Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 143
December 1, 2016
A second coat: why painting is the comeback art of the 21st century
It tends to be ignored by art prizes, but painting is trendier than ever – and makes conceptual art look elitist and out of touch
It seems only yesterday that painting was “dead”. Now it’s everywhere. In London, galleries east of Spitalfields are full of the stuff. Recently, visiting an exhibition by a painter friend, I was chatting to the young artist who runs the gallery – which doubles up as his painting studio. Opening a hidden cupboard, he took out some of his big, sprawling canvases, great stuff full of political imagery and existential angst. And that’s just inside galleries. Never mind the paintings in the streets that are so much a part of 21st-century life. Painting dead? If so we must be suffering the attack of the zombie painters, because this old art is invading every corner of the modern world from the coolest corners of the art world to underneath your local railway bridge.
Related: Cy Twombly review – blood-soaked coronation for a misunderstood master
Continue reading...
November 30, 2016
Blaze of Glory: the grand tradition of burning the American flag
Donald Trump has tweeted that he wants to jail anyone who sets fire to the stars and stripes. But this act of protest has a special place in US history
Jimi Hendrix did not need a match to burn the American flag. All he needed to desecrate Old Glory was an electric guitar. When Hendrix started to play the national anthem at Woodstock in 1969, the audience must have been baffled. Patriotic bullshit, man! But as he played The Star-Spangled Banner, he distorted it to produce increasingly painful, harsh and violent sounds. The Vietnam war and the dissonance of a US at odds with itself throb in the surreal chaos Hendrix makes of a song written in 1813 to express love of the flag:
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
Continue reading...Cy Twombly review – blood-soaked coronation for a misunderstood master
Centre Pompidou, Paris
The first retrospective since the US artist’s death in 2011 celebrates a man pushing sex and death into a gory new space for art
Cy Twombly, an artist who was born in Lexington, Virginia in 1928 and moved to Italy in the 1950s, is in many ways very French. In the Salle des Bronzes Antiques at the Louvre museum in Paris, where ancient Greek armour waits silently for wars that will never come again, the room’s vast ceiling is painted by Twombly with a bright expanse of blue, its intensity illuminated by silver and gold suns and moons as if the light of the Mediterranean were infusing the museum with desire and danger.
For Twombly, the bronze helmets preserved in this gallery would not just have been archaeological remains from which the past might be understood but instruments of passion, relics of love. Twombly’s art is about sex, death and longing. History and myth enabled him to speak of these private things on a grand scale, to project his emotions across the most grandiose of canvases.
Related: Cy Twombly obituary
Continue reading...November 28, 2016
Did the boldness of Britain's public art pave the way to Brexit? | Jonathan Jones
From the Angel of the North to the Tower of London poppies, art on an epic scale has captured imaginations, fired up patriotic pride – and made us a Brexit nation
Emerging from customs at St Pancras International station last night, I found myself looking up at two colossal sculptures. Paul Day’s nine-metre bronze statue of a kissing couple loomed up in all its detailed smoochiness. Higher still, suspended from the roof, soared Ron Arad’s wave-like Thought of Train of Thought.
To their supporters and critics these may seem to be very different works of art – Arad’s cutting edge abstraction versus Day’s figurative statue – but seeing them with the eyes of a traveller who’d just cleared the UK border, they both spoke of national self-confidence: bold and brassy, a bit vulgar, and very loud.
Continue reading...November 25, 2016
Robert Rauschenberg, Victor Pasmore and electric chairs – the week in art
Rauschenberg’s titanic Tate show opens in London this week, along with the provocative Painters’ Painters – and a host of other art happenings
Robert Rauschenberg
The hungry genius of Rauschenberg embraced everything from the space race to Dante’s Inferno – often in the same work. His neo-dada art of assemblage, collage and montage is still very much alive in 21st-century art. At an anxious time in US history, the creative abundance of one of its greatest artists is a reminder of its democratic culture at its inclusive best.
• Tate Modern, London, 1 December-2 April.
Five of the best… art exhibitions
Robert Rauschenberg | Painters’ Painters | Picasso On Paper | Victor Pasmore | Game Plan
Art and life cannot be divided; they flow together in an unending river of chance and desire. That is the message of Rauschenberg, one of the truly great artists of modern times. This is a chance not just to appreciate a creative career that started with neo-dadaist experiments in 1950s America and embraced everything from astronauts to dancers to JFK, but to rethink your idea of art itself. There is something uniquely liberating about the rollicking way in which Rauschenberg asked, joyously and passionately, what painting is, what sculpture is, and what it has to do with our actual lives in all their mess and clutter.
Tate Modern, SE1, Thu to 2 Apr
November 24, 2016
Shakespeare's Stratford reminds us of a forgotten, morbid England | Jonathan Jones
The cult around Shakespeare has led to the restoration of murals in Stratford-upon-Avon, whitewashed over by his father. They’re far from masterpieces, but they do show us an England in thrall to devils and death
Stratford-upon-Avon is a town preserved not in amber but by language. The words of its most famous son have made this Warwickshire town a sacred spot ever since the great actor David Garrick staged a Shakespeare jubilee at Stratford in 1769. That date is significant. It’s in the very early days of the industrial revolution, when Britain had barely been modernised and many medieval as well as Tudor buildings were still in use. A world we have lost could still be found.
Related: Shakespeare Trilogy review – Donmar's phenomenal all-female triumph
Continue reading...November 23, 2016
Norman Rockwell's Statue of Liberty can point Trump towards decency | Jonathan Jones
Rockwell’s painting was positioned behind Donald Trump’s head as he met Obama in the White House. But this isn’t trolling – it’s a reminder to Trump that America is the land of the free
Norman Rockwell is the great healer of American art. His paintings reconcile midwestern values with surprisingly progressive ideals, artistic traditionalism with optimism about the modern world, old-fashioned conservatism with liberal decency.
Related: The unholy power of that Farage-Trump buddy photo | Jonathan Jones
Continue reading...The unholy power of that Farage-Trump buddy photo | Jonathan Jones
Traditionally, a British ambassador needs royal documents of accreditation from the Court of St James’s in order to represent Her Majesty abroad. There’s none of that fuss for Nigel Farage: he has appointed himself ambassador to the United States – as a stepping stone to some higher office, such as Foreign Secretary Farage, Prime Minister Farage or perhaps, if The Donald should suggest it in a 3am tweet, King Nigel. Not on the basis of such fussy old paraphernalia as a great seal, a royal charter or (perish the thought) elected office of any kind, but simply by flashing a photograph at us.
In the age of the selfie and the celebrity presidency, Farage has invented a new source of political authority. It dazzles and blinds, more than 10 days after it was taken, as it shines its power-drunk bully-light into every corner of the news. It is the picture that defines 2016, drooled one befuddled commentator.
Continue reading...November 22, 2016
Be careful, Hockney – modern stained glass can shatter medieval beauty | Jonathan Jones
The Church of England has asked David Hockney to create windows for Westminster Abbey – but nothing can touch the majesty and historical power of medieval glass
David Hockney is to create stained glass for Westminster Abbey to mark the Queen’s 65-year reign – but should he think twice?
Related: David Hockney window at Westminster Abbey to honour Queen
Continue reading...Jonathan Jones's Blog
- Jonathan Jones's profile
- 8 followers
