Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 140
January 3, 2017
How to use John Berger’s ‘language of images’ on Trump, polar bears and Kim Kardashian
In the 70s, the late critic revolutionised our appreciation of the visual arts. How do his ideas translate to contemporary culture?
John Berger, who died on Monday, wrote and said a lot of smart things, but he will be remembered longest for his 1972 BBC television series and book Ways of Seeing. The TV series belongs to the pixellated past, but the brilliantly designed book published alongside it by Penguin, with boldly montaged illustrations and stark, pithy text, is a bestselling modern classic.
As Berger put it, we are visual animals who see before we learn to read and, even as adults, get our most basic orientation in the world with our eyes, which makes images extraordinarily powerful.
Related: John Berger, art critic and author, dies aged 90
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January 1, 2017
Art to inspire: Ali Smith, Alain de Botton and others on the works they love
Got the January blues? To kick off a series dedicated to culture that can uplift us in 2017, six writers and creators from the worlds of music, philosophy, fiction and art choose the works they can rely on to replenish their energy for life
Gilles stands there in his bright white clown suit wearing shoes with pink ribbons. He’s looking ahead, not smiling, but not running away either. He has a job to do, a life to live, a person to be. And, whatever he may be feeling inside, he presents himself to the world, ready for whatever life is about to throw at him, with his straw hat tilted back, hands at his sides. There he is, an ordinary hero, in the moment before the rotten eggs hit his spotless suit.
I call him Gilles, the name by which he has long been known, although the Louvre, which owns this painting by Antoine Watteau, now simply calls it Pierrot, the clownish character from the Commedia dell’arte. Other characters from this stylised form of Italian theatre gather behind Gilles, who is raised on a kind of earthen stage. It adds to the sense that Gilles is on his own, separated from the crowd by his sensitivity and self-consciousness.
Continue reading...December 30, 2016
Five of the best exhibitions this week
Tracey Emin And William Blake | Djordje Ozbolt | Game Plan: Board Games Rediscovered | Memorial: A Tribute To Taxidermy | Marcantonio Raimondi And Raphael
The raw reality of Tracey Emin’s My Bed is endlessly shocking. It is not so much the condoms, cigarette butts and empty vodka bottles as the sheer unvarnished factuality of a moment from someone’s existence permanently preserved that leaves you unsettled. My Bed is accompanied here by Blake’s images of souls in hell and the crucified Christ. Emin’s own drawings of a nude woman in agony and ecstasy hang well with his visions in a meeting of British genius old and new.
Continue reading...Homelessness: no laughing matter for Hogarth – nor for us
Centuries after William Hogarth created probably the first image of homelessness in British art in 1736’s Four Times of the Day, the image of people sleeping rough is one that is still all too depressingly familiar
In 1736, an impressario called Jonathan Tyers commissioned William Hogarth to paint four scenes to decorate his pleasure park Vauxhall Gardens, where Londoners, some of them posh and some just wearing posh clothes, listened to music, intrigued and seduced each other in the “dark walks” under the trees. Hogarth had the idea to capture the comedy and sadness, crowds and chaos of life in 18th-century London in four paintings that translate an old artistic theme, Four Times of the Day, from pastoral settings to a city that was fast becoming the first modern metropolis. In 1738, he published a set of prints of these paintings to make them accessible to the ordinary urbanites they portray. Even if you were too poor to buy a print by Hogarth, you could still see his work for free in print-shop windows that served as the street art galleries of their time.
Hogarth’s Four Times of the Day portrays the London of nearly 300 years ago as a rollicking carnival of collisions between rich and poor, the respectable and the raunchy, the pious and the outcast. Yet one detail upset me when I noticed it earlier this year.
Related: Britain’s shame: the people who are homeless, even though they’re in work | Aditya Chakrabortty
Continue reading...Beyoncé to Black Mirror; the culture that defines 2016
How better to make sense of this turbulent year than through the art and literature it has produced? Our critics choose the works that sum up the last 12 months
If there is one film that holds a political key to understanding 2016, it is Ghostbusters: that funny, good-natured, easygoing female remake of the 1980s original. The movie, and the way it was received and viciously attacked online, told us something vital about the hive mind of the US’s reactionary right. It starred Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones. Wiig and McCarthy were already well known; McKinnon was the upcoming SNL superstar who was later in the year to become famous for her Hillary Clinton impersonation – but it was the African-American comic Jones who became the particular object of unpleasant abuse, reminiscent of #gamergate vitriol, naturally with a racist slant, though everyone was attacked, and all for daring to remake and allegedly “spoil” the original with a gender switch.
