Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 158
June 15, 2016
Georgiana Houghton: Spirit Drawings review – awe-inspiring visions of a Victorian medium
Courtauld Gallery, London
All-seeing eyes and cosmic visions dazzle in the abstract art of a woman who claimed her hand was guided by the dead – from saints to famous male artists
The eye of God stares out of a swirling storm of line and colour, like the eye of a whale seen through turbulent oceanic depths. It is awe-inspiring. The abstract art of Georgiana Houghton summons up strange powers of the imagination that stir deep regions of the soul. Her labyrinths of red and gold, purple and brown can be joyous and ecstatic, oppressive and eerie, but always they are tremulously expressive – and completely out of time.
Related: Spiritualist artist Georgiana Houghton gets UK exhibition
This woman was a genius who could only create and show her art by attributing it to dead white males
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June 14, 2016
How a William Hogarth painting predicted Brexit 250 years ago
British feelings of isolationism, anger and complacency are nothing new – Hogarth was busy skewering them in 1748. He also understood what today’s Brexiters do not: the country’s power relies on an international economy
It’s the economy, stupid. Or is it? The British people seem unimpressed by airy liberal issues such as jobs and money as, in the looming EU referendum, they head for an assertion of national sovereignty that flies in the face of all those scary warnings of instant self-imposed recession.
What’s going on? Has the commercially minded populace once dismissed by Napoleon as “a nation of shopkeepers” suddenly taken leave of all economic rationale?
Related: Hogarth's anti-progress: how the father of British painting went missing from our galleries
Related: These anti-Brexit posters show just what we lose by leaving the EU
Continue reading...June 12, 2016
Out of this world: why the most important art today is made in space
Forget the Turner prize. This is art that reflects the true grandeur of the universe – it is the Sistine Chapel of the scientific age
It’s all about scale. A black dot is moving across the face of a blazing giant. The shadow of the planet looks tiny, compared with the vast flaming orb of the sun embracing it, whose flares and vortices of unimaginable heat shudder the imagination. What a brilliant way to convey the size and power of the star we orbit. But these images of the transit of Mercury on 9 May are not artist’s impressions. They’re real.
Many people watched the transit from Earth, but no earthbound telescope could match the view available to Nasa’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), an unmanned spacecraft launched in 2010, the five-year mission of which is to observe the sun in unprecedented detail. Its spectacular images of the transit held the front pages of newspapers, but they were merely the latest in a series of revelatory views of our star that the spacecraft has beamed back to Earth. Images from the SDO have once again been making headlines – they show in eerie ultraviolet a vast, black void that has opened in the sun’s glowing surface.
Continue reading...June 10, 2016
Calais, clairvoyants and Serpentine minecraft – the week in art
Mary Heilmann’s personal touch, Manchester’s lost architecture and Nicholas Nixon’s unbearably moving family portrait – all in your weekly art dispatch
Georgiana Houghton
The psychedelic spirit drawings of this Victorian medium, who claimed to be guided by dead artists, are precocious abstract marvels.
• Courtauld Gallery, London, 16 June-11 September.
Five of the best... exhibitions this week
Mark Anderson | The New Tate Modern Opening Weekend | Georgiana Houghton | Cecily Brown | Royal Academy Of Arts Summer Exhibition
This summer sees the centenary of the Battle of the Somme, in which 19,240 British soldiers perished on the first day alone. As the youth of Europe died like cattle, a group of pacifist poets and artists opened the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich, where they satirised the war with nonsensical performances. Mark Anderson’s audiovisual spectacle Furious Folly remembers the first world war through the shattered lens of dada and is a corrective to some of the more complacent memorial artworks this horrific conflict has recently inspired.
Continue reading...June 9, 2016
Instagram paint-mixing videos get to the heart of our love for the sloppy stuff
Some see the online craze for stirring pots of colourful gunk as worse than watching paint dry. But it just goes to show the physical freshness of pigment
I like paintings. Sure I do. I actually like all paintings, even bad ones. And when it comes to good ones, I don’t differentiate between figurative and abstract, old and new. I can get as lost in the chance patterns of Gerhard Richter’s abstracts as I can in a Rubens landscape. Now I come to think of it, perhaps it isn’t painting I adore, but paint itself – that wonderful sloppy, smeary stuff.
So I can see why there is a YouTube and Instagram vogue for posting videos of paint being mixed. In these clips, paints are stirred in spiralling rivers of white and pink, blue and green. Colours mix and transform. The paint stays wet, raw, and sexy. The people posting these videos are re-enacting the story of painting.
Continue reading...June 8, 2016
'This is not America': a Chilean artist's newly electric message to Trump
Alfredo Jaar’s inflammatory billboard Logo for America lit up Times Square years ago. Now it will be installed in Piccadilly Circus – and it couldn’t be more urgent
“This Is Not America” declare the yellow neon letters transposed on to a glowing outline map of the United States. “This Is Not America’s Flag” reads a following pixellated sentence, as the image changes to the stars and stripes. The Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar’s billboard, named A Logo for America, was first shown in New York’s Times Square in 1987, and was remounted there in 2014. This summer, it will flash above London’s Piccadilly Circus, courtesy of the South London Gallery, as part of its exhibition of contemporary Latin American art called Under the Same Sun.
Jaar’s artwork was doubtless pertinent in 1987, but now this neon message is truly electric. When Jaar created the original billboard, the relationship between the US and Latin America was a bubbling political and cultural issue. Today, that issue has reached a boiling point – becoming a hot excuse for hatred and bigotry, fear and loathing – as extreme nationalism and xenophobia are injected into the nation’s bloodstream by Donald Trump. For Trump, this IS America – and he wants to build a wall to keep it that way.
Related: Warhol demonised Nixon. Heartfield took on Hitler. Where is Trump's artistic mauling?
Continue reading...June 7, 2016
Brian Sewell's art collection is up for grabs – what does it reveal?
We know what he didn’t like, but a Christie’s auction of Sewell’s personal hoard of paintings sets his ferocious critical judgments against some muddled tastes
Brian Sewell, the art critic, was never shy about condemning the tastes of others. Many remember Sewell for his dismissals of contemporary art, but he was equally ready to chastise the National Gallery for what he saw as badly conceived exhibitions of the greats. So we knew what he did not like. But what did he love?
Related: Brian Sewell's pungent views got people arguing – that’s what matters
Related: Brian Sewell’s best cutting critiques – in quotes
Continue reading...June 6, 2016
The Louvre's closure proves art cannot survive climate change
The flooding in Paris is a stark warning of the danger posed by climate change to everything human civilisation has achieved – no matter how priceless
Related: Strikes, floods, protests and sense of betrayal pile on misery for France
One of the oldest human illusions is that culture is a conquest of, or an escape from, nature. It is an illusion we need to abandon fast.
Continue reading...June 3, 2016
Simon and Garfunkel, selfies and fibreglass KitKats – the week in art
Meades on Mussolini, Antony Gormley’s verdict on Brexit, and the high society grotesque of Cindy Sherman – all in your weekly art dispatch
Surrealist Encounters: Collecting the Marvellous
The surrealist movement is usually looked at from the point of view of the poets and artists who signed up to André Breton’s idea that dreams are revolutionary. But this exhibition sees it from the perspective of the eccentrics and enthusiasts who paid the bills for all those calls on the lobster telephone.
• Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, 4 June-11 September
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