Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 118
January 1, 2018
From Picasso at his mightiest to gods of American cool: the hottest art shows of 2018
Picasso reveals his most erotic year, Andreas Gursky predicts the post-truth era, O’Keeffe and Hopper hit Oxford – and the only way is Sussex for William Blake in our exhibitions preview
Get the new year off to an angry start with this exhibition about art, popular culture and protest. Peter Kennard’s classic CND photomontages of the 1980s and a raw, intimate recording of The Internationale by Susan Philipsz are among the political artworks in a survey of how art is inspired by dissent, resistance and rebellion. Yet can protest art really change anything? The most pungent political art of modern times includes Picasso’s Guernica and John Heartfield’s anti-Nazi photomontages, but neither stopped Hitler.
• 6 January-15 April, Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
December 30, 2017
Culture highlights: what to see this week in the UK
From Nile Rodgers’ New Year’s Eve party to festive ballet, here is our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance in the next seven days
Continue reading...December 23, 2017
Culture highlights: what to see this week in the UK
From the return of the a cappella smash hit Pitch Perfect to next year’s gigs of note, here is our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance
Continue reading...You may confer: test your knowledge of literature, music and art – Christmas quiz
What food did Samuel Pepys bury in his backyard? Which dystopian novelist had a ‘hopeless’ love affair with cricket? And how many words did Enid Blyton write per day? Try your hand at our Christmas quiz
“There is no such passion in human nature as the passion for gravy among commercial gentlemen.” In which classic book does this confident assertion appear?
Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens
The Physiology of Taste by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
Anna of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett
According to his diary entry for 4 September 1666, which luxury item did Samuel Pepys bury in his garden for safety as the great fire of London approached?
A joint of aged smoked beef
A parmesan cheese
His best china plate
In which classic children’s novel does the heroine get her best friend roaring drunk?
Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery
The Jolliest Term on Record by Angela Brazil
Matilda by Roald Dahl
Who said “I have made a lot of mistakes falling in love, and regretted most of them, but never the potatoes that went with them”?
GB Shaw
Bridget Jones
Nora Ephron
Which Thomas Hardy hero inadvertently serves the girl of his dreams a well-boiled slug?
Giles Winterborne in The Woodlanders
Angel Clare in Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Gabriel Oak in Far from the Madding Crowd
In Jane Eyre, what is the breed of Mr Rochester’s dog, Pilot?
Irish wolfhound
Newfoundland
Yorkshire terrier
In which story by Flaubert does the famous parrot appear?
“Hérodias”
“Un Coeur Simple”
“La Légende de Saint-Julien l’Hospitalier”
A boy prays to a polecat-ferret in the darkly funny Saki short story “Sredni Vashtar”. Which British writer-director turned the story into a film?
Stephen Fry
Patrick Marber
Andrew Birkin
Which philosopher asked why we should concern ourselves with cats, when they have no sign of the zodiac named after them?
Voltaire
Francis Bacon
Jean-Paul Sartre
In Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, what other pets are kept by young Hedvig Ekdal in the loft?
Birch mice
Wolverines
Rabbits
What’s the name of the wood at the heart of Robert Holdstock’s fantasy cycle about an English forest that contains time as well as space?
Oak-Apple
Instar
Mythago
Along which river does Alice Oswald poetically “sleepwalk” in a long poem of 2009?
Dart
Severn
Stour
With what creatures does Gawain battle in his winter journey across England to meet the Green Knight?
Dragons and ogres
Lynxes and griffons
Worms and wodwos
What is the title of Iris Murdoch’s 1978 Booker prize-winning novel about Charles Arrowby, a playwright and director?
The Sea
The Sea, the Sea
Down to the Sea
Into which poet’s past does Andrew Greig go fishing in At the Loch of the Green Corrie?
Norman MacCaig
Hugh MacDiarmid
Nan Shepherd
Which novelist stole one of their book titles from a composer?
