionage to a senior minister among these discreet walks.
Related: Where do the Brexit negotiations stand?
Related: Why ‘no surrender’ on Brexit is a bad strategy for the DUP | Bobby McDonagh
Continue reading...October 14, 2018
The Da Vinci mystery: why is his $450m masterpiece really being kept under wraps?
When the unveiling of the long-lost Salvator Mundi was cancelled last month, there were cries of fake. But is there more to the controversy surrounding the world’s most expensive painting?
In May 2008, some of the world’s greatest Leonardo da Vinci experts stood around an easel in a skylit studio high above Trafalgar Square. The object they had been invited to scrutinise, in the conservation department of the National Gallery, was a painting on a panel of walnut wood. It showed a long-haired, bearded man gazing straight ahead with one hand raised in blessing, the other holding a transparent sphere.
“There’s a mixture of being excited but not getting caught up in it,” says Martin Kemp, the eminent art historian who was there that Monday. “I try to keep a gravitational pull going, saying, ‘This can’t be right.’” Yet the thrill in the room was tangible. The painting had “presence”, felt Kemp, and there was no dissent.
We felt that to leave the painting 'raw' would cause viewers to focus on the losses
Was I looking at a work of genius – or a smoky imitation that turns his brilliance to mush?
Continue reading...October 12, 2018
Stonehenge's social network and a punk pioneer returns – the week in art
The British Museum opens a sweeping new gallery of Islamic art, Jamie Reid rages on in Hull and Stonehenge reveals its networked past – all in our weekly dispatch
Albukhary Foundation Gallery of the Islamic World
A spectacular new setting and interpretation for Islamic art and history from its beginnings to the present.
• British Museum, London, from 18 October.
What to see this week in the UK
From First Man to Enrique Iglesias, 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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