Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 148
October 13, 2016
Marcantonio Raimondi: the Renaissance printer who brought porn to Europe
In 1524 Raimondi, an engraver working with Raphael’s circle of sexual libertarians, printed I Modi – The Positions. These pornographic illustrations gave erotic art to the masses
The Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester is exhibiting the works of Marcantonio Raimondi (c.1480–1534), a printmaker who collaborated closely with the great Renaissance artist Raphael. The reproductions of Raphael’s paintings that Raimondi undertook helped spread artistic knowledge across Europe. It sounds respectable, even staid. Yet there’s another side to this craftsman that might make you prick up your ears.
He helped invent pornography. Raphael, who employed Raimondi, was at the centre of a circle of sexual libertarians in Renaissance Rome. They hung out at the villa of Agostino Chigi, banker to the Vatican, who held wild parties in his garden by the Tiber and owned erotic art including a lewd statue of the horny greek god Pan. Chigi was a libertarian – he apparently only married his mistress Francesca Ordeaschi to legitimise their four children after they’d lived together for years, and he also had an affair with the famous courtesan Imperia Cognati. The mood at his villa was hedonistic. One regular guest was the writer Pietro Aretino, who wrote of the erotic art in the villa: “Why shouldn’t the eye see what delights it most?”
Ben Jonson mentions I Modi in Volpone. And Shakespeare names the artist who drew the pictures in The Winter's Tale
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October 12, 2016
As Aleppo burns in this age of lies, Picasso's Guernica still screams the truth about war
MP Andrew Mitchell invoked the ghosts of Guernica in his speech on Aleppo this week. From the dead baby’s face to the figure in the fire, Picasso’s apocalypse will always outstare bloodthirsty dictators
The flames of Guernica still burn in modern memory. In 1937, the Nazi German air force bombed this ancient city in the hills of Spain’s Basque region on behalf of the fascist side in the Spanish civil war. The attack took more than 1,600 lives and was a revelation of the horror of bombing raids on civilians, which would soon become the norm when world war broke out two years later.
Related: Russia should be investigated for Syrian war crimes, says Boris Johnson
Aleppo(nica)https://t.co/THMdlUiEAv pic.twitter.com/TX4QylLrzF
Related: If we don't act now, all future wars may be as horrific as Aleppo | Paul Mason
Continue reading...October 11, 2016
David Bowie's sombre art collection needs more space oddities
Aside from Jean-Michel Basquiat and Marcel Duchamp, there’s little provocation or pop art brashness in David Bowie’s art collection – instead he’s weirdly fascinated by 20th-century British painting
David Bowie’s art collection was tasteful. Disappointingly tasteful. As Sotheby’s announces the full list of art owned by the late great pop star, to be auctioned in November, it is hard to stifle a yawn.
Where are the vulgar pop art provocations? Where is the camp outrage, the punk iconoclasm? And where’s Andy Warhol?
Related: The subtle side of David Bowie: 'quiet' art collection goes on display in LA
Continue reading...October 10, 2016
Quote me on this, Grayson: you're not a true artist at all
Grayson Perry has quoted my dismissal of him as ‘suburban popular culture’ on a new pot of his. But I’m no snob – and this is typical snark from an artist who makes dry jokes instead of feeling anything
It’s always nice to be quoted. In a design for a new pot that he has released to publicise his exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery next year, Grayson Perry quotes me dismissing his work as “suburban popular culture”.
Did I say that? Probably, although he also misspells my name Johnathan. Can I have that corrected on the final ceramic masterpiece, please? And isn’t this quote a bit polite compared with some of the things I have said about his work?
Related: Back to art school: Grayson Perry and Gillian Wearing meet tomorrow's stars
Continue reading...October 9, 2016
Beyond Caravaggio review: a masterpiece of surprise
The National Gallery’s powerful exhibition about the artist and his followers shows a man who could share his genius
The shadowed eyes of Caravaggio’s Saint John the Baptist (painted 1603–4) won’t leave me alone. They stare at me in the night. Ever since I saw this lifesize, nearly nude painting of a brooding youth in the National Gallery’s powerful and compulsive exhibition about Caravaggio and his followers – the “Caravaggisti” – it has been seeping into my unconscious like a bloodstain.