Joseph Roth
Ian McEwan
AS Byatt
Penelope Lively
Which opera by Richard Strauss makes the hero of which Iris Murdoch novel puke?
Feuersnot/The Nice and the Good
Der Rosenkavalier/The Black Prince
Ariadne auf Naxos/Nuns and Soldiers
Everyone knows that Helen Schlegel stole Leonard Bast’s umbrella after Beethoven’s fifth symphony. But what was next on the programme?
Brahms, Vier Ernste Lieder
Bizet, L’Arlésienne
Berlioz, Les Nuits d’Été
Which recording finally calls Joachim Ziemssen back from the dead in The Magic Mountain?
The Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde
“Va, pensiero” from Nabucco
Valentin’s prayer from Gounod’s Faust
Which opera does Proust’s Mme de Cambremer think finer than Parsifal “because in Parsifal the most beautiful things are surrounded with a sort of halo of melodic phrases, outworn by the very fact of being melodic?”
Schoenberg’s Erwartung
Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha
Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande
In which novel do Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons make a joint appearance?
Ali Smith’s How to Be Both
Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory
Ian McEwan’s Solar
Which Italian artist’s style figures in Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red?
Gentile Bellini
Umberto Boccioni
Michelangelo Pistoletto
The lost painting in Hannah Rothschild’s The Improbability of Love is by:
Jean-Honoré Fragonard
Jean-Antoine Watteau
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun
Which of these artists was/is also a novelist?
Ford Madox Brown
Jake Chapman
Vanessa Bell
Which of these is called a “poisonous book” in The Picture of Dorian Gray?
Marius the Epicurean by Walter Pater
Household Management by Mrs Beeton
Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans
Which celebrated dystopian novelist confessed to a “hopeless” teenage love affair with cricket? a) b) c)
HG Wells
Aldous Huxley
George Orwell
In Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, which football team wins the FA Cup 5-4 having been a goal down on four occasions?
Macclesfield Town
Leicester City
West Bromwich Albion
Dink Heckler, in Martin Amis’s London Fields, is the South African number seven in which sport?
Tennis
Darts
Cross country running
Which British writer drew on his experiences of playing rugby league for Leeds in his first novel?
John Braine
David Storey
JB Priestley
The hero of Fred Exley’s A Fan’s Notes is a fan of which American football team?
Green Bay Packers
Chicago Bears
New York Giants
What does Edith in Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac wear on her aborted wedding day?
A little black dress worn with a double strand of her grandmother’s pearls
A Chanel suit copied by a Polish dressmaker
A white linen dress purchased and altered to fit her at Selfridges
Who designed the dresses of Proust’s Duchesse de Guermantes?
Fortuny
Worth
Patou
In the 17th-century ballad “Tam Lin”, where did Janet tie her kirtle green?
Round her waist
Above her knee
Round her shoulders
In Middlemarch, what throws Dorothea Brooke’s beauty into relief?
Poor dress
A glimpse of her wrists
A low neckline
When Rose marries Pinkie in Brighton Rock, what new garment does she buy?
New shoes
A new corset
A new mackintosh
What is What-a-Mess the puppy’s real name?
Ian
Scamper
Prince Amir of Kinjan
Which children’s writer did GK Chesterton liken to Jane Austen and say that he “felt like a male intruder” on her books’ grounds?
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Louisa May Alcott
Charlotte Yonge
Who named the hero of her most famous book after her (probable) younger lover at the time (and dedicated the book to him)?
E Nesbit
Richmal Crompton
Joan G Robinson
How many words did Enid Blyton write per day, at her peak?
3,000
10,000
15,000
Who lived on Klickitat Street?
Clever Polly
The little wooden horse
Ramona Quimby
Which Roman writer addressed a poem to his lover’s sparrow?
Catullus
Propertius
Ovid
Which bird’s nesting season is characterised by halycon days, according to the poet Simonides?
