Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 157
June 28, 2016
A great European painting has just been unveiled in Britain. It feels like forbidden fruit
For Brexiters, divorce from Europe’s cultural glories is just good riddance to foreign muck. Now we’re isolated, feasting on the art of Georges de la Tour feels like a subversive act against nationalism
A great masterpiece of European art has just gone on view at the National Gallery in London. Georges de la Tour’s painting The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs (1630-34) has been loaned by the Kimbell Art Museum in Texas and can be seen, for free, in the French galleries.
Under normal circumstances I would be happy just to revel in this painting’s luminous beauty and cynical humour. De la Tour is a great master of light who loved to paint the Magdalene in darkness, her bare skin silvered by a pale candle flame. In The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs it’s the big, pale, brightly lit face of a woman in an elaborate headdress that catches our eye. She is a courtesan – hence the fancy dress – who is working with a servant and the boy showing us his hidden cards to cheat a foolish young man. I might have gone on to point out how a similar masterpiece by De la Tour, The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds, hangs in the Louvre and how both paintings brilliantly reinterpret Caravaggio’s earlier work The Cardsharps.
Related: Brexit? Britain has already voted to stay. Just look in its galleries
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June 27, 2016
David Hockney RA: 82 Portraits and 1 Still-life review – 'We can feel Hockney's deafness'
Royal Academy, London
The artist’s humorous portraits, all with the same yellow chair, are a superheated pageant of fashion and pattern
David Hockney is a relentlessly experimental artist, in the original sense of the word experiment, which means the testing of truth against experience. The artist is interested in how we see and how we can adequately record the evidence of our eyes. His restless quest for visual truth has led him from cubist photomontages to plein-air paintings – and now to an intriguing exploration of the nature of portraiture, in which 82 different people all pose in the same elegant chair, perching, sprawling or slumping themselves on its lemon upholstery, faces ruddy or pale, accepting the scrutiny of his pencil and paintbrush.
What is it, in the 21st century, to have your portrait painted? It is for one thing a gloriously archaic exercise, a few hours of escape from the speed of modern life. Just do it, says the slogan on Avner Chaim’s green T-shirt, under his striped purple zip-up jacket, yet he’s been taken out of the rush of the big city, sat in Hockney’s old-fashioned chair, and must wait for the artist to do his work.
Related: Is David Hockney right to say painting is an old man's art?
Continue reading...June 24, 2016
Flowers, fabric bridges and Ukip's refugee poster – the week in art
…plus George Stubbs’s radical vision, Tate Modern’s macaws, the Orbit slide and Newcastle’s buzziest nightspot – for dung flies – all in your weekly art dispatch
Georgia O’Keeffe
One of America’s most iconic artists brings her desert blooms to the British summer.
• Tate Modern, London, 6 July-30 October
Five of the best... art exhibitions
Painters’ Paintings: From Freud To Van Dyck | Inspiring Impressionism | Lucian Freud Unseen | Storms, War & Shipwrecks | Jim Hodges
When the pungently realist painter Lucian Freud died in 2011 he left the National Gallery a work of art. Was it a British painting, a tough expressionist daub, or perhaps a work by Manet or Courbet? No, it was an enigmatic dark-eyed portrait by the romantic painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, who is usually thought of as a wan landscapist. Freud’s erudite and unusual taste in art raises the question of what paintings artists collect, and why, which this exhibition pursues across the centuries – from the princely art cognoscenti of the baroque age to acquisitive modern artists such as Degas and Matisse.
Continue reading...June 23, 2016
Stubbs and the Wild review – a radical world vision seen through animal eyes
Holburne Museum, Bath
Terrified horses, playful leopards, anxious lemurs … the 18th-century painter’s acute observation and compassion are vividly present in this impactful show
A white horse trembles in terror, veins throbbing in its flanks, its mane thrust forward as if galvanised by electricity, its mouth open in shock. Every muscle of its tremulous body is a beacon of distress. As Horace Walpole, author of the Gothic horror story The Castle of Otranto, observed when Horse Frightened by a Lion was first exhibited in the 1760s, this poor, suffering animal expresses more with a fetlock than a poet with verse.
