Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 159
June 2, 2016
James Needham's bathroom painting proves art is doomed in the selfie age
This portrait of the artist and his wife may be hugely popular on social media, but its intimacy and humanity – just as with a photographic selfie – is fake
Painting can be popular in the digital age, provided it washes out all aesthetic ambition and reduces the 600 years of art history since the Renaissance to the level of a glorified selfie.
That is the lesson of the internet popularity of Sydney artist James Needham’s double portrait of himself and his wife in their bathroom. Needham’s mediocre daub has been shared almost a million times on Imgur. But why?
Related: Kim Kardashian’s Selfish: a nail in the coffin for artistic photography?
Related: The selfie's screaming narcissism masks an urge to connect | Jonathan Freedland
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June 1, 2016
Francis Bacon's painting gloves are going to auction – praise be!
The paint-splattered gloves are proof that we worship artists’ relics – from Turner’s paintbox to Pollock’s brushes – as traces of genius in their own right
Is art a modern religion? It’s like the joke about sex being dirty: it is if you’re doing it properly. At its most powerful, art can offer a cosmic sense of place that for many of us religion no longer provides. The other day, I visited the latest incarnation of the Mark Rothko room at Tate Modern. No matter how much Tate moves it about (right now it’s with Monet), this imposing installation of black, purple and red paintings of dark portals always takes me out of myself and makes me think about the bigger things.
Related: Calm, chaos, canvas: the studios of Picasso, Monet and Koons – in pictures
Continue reading...May 30, 2016
Bhupen Khakhar review – Mumbai's answer to Beryl Cook
Tate Modern, London
Why is Tate Modern exhibiting an old-fashioned, second-rate artist whose art recalls the kind of British painters it would never let through its doors?
What makes painting modern? Is it abstraction, or depicting the modern world, or a mixture of the two? Painting as a medium should have died out long ago according to some definitions of modern art, and yet people keep at it. What is it that can still give these daubs relevance?
Tate has the answer and it is a surprise. On the evidence of its latest Bankside exhibition, to be truly modern a painter has to be a hamfisted hack. Talented artists need not apply. That must be why Howard Hodgkin, David Hockney and Frank Auerbach have to make do with retrospectives at Tate Britain, while the incredibly unimpressive Indian painter Bhupen Khakhar, who died in 2003, is glorified as an important modern artist in the hallowed – and soon to be even more grandiose – industrial temple that is Tate Modern.
Related: Bombay dreams: how painter Bhupen Khakhar captured the city spirit
Continue reading...May 29, 2016
Pete Souza: photographing the real Barack Obama
Over two historic terms, official White House photographer Pete Souza has chronicled the most intimate, candid and comical moments of Barack Obama’s presidency
It was a tale of two Americas. In Las Vegas the casinos were humming with a hell-yes tide that was about to sweep the manic Donald Trump to his most pumped-up victory yet. In Washington DC, civilisation still existed. In the week Trump’s xenophobic bid to be the Republican presidential candidate began to look unstoppable, the man whose Americanness he has questioned was meeting 106-year-old Virginia McLaurin. In Pete Souza’s official White House photograph of their get-together, President Barack Obama cracks a delicious smile as the first lady dances with McLaurin, who was invited to visit the White House in recognition of community work she has done for decades in the US capital. The meeting was also a celebration of Black History Month – and Souza’s picture manages to be both intimate and historic. Here are three African Americans in the White House. The room they are in – the Blue Room – is opulently decorated with gold stars, Empire-style furniture, and a portrait of some grand national father who holds a white handkerchief in his white hand.
Continue reading...May 28, 2016
Caravaggio and the art of dieting
The luscious banquets painted by the Renaissance master were held up as a good example of healthy eating this week by the National Obesity Forum – but were they really that nutritious?
