Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 156
July 8, 2016
Chairman Mao, neo naturists and the occult – the week in art
Merseyside comes alive with art and Antony Gormley laments the ‘termites’ nests’ of today’s cityscapes. All that and more in your weekly art dispatch
Colour and Vision
This exploration of visual experience across the natural world has everything from fossils of the first creatures to develop eyes in the ancient seas to an installation about the Newtonian spectrum. Science and art come together in what should be a mind-expanding show.
• Natural History Museum, London, 15 July-6 November.
Five of the best... art exhibitions
David Hockney | Jorge Otero-Pailos | Liverpool Biennial | David Bomberg | Etel Adnan
Britain’s most famous living painter is a master of the portrait, capturing entire decades and states of mind in such iconic works as Mr And Mrs Clark And Percy and Beverly Hills Housewife. His new series 82 Portraits And 1 Still-Life paints a picture of the 21st century through portraits of friends including architect Frank Gehry and artist John Baldessari. Everyone poses in the same lemon-yellow upholstered chair as Hockney eyeballs them in often delicious detail.
Continue reading...July 7, 2016
Stanley Kubrick and me: designing the poster for A Clockwork Orange
Philip Castle’s airbrushed art features on album covers for David Bowie and Pulp but his lurid imagery for A Clockwork Orange remains his most infamous work – he remembers his friendship with the director
Philip Castle shows me into his front room to see the naked woman on her knees next to the family piano. The plaster sculpture is battered and fragile and turning yellow with time, but I would recognise those nipples anywhere. This is one of the nude statues that serve as furniture – and serve up drinks from their breasts – in the sinister, darkly funny opening scenes of Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film A Clockwork Orange. “There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening.”
In Kubrick’s pessimistic parody of British youth culture, Malcolm McDowell’s futuristic ultraviolent mod antihero sets the scene in voiceover as the camera pans back from him and his bowler-hatted, white-codpieced droogs, taking in one obscene statue after another, just like this one I viddied with my own eyes, O my brothers, in Castle’s house.
Kubrick sent people to the cinemas where A Clockwork Orange was showing to make sure the screens were clean
Related: Tune in, freak out: take Latin mass with Stanley Kubrick and 114 radios
Continue reading...July 6, 2016
William Dobson's haunting self-portrait must be saved for the nation
An introspective masterpiece by a rare British painter of the English civil war era, this work deserves a public home where it can speak to our own troubles
The top 10 self-portraits in artHis big dark eyes dream beneath a mane of shaggy brown hair, his ruddy face is moustachioed, and a white cravat is wrapped around his throat under a monastic-looking coat. The man in this painting is a romantic. He looks a bit like the 19th-century painter Gustave Courbet. Indeed, his intensity is not a million miles from Vincent van Gogh. Yet this face was painted more than 200 years before their time – by a British artist.
William Dobson’s Portrait of the Artist, painted in about 1637, goes on sale today at Bonhams in London, and it deserves to be saved for the nation. The painting will almost certainly be bought by a private collector or dealer, but it needs to end up, somehow, in a major British public collection because it is a national treasure.
Related: The digital Rembrandt: a new way to mock art, made by fools | Jonathan Jones
Strikingly powerful self-portrait by #WilliamDobson achieves £1,106,500 inc. premium at the #OldMasterPaintings Sale pic.twitter.com/lD1fwt7dQK
Egads! Mine face doth sell for so many ducats!! @bonhams1793 @philipmould @JANUSZCZAK @arthistorynews pic.twitter.com/7qQwhKmFXT
Continue reading...July 5, 2016
The day I danced my Brexit woes away with a Brazilian | Jonathan Jones
The Horniman’s Festival of Brasil is a cocktail of culture, costumes and chaos – and carnival spirit is just what we need this British so-called summertime
How could I stop thinking about Britain’s misery? There I was, in a sunny south London park on a Sunday afternoon, dully reading political news on my phone, when I was persuaded to put on a cow mask and skirt and join in a carnival. Crisis? What crisis? It was time to parade and dance.
