Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 147
October 21, 2016
Clipped wings: the tragic true story of The Goldfinch
It was made famous by Donna Tartt’s novel, but the truth about its artist, Carel Fabritius, is stranger than fiction
It’s just a painting of a chained bird on its perch, but The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius has become a pop icon. When I last saw it at the Mauritshuis in The Hague it was singled out from other paintings, roped off, almost like the Mona Lisa. Now it is to be exhibited at the Scottish National Gallery. Will the crowds there from 4 November match the 200,000 people who queued to see it at the Frick Collection in New York in 2014?
The popularity of this 17th-century Dutch painting has been hugely enhanced by Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch, whose narrator steals it when he is 13 years old. Yet the true story of The Goldfinch and the man who painted it is stranger than fiction.
Related: Donna Tartt: Is this the year of The Goldfinch?
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Five of the best… art exhibitions
South Africa: The Art Of A Nation | Marcantonio Raimondi And Raphael | Howard Hodgkin | Maíno’s Adorations | Edward Krasinski
There is only one country in the world that can claim an art heritage that goes back 100,000 years. The world’s oldest artworks, found in Blombos Cave in South Africa, stand at the dawn of a national art epic that today includes one of the world’s greatest living artists, William Kentridge, alongside a variety of makers, from community groups to installationist Willie Bester. On the way, the nation has seen huge diversity in its output; this exhibition spans the lot.
Continue reading...October 20, 2016
Yves Klein review – a superheated plunge into the wild blue yonders
Tate Liverpool
From the Fire Paintings to the works made with women’s bodies, this is a sublime homage to the visionary artist
I’ve got the blues and it’s beautiful. Sinking into the art of Yves Klein is like diving into a clear blue sea – and finding it’s far deeper and stranger than you’d expected. Below the luminous shallows are opaque depths and a terrible immensity. Fluorescent fish seem to dart out of underwater caves.
The sea seems important to Klein. Some of the most haunting works in Tate Liverpool’s beguiling homage to this visionary artist – who died in 1962, at the age of just 34 – are natural sponges fixed to wooden panels along with a scattering of stones. The whole assemblage is saturated in blue pigment. It is like being a diver in the Mediterranean, looking at the rich and alien life on the seabed.
His blue is pure, heavenly and diving into it brings a release, a calm. This is therapeutic art
Far from crude imprints of female anatomy, his Anthropometry paintings are ethereal, dreamlike, poetic
Continue reading...October 19, 2016
Rodin and Dance review: soft porn takes flight in show of sensual strength
Courtauld Gallery, London
Cubists captured the madness of the early 20th century in abstracted shards; Auguste Rodin showed it in dance, with sculpted figures that are erotic, aerodynamic and hallucinatory
Auguste Rodin is one of most mysterious and elusive of all great artists. Just to look at his life dates is to see how paradoxical he is. Born in 1840, died 1917 – that’s a life that reaches from the late Romantic age into the despair of the first world war. Rodin’s art also has one foot in the past, the other in the future. In the very same work he can resemble Michelangelo, Picasso and Louise Bourgeois.
Modern artists shattered tradition to express the dynamism of technology; Rodin portrayed it in dance's wildness
Related: The magnificent Musée Rodin reopens in Paris – with a chocolate surprise
Continue reading...October 17, 2016
Why we should back Tania Bruguera's presidential bid for a free Cuba
The Cuban artist exposes how anti-democracy feeling is still rife in the one-party state. This is valuable ‘artivism’ in a less-than-rosy nation
Art is good at pointing out simple truths that otherwise get forgotten, or conveniently ignored. Cuban artist Tania Bruguera has just announced that she is running for president of Cuba when Raul Castro steps down – as he has said he will – in 2018.
There’s just one snag. You can’t run for president of Cuba. The socialist island is not a democracy but a one-party state. Bruguera’s “artivism”, as she calls it, is a satirical performance that draws attention to the embarrassing reality that Cuba’s rulers are not freely elected by the people. “Let’s use the 2018 elections to build a different Cuba,” she says, “to build a Cuba where we are all in charge and not just the few.” She says she hopes “to change the culture of fear” with her utopian bid for the presidency.
Related: Tania Bruguera: the more the secret police torture me, the better my art gets
Continue reading...October 14, 2016
This painting is a masterpiece of love and war – Britain must break the bank to keep it
Jacopo Pontormo’s Portrait of a Man in a Red Cap could soon belong to the National Gallery after a £19m government grant – but only if another £11m can be found. It’s a painting full of romance and political anger, and worth every penny
The National Gallery has only got until 22 October to buy Jacopo Pontormo’s Portrait of a Man in a Red Cap (1530), a masterpiece of Florentine mannerism that is currently subject to a government export ban. It has already been sold to a US collector and tax has been paid on it, so the gallery has to match the £30m price – and the deadline is rapidly approaching. With a £19m government grant already awarded.
Why does it matter? Why is it so important to keep this particular painting in Britain? Perhaps because it is not just a beautiful portrait but a moving document of politics and history. For this is a picture of a young idealist: a relic of revolution.
Related: Beyond Caravaggio review: a masterpiece of surprise
Continue reading...Klein turns blue, Rodin dances and Turner goes home – the week in art
Yves Klein heads to Liverpool, while Manchester hosts the masterful printmaker Marcantonio Raimondi – plus the rest of the week’s art happenings
Yves Klein
The man who patented his own colour comes to Merseyside in what should be a fascinating encounter with one of modern art’s most charismatic shamans.
• Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, 21 October-5 March.
October 13, 2016
Five of the best... art exhibitions
Yves Klein | Rodin And Dance | Ed Ruscha | Tony Cragg | Hepworth prize for sculpture
1 Yves Klein
Magic and mysticism, fire and freedom dance through the works of Yves Klein. This charismatic star of 1960s French art tried to fly, practised judo, used nude models as paintbrushes and patented his own shade of blue. While all of that makes him sound a ridiculous showman, long after his death his works shine on. The blue imprints of naked bodies in his Anthropometries are not offensive but haunting, for Klein was a modern shaman whose vision reunited the spiritual and the carnal.
Continue reading...Goodbye art history A-level, you served the elite well | Jonathan Jones
This autumn yet another new edition of EH Gombrich’s classic 1950 book The Story of Art – the “Luxury” edition – will be out in time for Christmas. Meanwhile the BBC is hard at work on Civilisations, an epic attempt to regain the factual television heights of Kenneth Clark’s 1969 series Civilisation.
Related: Last art history A-level axed after Michael Gove cull of 'soft' subjects
Far from a savage attack on the people’s art history, this is the end of one privilege of the public-school elite
Related: Kenneth Clark: a civilised man?
Continue reading...Richard Serra review – rusting hulks that trap the ticking of time
Gagosian Britannia Street, London
It may look like a big chunk of derelict dockyard but the great sculptor’s new work feels like a monument to our times
Imagine walking in the dark nave of a cathedral. You turn a corner and it turns into the hull of a rustbucket ship. Another twist and you are in a north African souk. These are just some of the impressions you might get walking through the curvaceous labyrinth that is Richard Serra’s new sculpture NJ-2.
This is not some virtual-reality artwork that demands you put on headgear to enter an illusory world, nor are any of the pictures forming in my mind at all adequate to describe the experience of Serra’s almost infintely suggestive art. So let’s reduce it to the bald facts.
Long, dark stains pour down the steel walls that tower above you, redolent of centuries passing, history happening
Related: Richard Serra and Michael Craig-Martin’s 50-year conversation about art
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