Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 145
November 11, 2016
Rembrandt, animal magic and the battle of the Somme – the week in art
In this week’s art openings, you can question the authenticity of a Rembrandt, mull over the nature of power – and hang out with a menagerie of arty animals
The Somme
The battle whose waste of life has become an image of the futility and madness of war is remembered by 21st-century artists including Jeremy Clark, Helen Grey, Michael Isaac, Lauren Adams and Charlotte Potter.
• Moor House, London, from 11-30 November.
Five of the best… art exhibitions
JMW Turner | The Somme | Am I Rembrandt? | Karla Black And Kishio Suga | Emma Hart And Jonathan Baldock
The forces of nature become pure paint in the free and formidable art of Margate’s greatest visitor. Turner was sent from his native London to a school in this coastal town when he was 11 and returned regularly as an adult, especially after forming a relationship with his landlady Mrs Booth. His watercolours of Margate are at the heart of an exhibition that explores his exhilarating creation of worlds from violent yet subtle colour, influenced by his study of Goethe’s colour theory as well as his open eye for the brilliance of nature.
Continue reading...November 8, 2016
Bob Dylan: a Hockney-like painter of America's strange essence
Dylan’s art marks him out as a staunch traditionalist – but his powers of observation make his canvases evocative celebrations of life itself
Long before Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel prize in literature, pundits used to talk about “Dylan versus Keats”, as if you had to choose, and as if Dylan’s poetic transformations of folk song are really so different from what John Keats does in his eerie ballad La Belle Dame sans Merci.
When it comes to Dylan’s art, the dice fall differently. Dylan versus John Constable would make no sense, for when it comes to drawing and painting it’s as plain as a Brooklyn ice cream parlour that Bob Dylan is a bluff old traditionalist.
Continue reading...November 7, 2016
Marina Abramovic: the latest target in the rightwing culture wars
The accusation that the artist indulged in black magic with John Podesta shows some US conservatives are more reactionary than ever
The 2016 US election has brought the nation’s rifts to a point of blood-curdling, irreconcilable vitriol surely unseen since the civil war. Amid such mayhem, an accusation that artist Marina Abramović has been schooling senior Democrats in black magic is almost a welcome bit of light relief.
Related: Marina Abramović mention in Podesta emails sparks accusations of satanism
Continue reading...November 4, 2016
Gothic horror, Elton John's photos and Richard Branson's head – the week in art
Fergal Stapleton’s phantasmagoric new paintings and Turner’s watercolours of Margate on show in their home town – plus the rest of the week’s art happenings
Fergal Stapleton
In Sheridan Le Fanu’s ghost story Schalcken the Painter, a 17th-century Dutch artist meets an undead corpse; the chiaroscuro, bloody tints, eerie phantoms and spectral lights in Stapleton’s new paintings mix old master echoes with a slice of gothic horror as if they were painted by Schalcken himself. Quotations from Rembrandt are seen through a glass, very darkly. It may have opened a bit late for Halloween, but this will spook up your winter nicely.
• Carl Freedman Gallery, London, until 10 December
Five of the best… art exhibitions
The Radical Eye | Portrait Of The Artist | Emma Hamilton: Seduction And Celebrity | Andres Serrano | Bellows And The Body
Photography is a 19th-century invention, but it was only in the 1900s that it became a medium for avant-garde vision. It took the modernist revolution in painting and the splintered perceptions of cubism to show photographers that the camera could do more than simply record the world. Here are the resultant experiments by Man Ray, Tina Modotti, Alexander Rodchenko and more, a pantheon of subversives who created images of liberating strangeness. This collection of their work has been assembled by Elton John.
Continue reading...November 3, 2016
God, sex or evolution – why did humans start making art?
A new Australian exhibition suggests art was first made to attract mates, signal dangers or mimic nature. But this reduces a mysterious impulse to a biological drive
Why did human beings invent art? Why do we make it, look at it, revere it and want to possess it?
Mona (the Museum of Old and New Art) in Tasmania offers some bold and provocative answers. I heard about its latest exhibition, On the Origins of Art, from participant Mat Collishaw, whose art is nothing if not provocative and just the style to suit a museum that seems to want to be the thinking person’s Saatchi Gallery. Collishaw has created a zoetrope sculpture of fluttering hummingbirds to illustrate the theory that early human beings evolved art for the same reason hummingbirds evolved gorgeous feathers and elaborate dances: to seduce the opposite sex.
Continue reading...November 2, 2016
Picasso's brown period: was he the first to make art from excrement?
Picasso apparently used his daughter’s faeces in paintings in 1938, predating the likes of Andres Serrano by 50 years. It’s proof there’s no end to his defiant genius
Picasso did everything first. In 1907, he painted the first completely modern work of art, in any field – Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Its equivalents in music and literature, The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky and Ulysses by James Joyce, would not appear until 1913 and 1922 respectively. By then, Picasso and Georges Braque had destroyed 500 years of artistic tradition with the cubist revolution. Then in 1912 Picasso (building on an insight of Braque’s) started using found materials including newspaper and chair caning, a full year before Marcel Duchamp supposedly “invented” the readymade.
Related: Picasso's widow may have hidden artworks from family, court told
Related: Pablo’s people: the truth about Picasso's portraits
Related: As Aleppo burns in this age of lies, Picasso's Guernica still screams the truth about war
Continue reading...November 1, 2016
Emma Hamilton: Seduction and Celebrity review – the betrayal of Nelson's mistress
National Maritime Museum, London
She was the irresistible beauty from the brothels who captivated Europe. This vivid show is a glorious reminder of her rise and fall
Of all the men who loved Emma Hamilton, the artist George Romney is the one whose passion has endured. Her husband, the vulcanologist, classicist and art collector Sir William Hamilton, found himself spurned when she fell madly in love with Horatio Nelson. And her heroic lover never grew old with her as he hoped. Nelson died on HMS Victory after winning the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. His grey pigtail, which he asked his friends to send her as he lay dying, is in this exhibition.
Related: Emma Hamilton portrait bought by her lover Lord Nelson to go on display
Continue reading...October 31, 2016
Italy's earthquake affects us all – theirs is a cultural richness like no other
The basilica of St Benedict in Norcia has been destroyed by Italy’s latest earthquake – and it is deeply sad to see such rich history trashed by nature
Buildings are not people. It is an immense mercy that, so far as is currently known, there were no fatalities in the latest earthquake to hit central Italy. Yet I can’t help mourning the basilica of St Benedict in Norcia. To see such a beautiful old building destroyed is gut-wrenching.
Related: Italy earthquake: historic structures levelled in biggest quake since 1980
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