Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 146
October 31, 2016
Give me Van Gogh’s ear over Damien Hirst’s luxury basement any day | Jonathan Jones
“Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!” howled Allen Ginsberg in 1957 at a time when the severed aural appendage of the painter who invented expressionism was becoming synonymous with soulful suffering. Today the ear is ’ere again, with another explanation for Van Gogh’s brutal act of self-mutilation all over the media.
The year before the Ginsberg poem, Kirk Douglas had put on a brilliantly intense performance as the ginger artist in Vincente Minnelli’s film Lust for Life (1956), taking out his cut-throat razor and raising it to his ear after a row with Paul Gauguin, played by Anthony Quinn. Lust for Life came out just after the death of the American painter Jackson Pollock in a drunken car crash. Art, it seemed, was a suicide rap. Great artists were visionary martyrs, doomed to anguish – even to cut off bits of themselves.
Related: Van Gogh 'cut off his ear after learning brother was to marry'
Van Gogh’s ear has become Warholian. What started as a symbol of artistic suffering is just art historical clickbait
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October 28, 2016
Boxing, torture and Horatio Nelson's lover – the week in art
Queen’s Gallery exhibits self-portraits from Rembrandt, da Vinci and Hockney, while Romantic icon Emma Hamilton steals the spotlight – plus the rest of the week’s art happenings
Portrait of the Artist
Artemisia Gentileschi, Rembrandt, Leonardo da Vinci, Rubens and David Hockney are among the icons whose images are explored in this insightful survey of artistic fame.
• Queen’s Gallery, London, 4 November–17 April.
Five of the best… art exhibitions
Paul Nash | Power And Protection: Islamic Art And The Supernatural | The View From Here | Deimantas Narkevičius | Victorian Decoded: Art And Telegraphy
The art of Paul Nash includes moving and eerie depictions of both the wars that defined the 20th century. He sums up the horror of the western front in his 1918 painting We Are Making A New World and 1941’s Totes Meer (Dead Sea) portrays a dump of crashed German planes as a dreamlike moonlit vision. A welcome showing for the Constable of barbed wire, Nash makes the landscape tradition speak powerfully and pertinently to the modern condition.
Continue reading...October 27, 2016
New York's Moma exhibiting emojis? It's like a teacher trying to twerk
Once, New York’s Museum of Modern Art was a temple of profound and serious work – but in acquiring emojis, it’s joined the race to the bottom
So the Museum of Modern Art is exhibiting emojis now. It figures. Once, it was a temple of greatness that fought for the serious, worthwhile and profound in modern art. Now, thrown off balance by the triumph of Tate Modern, it is just another postmodern emporium where every cultural spasm is given spurious value.
When they go low, we’d better go low as well, is the motto of most arts institutions in the 21st century, and it’s sad to see further evidence that Moma has joined this cultural race to the bottom.
The point of Moma: to offer an authoritative and compelling vision of what is truly great in the art of the modern age
Related: Juliana Huxtable interrogates 'older, whiter versions' of history at MoMA
Continue reading...Here lie the unwanted of Calais – an indictment of us, not them | Jonathan Jones
This is an age of unparalleled harshness. While desperate people sleep amid piles of rubbish, we have lost sight of their humanity, and ours
These are people in Calais now. People who wanted to find new lives. Instead they lie like cocooned caterpillars, desperately hoping to wake up to a different world. Others sit on the rubbish-strewn pavement, hunched in blankets. They too are rubbish, or so it would seem, according to widespread attitudes that have in recent weeks seen calls for children to undergo dental inspections to determine their age. How old are the people huddled here in the heart’s cold dawn – children, adolescents or adults? Can we at least agree they are fellow human beings?
I would harrow you, I would harrow myself. Give me words to make this picture real. If we could feel the pain of others, we would be good people, you and I. But this is an age of unparalleled harshness. Pictures of suffering pass us by. We narrow our eyes and close our souls. What have we become?
If history has taught us one thing it is that fear of the other is always irrational
Related: Calais: refugee children 'sleeping rough' after camp demolition
Continue reading...October 26, 2016
We need to remove the mask of history from female artists
Madrid’s Prado gallery has finally, after 200 years, put on its first show devoted to a female painter, Clara Peeters. We need far more like it, to understand the greatness of women working under heavy patriarchies
One of the most unsettling works of art I have seen for a long time is a small sketch in a school atlas that was identified last year as a self-portrait by the young Charlotte Brontë. Why is it so unsettling? Because of the talent it shows. Could she have been an artist as well as a great writer – and how many other talented women have found their ability to draw trivialised or suppressed through the centuries?
Related: More savage than Caravaggio: the woman who took revenge in oil
Continue reading...South Africa: The Art of a Nation review – from the dawn of man to the violence of apartheid
British Museum, London
Bringing together Zulu spears, tribal cave paintings and 20th-century activist collages, this dazzling array is a brilliant tribute to one of art’s true centres
Can war be beautiful? It was undoubtedly an art of sublime elegance for the Zulu nation in the 19th century, when they used some of the most precise military manoeuvres ever planned to massacre an entire British army.
The Battle of Isandlwana in 1879 shocked and perplexed the Age of Empire. Warriors equipped mostly with spears and ox-hide shields should not have been able to destroy a European force armed with Martini-Henry rifles, it seemed to Victorians.
Related: Zanele Muholi’s best photograph: out and proud in South Africa
Continue reading...October 25, 2016
James Franco's lubed-up riff on Renaissance art is an embarrassment
Sotheby’s commissioned Franco to respond to its exhibition of Della Robbia glazed terracotta, so he duly covered models in slick gel. It’s just the latest unnecessary stab at making old art cool
A new video by “artist” James Franco purports to interpret and modernise the Renaissance art of the Della Robbia family, by pouring transparent gel over models’ understandably grimacing faces. It is not just worthless in itself, but exposes the bankruptcy of the 21st-century cliche that you can set the art of today confidently beside the art of the past in a way that somehow liberates it from the dust of museums.
The Della Robbias churned out bright and breezy reliefs … pure and pretty, full of life and humanity
Related: James Franco's gay porn drama: 'He loves his scandalous stories'
Continue reading...October 24, 2016
Why Northern Ireland – and the rest of the world – needs Andres Serrano's Torture pictures
Helpless and naked before the camera, Serrano’s ‘victims’ make it impossible to ignore man’s inhumanity to man
There are two reasons that Northern Ireland is a particularly pungent place for Andres Serrano to show his Torture pictures, currently on view at Void in Derry. One is the violent history of the Troubles. The other is the Christian imagery that haunts the artist.
In Serrano’s notorious image Piss Christ, a crucifix is suspended in a tank of orange urine. When it was made in 1987, Northern Ireland was in the midst of something that resembled a civil war. Protestants fought Catholics and the IRA fought the British army. Altogether, 3,600 people were killed in the Troubles between 1968 and 1998, when the Good Friday agreement began today’s peace.
Continue reading...October 21, 2016
South African creativity, Krasiński's illusions and Paul Nash's horrorscapes – the week in art
Tate Liverpool questions reality with Edward Krasiński while Oxford displays supernatural Islamic objects – plus the rest of the week’s art happenings
South Africa: Art of a Nation
100,000 years of art history are spanned in the blink of an eye in this survey of South Africa’s many arts – from the earliest known painting workshop to the video art of William Kentridge.
• British Museum, London, from 27 October to 26 February.
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