Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 138
January 18, 2017
Sebastiano: the forgotten Renaissance genius who swapped sex for God
The National Gallery is pairing Michelangelo with the lesser-known Sebastiano in its latest exhibition. So who is this artist who gave up debauched Venice for the Vatican – and why did he waste his talent?
The names are not quite equal in fame. This spring the National Gallery is putting on an exhibition called Michelangelo and Sebastiano. You may have heard of Michelangelo. He carved David, painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and did a few other things. In Paolo Sorrentino’s brilliant TV drama The Young Pope, a copy of his Last Judgement formed a sinister backdrop to Jude Law’s pontifical pronouncements; Michelangelo is a god of art. But who is Sebastiano, and why has he got a joint exhibition with one of the greatest artists who ever lived?
He is Sebastiano del Piombo (about 1485-1547), the great nearly-man of the Italian High Renaissance. He was almost one of the very greatest Venetian painters, then moved to Rome where was he was overshadowed by Raphael and dominated by Michelangelo. Perhaps personal modesty held him back; perhaps he was not quite driven enough to compete in an age of intense artistic individualism. Yet his paintings offer tantalising evidence of true genius.
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January 17, 2017
Will a hard Brexit spell disaster for London's cosmopolitan art scene?
Art is the definitive globalised marketplace, and London’s dealers are at its centre. Is the UK’s spectacular period of cultural eminence about to collapse?
At London’s Frieze art fair last autumn some friends from Vienna and Lahore took me to the Deutsche Bank VIP lounge. There we ate – what else? – micro portions of fish and chips, an ironically British gourmet snack in surroundings that stressed the global nature of the art economy.
Now the postmodern canapes are going cold in London’s art world, as the terror of a hard Brexit sends chills through some of the most sophisticated businesses in the capital.
Related: Key points from May's Brexit speech: what have we learned?
Continue reading...January 16, 2017
Richard Prince has disowned his Ivanka Trump work, but he can't wash his hands so easily | Jonathan Jones
The art provocateur may have returned his $36,000 fee but he is more complicit in the rise of the president-elect than he thinks
Does an artist have any moral obligation when it comes to deciding who to sell their work to? Does the character or the family of the customer matter – and how they earned their money? The American artist Richard Prince has just confronted such ethical anxieties head-on in an entertainingly paradoxical way.
Today’s wealthy art collectors range from oligarchs to trustafarians, from aristocrats to – and here’s what Prince is worked up about – people like those in the Trump dynasty. There is no conspicuous consumption as conspicuous as art-collecting and the president-elect’s daughter Ivanka is an enthusiastic buyer of art, who likes to show off her purchases on Instagram. Prince made a painting of Ivanka for her collection and, following the US election, now has seller’s remorse.
If art can be a game of appropriation, irony and inauthenticity, why can’t politics be a cynical pop art performance?
Continue reading...Piccadilly Circus: still London’s heart of darkness
The young Alfred Hitchcock was so obsessed with the bright lights of London’s Piccadilly Circus that he gave them a starring role in no fewer than five of his films. In his eyes, the illuminated hoardings first introduced in 1908 to the West End’s great popular intersection symbolised everything glamorous and exciting about London – especially sex and death.
In his 1927 silent thriller The Lodger, a crowd swarms to Piccadilly Circus to read a glowing electric news bulletin on the latest slaying by a Jack the Ripper-like serial killer. In The 39 Steps (1935), fugitive Robert Donat, after fleeing through the Scottish Highlands handcuffed to Madeleine Carroll, finally makes it back to the bright lights, and we see a verité sequence of Piccadilly Circus, its signs glowing against the dark. “BLACK and WHITE”, reads a huge whisky ad.
Continue reading...January 13, 2017
Tristram Hunt may bring great Victorian ambition back to the V&A
The historian of the 19th century could move the museum away from pop culture towards big ideas about art and history
Tristram Hunt’s resignation letter reads like the kind of fantasy epistle people dream of sending the boss on a Friday morning after another awful week at the office. He doesn’t have to strain himself to sound like he’s got a new life planned out, starting with a journey to find himself in Anglesey. Instead he calmly explains he has just been appointed director of the V&A.