Led by a mirror-shaded policeman riding a hobbyhorse and seduced by trumpeters and drummers, a crowd of dazed Brits embraced a Brazilian festive fever. We became a small part of Rio de Janeiro. As the carnival director told us, the point was not to show off our costumes but to go wild and enjoy ourselves without inhibitions, by dancing to that infectious beat, throwing ourselves to the ground, forming human tunnels. And doing a hokey cokey in which everyone near me shouted “In”’. (Turns out, you can’t escape the aftermath of the EU referendum.)
Related: Wild walks, slides and crazy golf: art shows to throw yourself into
Continue reading...July 1, 2016
Fruit scrumping, cavaliers and filth in Westminster – the week in art
Jorge Otero-Pailos’ astonishing The Ethics of Dust opens in the Palace of Westminster, removing dirt – but not shame – from parliament. Plus all the week’s other art happenings in your handy weekly dispatch
Jorge Otero-Pailos: The Ethics of Dust
This latex cast of a medieval wall captures the dust and dirt of centuries of British parliamentary history. It is a timely artwork in the Palace of Westminster at a time when the mother of parliaments is threatened by architectural decay and public disillusion.
• Westminster Hall, Palace of Westminster, London, until 10 September.
Related: The Ethics of Dust: a latex requiem for a dying Westminster
Continue reading...Origin story: what does Darwin's taste in art tell us about the scientist?
Restorers at Down House, where Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, have discovered the scientist’s passion for Renaissance art. His collection sheds light on how he saw God, nature and himself
Leonardo da Vinci looked over Charles Darwin’s shoulder as he wrote On the Origin of Species. Darwin in turn saw him every day as he entered his study to work among his collections of bird bones, barnacles and notes from the global voyage on HMS Beagle that gave him an idea that would change everything.
Related: How Darwin’s view from his bedroom window ushered in a scientific revolution
Related: Celling point: scientist makes Darwin's Origin of Species with bacteria
Continue reading...Five of the best... art exhibitions
Georgia O’Keeffe | Making And Unmaking | The Dead Teach The Living | Winifred Knights | Christopher Wood
The career of Georgia O’Keeffe is a monument of modern US history. In the 1920s, she painted skyscraper abstractions that captured the mood of the jazz age. She also posed nude for her husband Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer and promoter of modern art. Yet O’Keeffe outlived not only Stieglitz but modern art itself. By the time she died – in 1986, at the age of 98 – she was associated more with the open west than big city lights. From the 1930s, her art embraced nature and the wilderness. Was she a great artist? This exhibition will offer plenty of evidence to assess her achievement.
Continue reading...The true faces of the Somme – uncoloured by the new nationalism
A hundred years ago, the battle of the Somme marked a terrible chapter for Europe, but in the new climate of jingoism, a worldwide tragedy is being reduced to a sentimental fiction for little England
Their faces look back at us from the abyss. Faces of the doomed. In photographs of British soldiers on the eve of the Battle of the Somme, which started 100 years ago on 1 July 1916, we see men who are about to die or suffer appalling wounds. The British army suffered 57,470 casualties on the first day of the Somme, including 19,240 men killed.
Related: Letters of fallen Somme soldiers released to mark battle's centenary
Related: ‘The roaring of the shells was diabolical.’ It was zero hour on the Somme
Continue reading...June 29, 2016
The legacy game: Gormley isn't the first artist to worry about his place in history
The sculptor Antony Gormley has voiced doubts about his ‘usefulness to the human race’. But to be an artist, you need a big ego
Antony Gormley has been struck down by modesty. The artist who casts his own body religiously, and whose monumental works include not only the Angel of the North but a hotel room whose exterior is shaped like a squatting Lego figure, has been musing about his own place in history.
“It’s quite possible that my whole project is very flawed,” he speculates. “That, in the great frame of things, when contributions are weighed in the balance of usefulness to the human race, I may be found very wanting, but it’s too late for doubt now. Neither is there time for it.”
Continue reading...Jonathan Jones's Blog
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