Continue reading...December 28, 2016
The timeless wonder of candlelight, a glimmer of love in our dark world
The evocative image of a flickering candle, celebrated by Joseph Wright and El Greco, is charged with spiritual power – we need it now more than ever
Why is candlelight so beautiful? At this time of the year candles burn brightly to celebrate Hanukkah or Christmas, casting a subtle, ever changing light into the long, dark midwinter nights. We love this magic and ancient form of light – but why?
Art can illuminate that – take the French 17th-century painter Georges de La Tour, entranced by the complex poetry of candlelight. In his paintings people hold, gaze at or are revealed by pale white candles and burning lamps. The ethereal brightness of the candlelight painted by De La Tour suggests both time passing – as the flame gutters – and the light of holy truth. In his painting The Education of the Virgin (1640) a book is illuminated by a single candle flame. The Virgin Mary’s reading is spiritual, as pure and luminous as that candle. In another painting by him, Job Mocked by His Wife, the candle reveals the timeworn body of an old man, and in another, a repentant Mary Magdalene sits contemplating a skull by the flickering light of a candle.
Related: Joseph Wright's Derby homecoming: dazzling, daring – and still in danger
Continue reading...December 26, 2016
Why we're still baroque-ing around the Christmas tree
We think of Christmas decorations as a Victorian invention, but they actually link us back to the baroque age – when bling and glitz formed a stairway to heaven
It’s the time of year when the baroque makes a comeback. Angels are everywhere, garlands are festooned about the place, and everything that can be decorated, is.
We tend to think of Christmas decorations as a 19th-century idea. In Britain, the first Christmas tree was installed by Queen Charlotte in 1800, and the definitive Victorian Christmas image of the Queen and Prince Consort standing with their children around their tree appeared on the cover of the Illustrated London News in December 1848, launching the German-invented Christmas tree and its attendant decorations into English-speaking popular culture.
Related: Look closer at nativity paintings – and see visions of apocalypse
Continue reading...December 23, 2016
Ten of the best exhibitions this week
From Yves Klein in Liverpool to the Guerrilla Girls in Whitechapel, here are the hottest art shows to see this week
Continue reading...Look closer at nativity paintings – and see visions of apocalypse
Christmas cards are full of cutesy depictions of nativity scenes, but Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli and Caravaggio remind us of the death in Jesus’s story
Nativity scenes are the art we see at Christmas, often on cards that put a masterpiece on the mantelpiece. Baby it’s cold outside, so let’s warm our hearts with a bit of Piero della Francesca or Bruegel.
Yet we close our eyes to the reality of this art. We turn Renaissance and baroque paintings into empty kitsch when we appropriate them as part of modern Christmas celebrations, which in truth have little in common with the much more religious world that created these images.
Caravaggio includes a set of carpenter’s tools. One day such tools will be used to build a cross for Christ to die on
Continue reading...December 22, 2016
The Vatican appoints its first female museum head – but it can go further
Hiring art historian Barbara Jatta is another progressive move from the Vatican Museums – now it must open up its secret wonders to the public
Which museum will be the next to appoint a female director? Most of the world’s great visual arts institutions remain firmly under male control. The current bosses of the British Museum and the National Gallery in London are men, as are the directors of the Prado in Madrid, the Louvre in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. So which groundbreaking top-rank art museum will be run by a woman from 1 January 2017?
It is one of the oldest and grandest of them all, and you will find it at the heart of perhaps the most male-dominated enclave in Europe. The new director of the Vatican Museums, whose collections started to be amassed in the Renaissance, is the Italian art historian Barbara Jatta, who previously curated prints there and rose to be deputy director. She has now been appointed by Pope Francis to succeed the current 77-year-old director, Antonio Paolucci, in the new year.
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