Hoopoe
Kingfisher
Nightjar
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the designer Daedalus is so jealous of his nephew that he flings him from the heights of Minerva’s citadel. Minerva transforms him into which ground-loving bird? (Clue: as a bird, the boy keeps his mother’s name, Perdix.)
Quail
Partridge
Pheasant
In I, Claudius, the narrator’s future ascent to the imperial throne is foretold in an omen: an eagle drops something into his lap. What is that something?
A wolf cub
A snake
A hare
Rosemary Sutcliff’s story The Eagle of the Ninth took its inspiration from a real Roman bronze eagle – probably not actually a legionary standard, but never mind. In which museum can it be seen?
Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter
Reading Museum
National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh
45 and above.
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Continue reading...December 22, 2017
Siberian warriors and a Christmas cracker of surrealist fun – the week in art
The Natural History Museum has a whale of an exhibition, a Games of Thrones world comes to life at the British Museum and Susan Philipsz finds her voice – all in your weekly dispatch
Continue reading...December 18, 2017
Peter Doig review – sun, sea and savagery in a troubled paradise
In these grave and noble paintings of our catastrophic age, the Scottish artist uses lurid colours to create bold beach scenes haunted by murders and mangy lions
The art of Peter Doig takes place in a troubled Arcadia, a place of sunshine, sea and deadly snakes. In his new painting Red Man (Sings Calypso) (2017) a colossal figure stands on a golden beach, his bare – reddish – torso framed by the black iron frame of a coastguard’s platform. The sea is a green band flecked with daubs of white. The pale blue sky is hollowed out by puffy cloud shapes. On the ground, a man lounges in shades with a boa constrictor wrapped around him. Is it a pet or is it strangling him?
In the Greek legend of the Trojan War, the priest Laocoön and his sons were strangled on the beach by giant snakes. The man with the snake in Doig’s painting looks like the doomed Laocoön as depicted in classical art. Doig was a friend and collaborator with Derek Walcott, the Nobel prize-winning Caribbean poet who died this year and whose epic work Omeros transposes the myths of Homer to the West Indies. Doig’s new paintings are similarly Homeric, or Walcottian. He sees his Trinidad home as a place of giants, monsters, blind singers.
Continue reading...December 16, 2017
Culture highlights: what to see this week in the UK
From the new Star Wars film to festive performances of The Nutcracker, here is our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance in the next seven days
Continue reading...December 15, 2017
Potter power, Banksy for sale, the US embassy and critics' picks of 2017 – the week in art
The British Library makes magic magical, Banksy goes under the hammer, the US unveils its British embassy and our writers choose their 2017 crackers – all in your weekly dispatch
Harry Potter: A History of Magic
This is a perfect festive treat that not only opens (gothic) windows on how Hogwarts was dreamt up but is also a richly illustrated exploration of the supernatural in art and culture, from an ancient Roman text including the word abracadabra to Joseph Wright of Derby’s painting The Alchymist.
• British Library, London, until 28 February.
December 12, 2017
Jonathan Jones's top 10 art exhibitions of 2017
The inventor of modern art caps an amazing year of drawings by old masters, vast 20th-century retrospectives and the return of the YBAs
Not many art exhibitions are truly important. They may be exciting, entertaining, absorbing – but when the dust settles and the posters are covered up with ads for the next unmissable show, nothing has really changed. This is one of the rare exceptions. Paul Cézanne, who died in 1906, has been iconic ever since Picasso and Braque picked up and turned his fraught, hard-won way of looking at apples, mountains and people into the broken mirror of cubism, yet his revolutionary importance is less well understood in the 21st century.
Cézanne did not so much innovate as dig, hack and burn the fabric of perception itself
Continue reading...December 9, 2017
Culture highlights: what to see this week in the UK
From festive horror-comedy Better Watch Out to Mariah Carey’s Christmas tour, here is our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance in the next seven days
Continue reading...Jonathan Jones's Blog
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