Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 136
February 8, 2017
Vermeer: the artist who taught the world to see ordinary beauty
Johannes Vermeer was so obscure he was barely even known when he died, let alone forgotten. But the French avant-garde rescued him – and showed us his calm, unpretentious genius
Johannes Vermeer is such a quiet and introspective artist that it took hundreds of years for anyone to notice he was a genius. Today he is so revered that it is hard to grasp how unknown he once was.
A major Vermeer exhibition opens this month at the Louvre in Paris, whose permanent collection includes his great painting of a woman absorbed in close, visually demanding work, The Lacemaker (about 1669-70). Her eyes are concentrated downward on the tiny stuff her steady hands are making, while our eyes in turn take in precise and glistening details: bright red threads against blue cloth, silvery beads, the grain of a table covering, her finely curled ringlets.
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How can Obama smile at a time like this? I think he knows something | Jonathan Jones
Does Barack Obama know something we don’t? While much of the world has eyes wide in horror at his successor, the man who was until recently president of the United States looks like he hasn’t a care in the world. If he is worried about Donald Trump dismantling his legacy, reversing his values and setting history alight, he has certainly forgotten those cares for sea, sun and mirrored shades as he radiates a happiness bordering on ecstasy in this holiday photograph.
While staying with Richard Branson recently in the British Virgin Islands, Obama learned to kitesurf, and the thrill of rediscovering his beloved watersports after eight years when he was kept out of the waves for security reasons glows in his face and relaxed body language. Yet for anyone who has woken up in the early hours worried and scared by Trump, this gleeful display of sheer satisfaction with life may seem a bit rich. Good vibrations are all very well but what about the future of the world?
Yet everything we know about Obama suggests he is far too good a person to simply surf while America burns
Related: Obama and Branson kitesurfing trip branded huge publicity stunt
Continue reading...February 7, 2017
Norman Rockwell's Four Freedoms remind us what the US has to lose
News that the painter’s quartet of works celebrating an apple-pie America is to go on tour emphasises what is under threat in the Trump era
Donald Trump’s “America First” presidency is abandoning any claim of a US mission to defend or spread “freedom” around the world. He also seems not to care much about it at home. His quarrels with the media and the judiciary boil down to a claim that his executive power should overrule all constitutional obstacles. For this to become the theme of his presidency so early on suggests that either he or American democracy is heading for disaster.
Norman Rockwell’s paintings The Four Freedoms are a reminder of exactly what is at stake. The Norman Rockwell Museum is sending these four iconic images of American freedom on tour. Under any other president it would look like propaganda. Under this one it seems subversive.
Continue reading...February 6, 2017
Did the Mona Lisa have syphilis?
Lisa del Giocondo, the model for Leonardo’s painting, was recorded buying snail water – then considered a cure for the STD. It could be the secret to a painting haunted by the spectre of death
What is the Mona Lisa’s secret? She smiles so enigmatically under the all-but-invisible transparent silk veil that covers her hair, turning her brown eyes as if she has just seen someone come into her field of vision. The fascination and fame of this portrait, begun by Leonardo da Vinci in 1503, has always related to the elusive personality it communicates. Giorgio Vasari in the 16th century claimed Leonardo employed musicians and jesters to make Lisa smile. Walter Pater in the Victorian age thought she resembled a “vampire”. Modern viewers sometimes see her face as androgynous, an observation first made by Marcel Duchamp.
I have a new theory. Perhaps the Mona Lisa had syphilis.
Take Garden-Snails cleansed and bruised 6 Gallons, Earth-Worms washed and bruised 3 Gallons, of common Wormwood, Ground-Ivy, and Carduus, each one Pound and half ...
Continue reading...February 3, 2017
Hockney, volcanoes and Renaissance robots – the week in art
The Tate’s big David Hockney show opens and the Turner Contemporary looks at how women have turned craft into art – all in your weekly art dispatch
David Hockney
Hockney is one of the most original and important artists we have ever given the world – this will be a smash hit and rightly so.
• Tate Britain, London, 9 February-29 May.
David Hockney's perky logo for the Sun reminds us of the world's beauty
The artist’s redesign of the Sun’s masthead may be a dashed-off iPad sketch, but it shows his wit, optimism and interest in light are all undimmed as he nears 80
Roll over, Damien Hirst. Go tell Grayson the news. David Hockney has just proved he is still Britain’s canniest pop artist (even though he denies ever having being one). None of the younger generation of media-savvy artists has ever redesigned the masthead of the Sun. They are unlikely ever to be asked, either.