The black shadow of the cross – or is it a broadsword? – cuts across the bright white flesh of John. Another deep dark void slices through his neck, separating his head from his body, foreshadowing the way he will die when Salome demands his head on a plate.
Related: Villainy and visionaries: how Caravaggio’s followers saw the light
Continue reading...October 7, 2016
Picasso, Caravaggio and quantum physics – the week in art
Caravaggio’s contemporaries arrive at the National Gallery, while Yinka Shonibare unleashes kaleidoscopic new work – plus the rest of the big shows this week
Beyond Caravaggio
One of those artists who blast his rivals off the walls, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio nevertheless inspired a legion of followers in early 17th-century Europe. How do their works compare with his?
• National Gallery, London, 12 October-15 January
Bacon, Auerbach ... Keith Cunningham? Meet the nearly man of British painting
Praised by Frank Auerbach, Cunningham flared into life in the 1950s then sank from view. A new exhibition celebrates him, but is he really a lost genius?
The myth of the difficult outsider, whose rebel genius is misunderstood by the establishment, is one of art’s oldest and most compelling fables. In French, the word for such a troubled talent is maudit: cursed.
This romantic stereotype of the misunderstood artist whose work will only be truly appreciated by future generations is rooted in truth. Great artists really can exist outside the markets and establishments of their time. Heading through Hoxton, east London, in search of the latest lost and rediscovered genius of British art, I passed the William Blake pub. In British art, Blake is the definitive gifted outsider. Shunned in his lifetime by the Royal Academy, struggling to find any audience for his radical and ravishing artist’s books, he is now universally revered for his vision.
Related: Sitting for Frank Auerbach: 'It's rather like being at the dentist'
Continue reading...October 6, 2016
Five of the best... art exhibitions
Towards Night | Beyond Caravaggio | Turner prize | Joseph Beuys | Opus Anglicanum
This exhibition takes a long day’s journey into night as it has been painted or experienced by artists as diverse as Caspar David Friedrich and Peter Doig, William Blake and Louise Bourgeois. Doig’s painting Echo Lake is a David Lynch-like image of the nocturnal menace of the great outdoors; Bourgeois drew all night because she had insomnia; while Blake, long before the surrealists, drew his dreams.
Continue reading...October 5, 2016
Frieze Masters review – for the billionaire who has everything, what about a Magritte?
Regent’s Park, London
Bacon, Dalí, a relief from ancient Persepolis … this treasure trove of classical and modern masterpieces is dazzling, then exhausting – and finally sickening
What do you feel about money? Is it sexy, beautiful, sublime? Or disgusting?
Like a giant conceptual artwork, the Frieze Masters art fair forces you to evaluate your attitude to obscene wealth. So much of the time, we talk about 21st-century society in abstractions. It’s all very well going on about “the 1%” and producing data that shows inequality is twisting our world out of shape. The organisers of Frieze have done something much more graphic and useful. They have put the reality of money on display so we can walk among the 1%, study the art that’s theirs to buy, and make a choice. Do we go along with this or not? Is it fun, or is it all a bit … repulsive?
Continue reading...October 4, 2016
More savage than Caravaggio: the woman who took revenge in oil
Artemisia Gentileschi turned the horrors of her own life – repression, injustice, rape – into brutal biblical paintings that were also a war cry for oppressed women. Why has her extraordinary genius been overlooked?
Two women are holding a man down on a bed. One presses her fist against his head, so he can’t raise it from the mattress, while her companion pins his torso in place. They are well-built with powerful arms but even so it takes their combined strength to keep their victim immobilised as one of them cuts through his throat with a gleaming sword. Blood spurts from deep red geysers as she saws. She won’t stop until his head is fully severed. Her victim’s eyes are wide open. He knows exactly what is happening to him.
The dying man is Holofernes, an enemy of the Israelites in the Old Testament, and the young woman beheading him is Judith, his divinely appointed assassin. Yet at the same time he is also an Italian painter called Agostino Tassi, while the woman with the sword is Artemisia Gentileschi, who painted this. It is, effectively, a self-portrait.
With words and images, she fought back against the male violence that dominated her world
I pulled his hair, she told the court, and grabbed his penis so tight I even removed a piece of flesh
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