Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 135
February 22, 2017
No one should demand the closure of galleries – even for far-right artworks
The campaign to shut down London’s LD50 for giving a platform to extremist speakers is pathetic. Art galleries must be allowed to anger and disgust us
Shutting art galleries down is never a good idea. I don’t care how offensive you or I may find the art they show or the events they organise. Haven’t we learned by now that art has the right to offend, and that art galleries are spaces in which to be shocked, provoked, even disgusted?
Only yesterday it was conservative taste that found the contemporary art world offensive. Now it is the liberal left that wants to literally “shut down” an east London art space that has shown, among other things, the work of Jake and Dinos Chapman.
Related: Art gallery criticised over neo-Nazi artwork and hosting racist speakers
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February 21, 2017
Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting review – the birth of the cool
Louvre, Paris
Vermeer exhibitions are often padded out with his lesser peers – but here, fine choices illuminate the staggering soulfulness of the Dutch master
Some artists are so dazzling they reduce all around them to greyness. Their genius is a flame for us moths who queue for hours to see any exhibition with their name on it. Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting, which opens this week at the Louvre, was already jam-packed when I went to see it and that was two days before the general public was allowed in. No wonder. This is a unique chance to see some of Vermeer’s most stupendous masterpieces in one place – about a third of his entire surviving output, including such glories as The Milkmaid (c.1660), lent by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Woman Holding A Balance (c.1664) from the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, and the marvellous Woman with a Lute (c.1662-63) from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
This is by far the biggest and best array of Vermeer’s precious paintings that I have seen in any exhibition, and it makes the show a must for anyone who has ever been entranced by his poetic moments of inner drama.
Related: Vermeer: the artist who taught the world to see ordinary beauty
Continue reading...February 17, 2017
Genetics, calligraphy and British watercolours – the week in art
A major year-long survey of modern British art comes to Cardiff, while Birmingham hosts a splicing of art and science – all in your weekly art dispatch
Bacon to Doig
This ambitious survey of modern British art drawn from a rich private collection ranges from Freud to Perry, Hepworth and Hockney, and should be an exciting view of the art of our place and times.
• National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, 18 February–31 January 2018
Eduardo Paolozzi and Nathan Coley: this week's best UK exhibitions
From the renowned postwar artist to a sculpture depicting the bankside art museum up in flames
In Britain after the second world war, life was grey and consumer products that were routine in the US looked like science fiction dreams. Paolozzi’s early collages of kitchen gadgets and household modernity were utopian fantasies of tomorrow and founding classics of pop art. He participated in the Whitechapel’s famous exhibition This Is Tomorrow in 1956 and that gallery pays homage now to work that encompassed everything from tiled tube station murals to robotic bronze statues. Paolozzi left Britain a more modern place.
Whitechapel Gallery, E1, to 14 May
February 16, 2017
Ivory tells the history of the world – it must never be banned
UK legislation to ban ivory products from across history would criminalise some of the greatest art the world has seen. We need reason, not passion, in the fight against poaching
The cover of the Lorsch Gospels is one of the most unexpected beauties in any of our museums. This yellowish-white carving comes from the depths of the dark ages, when Europe was supposedly a primitive and barbaric place – yet it is a delicate and subtle artistic masterpiece.
It was made in Aachen, Germany, in about 810 to protect a splendid illuminated manuscript produced at the court of the Emperor Charlemagne. Its harmonious design, symmetrical arches, putti and robed figures cleverly emulate the lost splendour of ancient Rome – a splendour Charlemagne longed to restore. In the lowest panel, the infant Christ lies in a manger watched over by an ox and ass in one of the earliest nativity scenes in art. This tender portrayal has a loving humanity that communicates directly with us across the centuries.
Related: Prince William charity urges UK to back ivory trade ban
Continue reading...February 15, 2017
Forgeries are hurting the art market – but I'd buy ones this good
Valuable paintings have recently been declared fakes, spreading fear through the world art market. But if they are fakes, I may be on the side of the forgers
How can you tell when the art market is terrified? Perhaps when a leading auction house sets up its own forensic department, so it can offer art collectors the additional reassurance of a battery of scientific tests when they fork out hundreds of thousands, or even millions, on a painting that may be a masterpiece – or may be a fake. Sotheby’s New York has recently done just that. It has purchased the research company Orion Analytical, whose forensic knowledge will now be part of its own brand.
Sotheby’s has good reason to buttress its expertise with objective scientific tests on such crucial clues as the age of the materials a work of art contains. For there is a crisis in the art trade. Allegations of forgeries are proliferating in a way that is troubling to think about.
Related: Was the National Gallery scammed with a fake Old Master painting?
Continue reading...February 13, 2017
Why the sublime violence of volcanoes will never lie dormant
A new exhibition shows how scientists have tried to understand the mayhem of volcanoes, and how artists have embraced their sheer terror
Art and science merge in a colossal mushroom cloud of ash in an illustration from William Hamilton’s 1779 supplement to his book Campi Phlegraei. We see a vast plume of white and grey dust hanging high above Mount Vesuvius in broad daylight. Blue sky and sea enclose the eruption in a frozen calm. The cloud suggests the solidity and weight of thousands of tons of incinerated stone, suspended impossibly in the air.
Continue reading...February 10, 2017
Classic pop, revolution, and a fire at Tate Modern – the week in art
Wolfgang Tillmans’ major Tate show opens this week, as does the Whitechapel’s Eduardo Paolozzi exhibition – all in your weekly art dispatch
Eduardo Paolozzi
Science, technology and the modern world merge creatively with the traditions of sculpture in the work of one of the first pop artists.
• Whitechapel Gallery, London, 16 February-14 May
Wolfgang Tillmans and Volcanoes: this week’s best UK exhibitions
From one of art’s greatest contemporary photographers to the rich cultural history of famous eruptions
A period that shook the world is marked by this centenary show about the Russian Revolution’s impact on art. While the bourgeois art collecting that had brought Matisse’s Dance to Russia was killed by the Bolsheviks, the first 15 years of communism saw public commissions aplenty as modern art became utopian agitprop. Here is some of the greatest art of the 20th century made under some of the most difficult conditions.
At Royal Academy of Arts, W1, from Saturday 11 February to Monday 17 April
February 9, 2017
Ignore the art market – there is only one Bruegel that matters
Pieter Bruegel the Elder is the only genius in his family – so why is the UK being flooded with the inferior work of his offspring?
Why does the British art world persist in pretending there is more than one great artist called Bruegel, or indeed Brueghel? The Holburne Museum’s new exhibition claims to be “the UK’s first exhibition devoted to the Bruegel dynasty,” but this Flemish family get all too much attention, from high-profile sales to campaigns to “save” their art.
Related: Brueghel's rediscovered wedding dancers to go on show in Bath
Related: Bosch and Bruegel review – more gripping than a thriller
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