Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 154
July 29, 2016
Boris blunders, Renaissance cover-ups and paper peepshows – the week in art
Elizabeth I stays puts, Marina Abramović and Sophia Al-Maria speak out, and Robert Burns isn’t the only to be exposed – all in your weekly art dispatch
Joseph Beuys
This visionary artist brought his charismatic presence to the Edinburgh festival in his lifetime and now returns in spirit with a show based around his expressive, mythological drawings.
• Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, 30 July–30 October.
Five of the best... art exhibitions
Christian Boltanski | Joseph Beuys | Colour: The Art And Science Of Medieval Manuscripts | Alice Neel | Tony Morgan And John Blake
Boltanski’s installations make us aware of our common humanity and speak of collective loss, guilt and sorrow. To mark the opening of his new permanent work in this beautiful sculpture park, the French artist also exhibits in its country house art gallery. Outdoors, bells jingle in the breeze, arranged to mirror the pattern of stars on the night of his birth. His indoor creations expand the poetry as shadow theatres flicker like dreams and you are invited to record your own heartbeat. This darkly magical artist deserves to be a star of the Edinburgh Art Festival.
Continue reading...July 27, 2016
Colour: The Art and Science of Illuminated Manuscripts review – a rainbow of agony and ecstasy
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
They may look like props from a Harry Potter film, but the manuscripts in this sumptuous show are expressionist art, as full of emotion as a Van Gogh painting
• Everything is illuminated: medieval manuscripts – in pictures
Imagine how it felt to be one of the last illuminators, a trained miniaturist still painting exquisite images in blue and gold, with your pots of ground cinnabar and antimony, in precious handwritten books as the printing press revolutionised Europe 500 years ago. Your craft was redundant now that German printers could pump out hundreds of Albrecht Dürer woodcuts or Martin Luther pamphlets in the time it took you to paint one letter A.
Related: Unveiled: Adam and Eve naked again after centuries-old cover-up
Related: Everything is illuminated: the wonder of medieval manuscripts – in pictures
Continue reading...Hoarders or collectors? Our frightened society has forgotten the difference
New York art show The Keeper celebrates our poetic obsession with objects, but how many of us simply surround ourselves with familiar, reassuring rubbish?
The US is a nation of compulsive collectors – at least if responses to an exhibition at New York City’s New Museum are anything to go by. The Keeper is a collection of collections, a survey of the collecting passion in art and beyond that finds room for everything from a menagerie of tiny whittled animals made by Levi Fisher Ames of Wisconsin to Vladimir Nabokov’s collection of butterflies in three floors of stuff. All of which begs the question: what is the difference between artful collecting and mad hoarding? Or are they the same thing?
Just as intriguing are the collecting confessions of New York Times readers who replied to the paper’s invitation to respond to the show. It turns out they collect everything from “vintage photos of men in rows” (pictures of lines of men, that is – not images of men quarrelling), to a woman who keeps the contents of her vacuum cleaner, to people who lovingly curate novelty pens or coloured paperclips.
Related: Renting hell in New York City: how my hoarder landlady ruined my life
Related: Robert Rauschenberg: love and loss in America
Continue reading...July 25, 2016
The great art cover-up: Renaissance nudity still has power to shock
Sistine Chapel buttocks are veiled, while Leonardo’s Leda was so saucy she was destroyed. But prudish censorship only confirms the pulling power of art
You never know what will offend people. Researchers at the University of Cambridge have discovered that a skirt was crudely painted over the naked Eve in a Renaissance manuscript soon to go on view at the city’s Fitzwilliam Museum. Some time between the 16th and 18th centuries a particularly prudish owner had this image bowdlerised, even though the nudity of Adam and Eve is a venerable and respectable religious theme.
Related: Unveiled: Adam and Eve naked again after centuries-old cover-up
Related: The top 10 male nudes in art
Related: The top 10 female nudes in art
Continue reading...July 22, 2016
Pokémon in museums, Kahlo selfies and medieval beasts – the week in art
Witness the sensual wonders of the middle ages in Cambridge while the Baltic explores playground utopianism. All that and more in your weekly art dispatch
Alice Neel
Touching, intimate portraits of Americans by this powerful modern realist promise to be a highlight of this year’s Edinburgh art festival.
• Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, 29 Julyto 8 October.
Jousting isn't sport, it's a crazy art. Think Game of Thrones, then double it
More than medieval mock combat, jousting was about sex, spectacle and excess – and Holbein, Da Vinci and Botticelli are among the great artists who participated
If jousting becomes an Olympic sport, as apparently it may, it will be very good news for art. Perhaps we are about to see a new aesthetic era of sport, when rich heraldry and Arthurian imagery will replace relentless commercialism.
Related: English Heritage 'deadly serious' about bid to get jousting into Olympics
Related: Jousting is back – and nine other reasons to love Brexit Britain | Stephen Moss
Continue reading...Five of the best... art exhibitions
Louise Bourgeois | The Body Extended | Terence Donovan | Daydreaming With Stanley Kubrick | Hiraki Sawa
One of the best reasons to visit the new wing at Tate Modern is to see this superb display of the strange and beguiling work of the Frenchwoman who reinvented modern art. Bizarrely shaped objects, fetish-like sculptures and dream drawings all seduce the imagination. There is no comfort here, but instead a surrealism for our century, stripped of the silly old Dalí paintings of yesteryear and sticking in your mind like a toxic memory.
Continue reading...July 21, 2016
Tate Modern has finally won me over – with art
The Switch House opening raised an old worry: would the building eclipse its contents? Not any more. Tate Modern is now a world-class modern art museum
Great art museums need great art. That should go without saying, but the new Tate Modern is so architecturally exhilarating that I started to wonder: perhaps you really can have a museum where it doesn’t matter much what’s in it because the experience of walking around is so enjoyable and cool.
Related: First look: inside the Switch House – Tate Modern's power pyramid
Related: Tate Modern's Switch House review – brain-fizzing art to power a pyramid
Continue reading...July 19, 2016
A human skin handbag is not fashion – it's a crime
Fashion student Tina Gorjanc plans to make clothes using Alexander McQueen’s cloned skin. Is this a macabre joke or an ethical minefield?
Should art ever be made from human skin? It used to be serial killers like Ed Gein, the real life model for Alfred Hitchcock’s Norman Bates, who made themselves skin trophies. Today, there are more legitimate ways of getting hold of human skin to make art. Instead of murdering and skinning people, you can grow an epidermis in a lab. But is the resulting art any less creepy?
In this year’s Central St Martins degree show, Tina Gorjanc is showcasing a proposal to create handbags and other designer accessories from the skin of the celebrated couture designer Alexander McQueen, who died in 2010. Gorjanc has filed a patent for the method that would grow cell cultures from his DNA, extract skin cells, and tan the resulting remake of McQueen’s skin into leather for luxury goods.
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