So farewell Jeremy, as he has no need to say. Nor does he have to boast about the salary and sneer “cap that”. For the message is clear enough that he is leaving Corbyn’s ghost train for a glamorous top job at one of the best museums in the world. He’ll be musing over which William Morris wallpaper to choose for his office while former comrades are reading their latest batch of Twitter abuse and awaiting the reselection meeting. Nice for him.
Related: Great exhibitions: 2017's best art, photography, architecture and design
Related: V&A's choice of Tristram Hunt seems less risky after a look at his CV
Continue reading...Greek mythology, Kipling's father and Matisse's scissors – the week in art
Ovid inspires artistic transformations while Michael Andrews’ Gagosian show makes him ripe for rediscovery – plus the rest of the week’s art happenings
Michael Andrews
Poetic and haunting paintings by a major British artist ripe for rediscovery.
• Gagosian Gallery, Grosvenor Hill, London, 20 January–25 March
Jake Chapman is right to criticise Ai Weiwei's drowned boy artwork
What was Ai Weiwei thinking? Posing as a dead refugee boy on a beach in Lesbos was risible, fatuous and grotesque
Artist Jake Chapman is not known for his sentimentalism. In their masterwork Hell, he and his brother Dinos showed no pity for thousands of toy soldiers they tortured and eviscerated in a landscape of baroque psychosis.
They have also collected and exhibited paintings attributed to Adolf Hitler, and in interviews, Jake Chapman goes out of his way to defy liberal soppiness with provocative remarks such as saying children should be banned from art galleries. Yet it turns out that, like the apparently heartless Andy Warhol who secretly worked in soup kitchens, Chapman has a penchant for modest acts of kindness. It has come to light that when he heard about Refugee Relief, a charity that works on Lesbos to save exhausted refugees from drowning, he bought them a lifeboat.
Continue reading...Michael Andrews and Matisse: this week’s best UK exhibitions
Flourishes of postmodern storytelling and cutouts from the French great. Plus: Tales From Ovid’s Metamorphoses, The New Line and William Kentridge And Vivienne Koorland
A poetic eye for reality and flourishes of postmodern storytelling make Michael Andrews one of the most interesting, important British painters of the 20th century. Hopefully, this exhibition of some of his most haunting paintings will start a fashion for his admirable ways of seeing. It includes his eerie painting of a balloon’s shadow crossing a beach, which I loved long before I’d heard of him because it was on the cover of a Penguin poetry collection. But that’s Andrews: an artist you possibly know better than you think. And if you don’t, this is a chance to climb aboard.
Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, W1, Friday 20 Jan to Saturday 25 Mar
January 12, 2017
The Stonehenge tunnel will bring us closer to a mythic past
The newly confirmed road tunnel under Stonehenge has archaeologists up in arms, but removing traffic noise will help recreate the bleak mood that so inspired Hardy and Constable
Visiting Stonehenge becomes ever harder. You have to book ahead as if it were a swanky West End show, endure a visitor centre when what you really want to do is commune with the mysterious past – and when you do finally get your chance to walk around (not among) the stones, you need to assiduously ignore the hum of traffic from the heavily congested nearby A303.
Related: Chris Grayling gives go-ahead to road tunnel under Stonehenge
Continue reading...January 11, 2017
Europe thought it had a monopoly on artistic genius. Hokusai proved it wrong | Jonathan Jones
In Jeff Wall’s 1993 photograph A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), a disparate group of people are caught in a wild breeze. They seem liberated by the blast: as papers go flying about in comic disarray a businesslike man in a dark coat, white shirt and tie responds to the gust with ecstatic abandon, set free from his constrained existence by this moment of chaos.
Related: Katsushika Hokusai's later life to feature in British Museum show
Hokusai watches people with compassion, tolerance and curiosity
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