The Caravaggio diet is spread out at an inn in The Supper at Emmaus, painted in 1601 by the man himself. But does it have much in common with the jolly pre-modern gourmandising recommended this week by David Haslam of the National Obesity Forum? Claiming that low-fat diets are counter-productive, Haslam mused: “I often contrast a Caravaggio still-life masterpiece, giving ideal positive images of healthy food – pheasant, meat, fish, wine, cocoa, fruit and vegetables, with maybe a slice of bread – with the negative image of a traditional ‘diet’ … and wonder where the world went wrong.”
He is clearly familiar with Dan Brown’s law, which says that if you are going to namecheck an artist, you should make sure it’s a name everyone has heard of. The secret society conspiracy theories in Brown’s bestseller The Da Vinci Code had previously been attached to the French artist Nicolas Poussin, but Brown must have rightly realised that no one would buy a novel called The Poussin Code. Few even look at Poussin’s paintings in the National Gallery. I suspect the paintings Haslam is thinking of are really 17th-century Dutch still-life pictures with their hearty north European hunks of high- fat cheese, frothing ale glasses and bulging pies. But the “Willem Claeszoon Heda diet” doesn’t sound nearly so good.
Related: Official advice on low-fat diet and cholesterol is wrong, says health charity
Continue reading...May 27, 2016
The glasses in the gallery aren’t just art – they’re a work of genius | Jonathan Jones
It is a strangely touching image of vulnerability. Nothing speaks more of the weakness of the human body than the aids with which we try to remedy its failings. This is why in placing a pair of spectacles on an art gallery floor – just centimetres from the blankness of a white wall and facing outward as if looking at the feet of gallery-goers, beckoning them to kneel, crouch, and interact, or at least take a photo - the artistic duo Kevin Nguyen and TJ Khayatan have created a modern masterpiece.
Related: Pair of glasses left on US gallery floor mistaken for art
This is the readymade at its most casual and profound
Continue reading...Butterflies, bacchanalia and Francis Bacon – the week in art
The Louvre’s pyramid disappears, Tate Modern previews its £260m Switch House and Tracey Emin explains the joys of marrying a stone – all in your weekly art dispatch
Bhupen Khakar
Modern Indian art takes the form of playful figurative paintings here. Will they work in the most 21st century of museums?
• Tate Modern, London, 1 June-6 November
Five of the best... exhibitions this week
Massimo Vitali | Bridget Riley | Russia And The Arts | Master Strokes | Bettina von Zwehl
Drawing inspiration from the brainless days of high summer, this deadpan photographer of opiated holiday crowds has something in common with film director Paolo Sorrentino as an ironical chronicler of modern Italian glamour. Vitali’s beautiful people swarm over beaches from Cefalu to Liguria, showing off swimming costumes against hypnotically blue waters, while off stage the world’s troubles grow.
Continue reading...May 26, 2016
The Louvre's missing pyramid and the magic of trompe l’oeil
Muralist JR has cast a spell over the Paris museum’s glass canopy in a work that recalls the Renaissance’s eye-fooling tricks. Now can we have one for the Shard?
The Louvre has got rid of its pyramid. This seems a bit extreme. I know that not everyone loved IM Pei’s glass entrance canopy in the courtyard of the vast Paris museum when it was unveiled in 1989, but over the years the pyramid has become a beloved landmark. Why demolish it now?
Related: JR: ‘I realised I was giving people a voice’
Related: 3D street art: a question of perspective
Continue reading...May 25, 2016
Photographs don't lie: why does Austria flirt with fascism?
Gustav Metzger used a photo of Jewish men scrubbing Viennese streets under the gaze of sneering Nazis to remind the world about antisemitism. The narrow defeat of Norbert Hofer proves his message is as relevant as ever
Related: The far right’s narrow defeat in Austria should be a wake-up call for Europe | Owen Jones
The images come swimming back. The old black and white photographs are suddenly new again. It is March 1938 and Jews are being forced to scrub the streets of Vienna. Uniformed Nazis and non-Jewish members of the public laugh as they watch the humiliating scene. Jewish men crouch and kneel on the ground at their feet.
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