Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 149
October 4, 2016
Picasso Portraits review – tame exhibition sells his radical genius short
National Portrait Gallery, London
You won’t learn from this show how Picasso actually tore apart the portrait form as a way of seeing
If you have ever been fooled by sensationalist biographies that caricature the 20th century’s greatest artist as a destroyer of women, a selfish monster, a man who always put his art ahead of the people around him, the National Portrait Gallery’s soft-centred exhibition of a Picasso always ready to sketch a lunch companion on a napkin or trot out hilarious cartoons of pals is the corrective you need.
Heck, it even has his home movies. Picasso is revealed in the London gallery as a tender lover and a gentle father. Intimate and classically beautiful portrait drawings of his lovers Marie Therese Walter and Dora Maar, shown side by side, suggest his deep and sincere love for two women his art often contorts, eroticises and transforms. Portraits of his children Maya, Claude and Paloma are similarly disarming.
Related: Pablo’s people: the truth about Picasso's portraits
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Was the National Gallery scammed with a fake Old Master painting?
Orazio Gentileschi’s painting David Contemplating the Head of Goliath, until recently held by the National Gallery, could be a fake. If it is, it seriously undermines the gallery’s authority
Orazio Gentileschi’s painting David Contemplating the Head of Goliath is a striking object. Just 25cm tall and 19cm wide, it is painted on a small but very valuable slab of the precious stone lapis lazuli. This intensely blue rock has been mined in Afghanistan since ancient times and was one of the most coveted artistic pigments in the world before the invention of synthetic blues. Renaissance artists’ contracts often stipulated the use of lapis lazuli in paintings for the blue of the sky or the Virgin Mary’s robe.
Gentileschi, it would seem, went one better. Instead of just using crushed lapis lazuli to mix his blue, he painted directly on to a piece of this stone. By leaving the sky bare, he gave it a deep blueness – a brilliant chromatic effect.
Related: The so-called Caravaggio in the attic looks like a fake to me
Related: National Gallery to show Michelangelo statue for first time in UK
Continue reading...October 3, 2016
Peter Saul: the chocolate-smeared prankster of Pop painting
Taking potshots at the American art canon, Peter Saul’s paintings are riots of fast food, sex and acid-fried energy
You certainly can’t mistake Peter Saul for any other artist. Splurges of lime green or spaghetti sauce red, gross caricatures of politicians, flamboyant sexual fantasies … His art is the American dream pumped up and injected with steroids, served with a hot dog and a tube of mustard coloured acrylic.
Food analogies leap to mind when describing his work, because he confuses food and paint, gooey colours and infantilist appetites. Just as his fellow pop artist Ed Ruscha painted maple syrup and Claes Oldenburg made a giant burger sculpture, his art is a fast food emporium of sticky sauces and fatty snacks.
Continue reading...September 30, 2016
Gangsters' use of paintings as currency shows a profound belief in art
How many bags of cocaine for a Van Gogh? This is the sense in which the mafia reveres priceless works
The discovery of two stolen Van Gogh paintings in a house near Pompeii during an investigation into the Neapolitan crime syndicate the Camorra casts a fascinating light on gangs, art theft and Italy. Added to other occasional glimpses into the murky underworld of art, it suggests something surprising: that Italian gangsters, in their own way, revere art.
The Camorra does not have the soft-toned image that Mario Puzo’s The Godfather lent the more famous and sentimentalised Sicilian mafia. Instead, Roberto Saviano’s courageous reportage on the savage organised crime that defaces Naples, and the film and TV series Gomorrah that it inspired, portray this scar on southern Italy as a brutish, utterly unscrupulous business in drugs, protection and human lives. What would gangsters who traffic people and cocaine want with art?
Related: Italian police find stolen Van Goghs 14 years after infamous Amsterdam heist
Continue reading...Gorilla masks, steel masterpieces and night terrors – the week in art
Richard Serra’s latest epic metalwork hits London, while Louise Bourgeois heads to the Somerset countryside – plus the rest of the week’s art happenings
Guerrilla Girls
The veteran cultural activists present disturbing data on the continuing male dominance of art, in a pair of London shows.
• Whitechapel Gallery, London, 1 October–5 March; Tate Modern, London, 4–9 October.
Five of the best... art exhibitions
Guerrilla Girls | Louise Bourgeois | Philippe Parreno | Richard Serra | Gerald Laing
The greatness of Louise Bourgeois is more obvious with every passing year. Her art magically connects the 21st century with the giants of early modernism, for this pupil of Fernand Léger was nothing less than the last of the surrealists. This exhibition reveals a series of late etchings in which she explores her unconscious. Bourgeois kept working to the end of her life because her imagination was so stuffed with strange visions. Now her mind is preserved in art, a modern wonderland.
Continue reading...Antony Gormley: Fit review – march of the sexless Lego cybermen
Antony Gormley’s uneven new show aims for deep and meaningful, but comes out corny, angsty and repressed. And the less said about his riffs on Henry Moore and Richard Serra, the better
Is Antony Gormley already spouting pretension when he gets up in the morning? Does he go to the bathroom and contemplate “the voiding of excess material from his bodily chasm” as he sits on the loo? Does he sip his coffee and comment on how it makes him more aware of his position in space and time?
Related: Antony Gormley: Humans are building 'a vast termites' nest' of greed
Related: Sculptor Antony Gormley: 'the selfie is charming' but it's a modern paradox
Continue reading...September 29, 2016
Thumbs up to David Shrigley's fabulously feel-bad fourth plinth
Trafalgar Square, London
Seven metres of jabbing black bronze, Shrigley’s gleefully ugly sculpture gives a sarcastic thumbs-up to Brexit Britain
David Shrigley is a mordant and rueful artist. I have a postcard by him that says DEATH in letters that get smaller from left to right, pithily expressing our doom as a diminishing scribble. His take on existence veers between the grimly comic and the cynically absurdist. It is therefore hard to take him entirely at face value when he claims his colossal bronze sculpture of a hand with an elongated thumb jabbing the sky above Trafalgar Square is a simple statement of optimism. I honestly can’t see this gleefully ugly work of art spreading a lot of cheer.
Related: David Shrigley: ‘Women should not have my drawings tattooed on them’
Continue reading...Opus Anglicanum review – beautiful medieval embroidery loses its thread
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
The medieval craftspeople of England were in demand all over Europe for their fabulous embroidery, dressing popes and princes. But this exhibition turns their achievements into a boring history lesson
Picture the scene in the Vatican, when curators from the V&A turned up to borrow a precious artistic masterpiece. What was it they wanted: Raphael’s Transfiguration? Leonardo da Vinci’s St Jerome? Or perhaps a precious codex from the Vatican library?
Related: V&A exhibition reunites masterpieces of English medieval embroidery
Related: V&A director's decision to quit hastened by Brexit vote
Continue reading...September 27, 2016
Dark arts: how night inspires great painters
Whether it’s the night terrors of Edvard Munch or the shadowy holy light of Dutch nativity scenes, northern European artists have long found their voice in the dark – as the Towner Art Gallery’s latest show explores
The nights are drawing in. Autumn evenings are getting duskier, mistier, cooler. Early mornings are darker. Soon we’ll be living large parts of our lives under a nocturnal cloak.
As the dark deepens it unleashes imagination and stories of ghosts and witches; dreams and nightmares populate the night. Autumn is the time when they creep out of the lengthening shadows, ready for Halloween. As the world gets darker it also gets more interesting. That is what many artists find, anyway.
The night is full of terrors, from witches to loneliness, yet it is a labyrinth of mystery and beauty
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