Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 139
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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George Lucas's LA museum brings new hope to art's storytellers
The Star Wars director reinvigorated cinema with sheer storytelling panache – can he do the same for an art world obsessed with concept and abstraction?
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, George Lucas was a gifted film director. The release of Star Wars in 1977 – long before we had to call it Part IV or A New Hope – was a seismic event in modern culture that abolished the difference between art and entertainment.
Related: LA wins battle to host Star Wars creator George Lucas's $1bn museum
George Lucas is right. Art has forgotten the power of popular storytelling that was once its main reason to exist
Continue reading...January 10, 2017
Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights shows a world waking up to the future | Jonathan Jones
With its giant strawberries and nudity, Hieronymus Bosch’s painting has been seen as a celebration and warning about sin – but it’s really about a Renaissance-era curiosity that helped better explain the world
The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch is a wonder of art. By that I don’t just mean it is one of the world’s greatest paintings. It is also something we wonder at, astonished, like a rare relic in a cabinet of bizarre curiosities. What is happening in this outrageous display of unfettered imagination and what can it possibly mean?
Last year, the 500th anniversary of the death of Bosch was marked by a thrilling exhibition of his paintings and drawings in his home town Den Bosch, in the southern Netherlands. Yet one masterpiece was missing. The Garden of Earthly Delights does not travel from Madrid, where it hangs in the Prado museum. A book of the Prado’s own Bosch quincentenary published this month by Thames and Hudson makes up for that absence. It explores the latest discoveries and theories about Bosch’s most stupendous work with accurate colour images of many of its hypnotic details and infrared images of the three wooden panels that make up this religious – or pseudo-religious – painting.
Related: Art researchers uncover 'lost' Hieronymus Bosch – and sausage link
Continue reading...January 9, 2017
The 'art strike' against Trump is futile – cultural elites cannot effect change
Calling on cultural institutions to close on inauguration day only serves to make the likes of Cindy Sherman and Richard Serra feel good about themselves
It’s coming. The date is less than a fortnight away. 20 January is a day for the history books – the inauguration of Donald Trump as president of the United States. How to mark it? A day in bed with a bottle of tequila and some seriously depressing country music sounds about right – and in a sense that is what some of America’s most admired artists are proposing.
I am not saying Cindy Sherman, Julie Mehretu, Richard Serra, Joan Jonas and 130-odd other US art giants will be getting drunk under the duvet, but they don’t propose to do any work that day. They also urge museums and other cultural institutions to lock up and go home for the day, all of it a “J20 art strike” in protest against “the normalisation of Trumpism”.
Continue reading...January 7, 2017
Great exhibitions: 2017's best art, photography, architecture and design
From the biggest ever Hockney show to the Bayeux tapestry of space, with the Russian revolution, Renaissance miracles and California’s tech visions thrown in … the best art and design exhibitions to come in 2017
Unmissable Film | Pop | Classical | Theatre | Television | GamesAn exhibition that explores the myriad ways in which the north of England has inspired the wider world in terms of fashion, music and youth culture. It asks whether the north of England has a particular aesthetic as well as an attitude? Helping provide the answer are photographers such as Nick Knight, Corinne Day, Jason Evans, fashion designer Paul Smith, and artists Peter Saville and Jeremy Deller. The theme of masculinity will feature strongly.
• Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, 6 January-19 March.
January 6, 2017
Terror be damned – the Louvre is still the world's greatest gallery
In the wake of terror attacks in Paris and Nice, visitor numbers to the Louvre have fallen by two million since 2015. We cannot let fear deter us from this temple to human achievement
After the terrorist attacks on Paris in November 2015, tricolour flags were waved around the world and international solidarity with France was vociferously expressed. It seems the world was being hypocritical. Many people began altering holiday plans, even before mass murder came to Nice, with the Bastille Day truck attack. Tourism in France is so badly hit that even the Louvre has recorded a fall in visitor numbers.
The country’s grandest museum has announced that it had 7.3 million visitors in 2016, considerably down from a colossal 9.3 million two years previously. It even breaks down the international shortfall: declines in visitors of 31% from China, 61% from Japan and 18% from the US.
Related: The Louvre's closure proves art cannot survive climate change
Continue reading...Best friends, dark visions and wacky rococo – the week in art
Turner’s watercolours are unveiled once more in Edinburgh, while Beyond Caravaggio enters its final week – plus the rest of the week’s art happenings
Turner in January
Start the year with a dose of JMW Turner’s luminous genius in this traditional January unveiling of some of his most wondrous watercolours.
• Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, until 31 January.
Turner In January and Ken Price: this week’s best UK exhibitions
Scotland’s spectacular collection of the great artist’s watercolours, plus Adventures In Moominland, Ken Price, War In The Sunshine and An Amateur’s Passion
JMW Turner’s watercolour landscapes blaze and swirl, roar and storm in a way that belies the gentleness many associate with the medium. The collector Henry Vaughan left Scotland a spectacular bequest of these great works of art with the stipulation that all must go on view together every January, free of charge. So here they are, as every year, to redeem the winter with sublime light.
Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, to Tuesday 31 Jan
Turner In January and the rest of this week’s best exhibitions
Scotland’s spectacular collection of the great artist’s watercolours, plus Adventures In Moominland, Ken Price, War In The Sunshine and An Amateur’s Passion
JMW Turner’s watercolour landscapes blaze and swirl, roar and storm in a way that belies the gentleness many associate with the medium. The collector Henry Vaughan left Scotland a spectacular bequest of these great works of art with the stipulation that all must go on view together every January, free of charge. So here they are, as every year, to redeem the winter with sublime light.
Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, to Tuesday 31 Jan
January 5, 2017
Crucifixion is horribly violent – we must confront its reality head on
Glasgow theology students have been warned about brutal crucifixion images. But such paintings remind us of the grisly truth about death
Glasgow University is giving theology students what the Daily Mail calls “trigger warnings” about potentially upsetting images of the crucifixion. The theology department concedes that its course about Christ in cinema “contains graphic scenes of the crucifixion, and this is flagged up to students beforehand”. Given it includes Mel Gibson’s blood-spattered The Passion of the Christ, you can understand the anxiety (though the university tells us no students opted out); more recently, Martin Scorsese has featured underwater crucifixions in his new film Silence. Yet long before Jesus was dying on screen he was being nailed up in paintings and in sculpture.
One work that haunts me, and not in a good way, is a painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder that I chanced on a few years ago in the great Alte Pinakothek museum in Munich. Painted in 1503, it shows not only Christ but the two thieves who died beside him. At first sight it may not seem so sensational – except for a nasty spurt of blood out of Christ’s nailed feet. Then you notice that a single huge nail goes through both feet. Oh wait, this really is horrible. For the feet are bizarrely twisted together and shapeless, as if the nail has smashed bones and torn tendons in its violent riveting of flesh to wood.
Related: Jesus's tomb in Jerusalem exposed during conservation work
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