It is easy to forget how famous Hockney is. You don’t have to know anything at all about art to recognise his name or know his work. It is a level of popularity captured in the TV series The Sopranos when the mob boss and his girlfriend gaze at a swimming pool painting by “David Hockey” in a hotel room. Every tall, tiny-headed palm tree in LA bears his signature.
Continue reading...David Hockney and Robots: this week’s best UK exhibitions
When David Hockney splashed into the swinging 60s in a gold jacket and pop art spectacles, he made more impact on the public than any British artist since William Hogarth. With his confident, funny and sexy early paintings of gay life, he helped to change British society. Then he went to LA and became its definitive painter of brainless palm trees in empty blue skies. Hockney is a truly popular artist yet also a sensitive and solitary one who has always followed his own visual curiosity, even when it led him back to his native Yorkshire to paint the landscapes of his childhood. This exhibition offers a bigger view of his richly pleasurable art.
Tate Britain, SW1, Thursday 9 February to Monday 29 May
February 2, 2017
The drop in museum visitors reveals a nation without aspiration or hope | Jonathan Jones
A government report shows that visitor numbers to UK museums and galleries are down by millions. This is not due to distracted young minds – it is a symptom of economic strife
Britain’s leading museums and galleries, according to figures released by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, have dramatically lost visitors. Museums including the Tate galleries, National Gallery, V&A and British Museum collectively clocked up 47.6 million people from April 2015 to March 2016 – a significant fall from the previous year and the end of a British museum boom that had become a matter of national pride. Our museums are no longer on the up; the culture-hungry crowds are not growing. Why? And what is to be done?
Related: British museums and art galleries hit by 2m fall in visitors
In 2015-16 there were 47.6m visits to DCMS-sponsored museums. This was a decline of 6.2% on 2014/15, and a decline of 2.8% when Tyne and Wear museums are excluded from 2014-15.
In 2015-16, there were 7.9m child visits to DCMS-sponsored museums. This was a 14.4% decrease on 2014-15, and a decline of 1.8% when Tyne and Wear museums and the Horniman museum are excluded from 2014-15.
Related: Changing of the guard at great arts venues may be end of a golden era
Continue reading...February 1, 2017
We cannot celebrate revolutionary Russian art – it is brutal propaganda
The Royal Academy is showcasing Russian art from the age of Lenin – but we must not overlook that his regime’s totalitarian violence rivalled nazism
It was a bizarre moment. I was visiting New York’s Museum of Modern Art for the first time, revelling in Duchamp and Brancusi, Cezanne and Schwitters. Then I came across a room that felt like a pious shrine, a white reliquary containing models of unbuilt architecture, posters for a failed utopia. This was MoMA’s homage to the art of the Russian revolution. Why did it seem so strange? Because here we were on West 53rd street, in the heart of capitalist Manhattan.
It struck me as intellectually lazy for this museum, so remote from everything the Russian revolution stood for, to apolitically celebrate its art, as if constructivism and suprematism were just cool aesthetic discoveries rather than utopian projects from an age of struggle and violence.
January 31, 2017
Jacob Epstein: the immigrant bringing morals to the Oval Office | Jonathan Jones
The bust of Churchill that sits across from Donald Trump’s desk is created by an immigrant, who reminds us of both the glory of humanity and the evil of fascism
Hours before Donald Trump announced his draconian executive order banning citizens of seven Muslim countries from entering the United States, he posed with an immigrant in the Oval Office. Or at least, a work by that immigrant’s hand. Jacob Epstein’s bust of Winston Churchill has become a bizarre political football (although you’d hurt your foot if you kicked it), returned to the Oval Office with great fanfare as the symbol of a special relationship between Brexit Britain and Trump’s America. Yet this work of art holds a subversive secret.
Its creator embodied everything Trump hates. Epstein was the product of America’s previous openness to immigrants. Born in New York in 1880, he was the son of Jewish refugees from Poland. There is absolutely no difference between the plight of the refugees Trump rejects and Jewish refugees from persecution in eastern Europe more than a century ago. Epstein’s parents were typical of the “huddled masses” welcomed to the US by the Statue of Liberty’s pro-immigrant inscription. Then again, they were not typical of anything – they were individuals, just like the millions of individuals all defined without further enquiry as a collective threat to America by Trump’s terrifyingly irrational and inhumane diktat. And they had a very individualist son.
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