Racehorses were rockstars in 18th century Britain, and Stubbs was their society portraitist
Related: Under the skin of George Stubbs's The Anatomy of the Horse
Continue reading...June 22, 2016
Is David Hockney right to say painting is an old man's art?
At 78, the artist is working harder than ever as he prepared to exhibit 83 new works in London. But does experience make every artist better with the years?
David Hockney says he’ll keep on painting into his 80s and may well have his greatest work ahead of him. “The Chinese have a saying,” the 78-year-old told the Radio Times. “Painting is an old man’s art. I told Lucian Freud that a long time ago. I think it is, actually. It means it’s an accumulation of things.”
Is Hockney right? Do painters get better with age? There is no question Freud got better as he matured. Was this the accumulation of skill? Partly, yet it also reflected a greater freedom. Freud braved more and dared more the older he got. His brushwork, which in his youth was careful and precise, became more suggestive and sensual. Early paintings by Freud such as Interior at Paddington (1951) are striking but his greatness lies on masterpieces such as his portraits of performance artist Leigh Bowery with their heroic admiration for the flesh.
Related: Flowers or vaginas? Georgia O’Keeffe Tate show to challenge sexual cliches
Continue reading...June 20, 2016
Painters’ Paintings: From Freud to Van Dyck review – an electric conversation
National Gallery, London
From the sensous Cézanne owned by Degas to van Dyck’s horde of Titians, this sparky show reveals the chains of inspiration linking painters through the ages
Paul Cézanne is the painter’s painter par excellence, or so it emerges in a sparkily clever, sensuously displayed exhibition at the National Gallery in London that sees great art through through the eyes of great artists.
Cézanne’s dappled geometries, slices of solid sunlight and obsessively seen bodies, male and female, have long made him a hero of modern art, but this show reveals how intimately, how passionately artists have studied him – and still do.
Owning great art does not automatically make you a great artist
Continue reading...Joseph Wright's Derby homecoming: dazzling, daring – and still in danger
Exclusive: In an audacious coup involving a Manhattan auction house, an anonymous agent and a secret bid, Derby has brought home a pair of masterworks by its star son, even as his wider collection faces the cut
Joseph Wright of Derby’s 1766 masterpiece, A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery, is a painting that shoots you into outer space. So intense is the light glowing on its circle of 18th-century faces from an illuminated model of the solar system, it’s as if we are all orbiting this star of science.
Wright is England’s answer to Caravaggio, a master of light and shadow and the man behind one of the most celebrated images of science ever created. This painting has appeared in countless books and TV documentaries. How, then, can it belong to one of the most endangered public galleries in Britain?
Related: Restoration of Joseph Wright of Derby paintings reveals hidden details
Related: Museums are now part of Britain's pernicious north-south divide
Continue reading...June 17, 2016
The Tate's switcheroo, Jarman shortlist and queer Islam – the week in art
The superwomen of the USSR flex their muscles, David Hockney returns to portraiture, and how William Hogarth predicted Brexit – all in your weekly art dispatch
Superwoman
Striking images from Soviet propaganda art explore how communism represented women from the 1917 Bolshevik revolution to the collapse of the USSR.
• GRAD, London, 18 June-17 September.
June 16, 2016
Farage’s poster is the visual equivalent of Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech | Jonathan Jones
This picture, filled with nonwhite faces, makes explicit the racism in Ukip’s vision of leaving the European Union
If you are thinking of voting to leave the EU, if you want Britain to take back control, if you believe the Brussels oligarchs are throttling our democracy, and, yes, if you think immigration has to be regulated and that can best be done if we have proper national borders again, look at this poster, for it is very informative.
Related: Nigel Farage attacked for Ukip poster showing queue of migrants
Your new poster resembles outright Nazi propaganda, @Nigel_Farage. Thanks to @brendanjharkin for pointing it out. pic.twitter.com/Rd89XZSvfD
I don’t think this Ukip poster creators would be insulted by the Enoch Powell comparison
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