Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 165
April 1, 2016
Farewell, Zaha Hadid and Google goes gaga for Deep Dream – the week in art
An architectural legend is lost, Bruce Munro lights up Uluru and what Palmyra looks like after its recapture – all in your weekly art dispatch
Dutch Flowers
The Dutch Republic in the 17th century took flowers seriously – so seriously it was gripped by tulip-mania. The flower-growing obsessions of the age still shape the look of Holland today. In art, flowers offered a perfect subject for the realist artists from an age when the microscope was pioneered. Paintings by Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder, Rachel Ruysch and others showcase fascinating visions of colour – but look out for the worm in the bud, the lizard under the leaf.
• National Gallery, London, 6 April-29 August.
March 31, 2016
British Museum's new director brings lessons of German history
Hartwig Fischer was born in West Germany, had family in the East, is old enough to remember the cold war but was young enough to enjoy the opportunities of unified Germany
Hartwig Fischer, the new director of the British Museum, grew up in a land bisected by history. He was born in Hamburg in West Germany in 1962, a year after the communist eastern German Democratic Republic put up the Berlin Wall. Fischer had relatives in East Germany, in Dresden, the former capital of the Electors of Saxony, famous for the art collections amassed by its old rulers, yet a place isolated from much of the world and supervised closely by the Stasi in Fischer’s youth.
“Dresden was one of the places where it was hardest to view western television – it was the most completely cut off under the GDR,” says Neil MacGregor, the recently retired British Museum director into whose near-sacred shoes Fischer steps on Monday. MacGregor’s book, Germany: Memories of a Nation, is meanwhile coming out in paperback and he admires his successor for precisely those qualities that might arouse some British scepticism in these days of Brexit debate – his characteristically German virtues and experiences.
Related: Hartwig Fischer: the German helping the British Museum change the world
Related: German to become first foreign director of British Museum since 1827
Continue reading...March 30, 2016
‘C.R.U.I.S.E spells WWIII’ – 1980s peace campaigners in pictures
Edward Barber’s photographs of protesters capture not only the defiance but also the humour and humanity of CND and anti-nuclear protesters
Edward Barber’s photographs of peace protests in the 1980s are as nostalgic as hearing Love Will Tear Us Apart on your streaming service or watching The Young Ones on Netflix. The severe black-and-white tones speak of a time when the stakes were high – or seemed to be. The nuclear war – in which you should put a bag over your head and kiss your loved ones goodbye, as one man’s protest instructs – never came. But these are not images lost in time, either. Nuclear weapons are once again a political issue.
Continue reading...No self-pity, no fear: a hostage sets new standards for British sangfroid | Jonathan Jones
In requesting a photo with his EgyptAir hijacker, Ben Innes displayed surreal genius and cool under pressure worthy of a John le Carré hero
Ah, the British. Cool under pressure. In the John le Carré-based TV drama The Night Manager that recently ended, an Englishman kept his head so well that he brought down an arms smuggling business. Le Carré attacks the establishment, but his heroes are romantic embodiments of the best British values, still trying to be decent in an indecent world: “Poor loves. Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves …”, as Beryl Reid described them in the 1979 BBC version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
Now along comes another British hero keeping his cool in a mad age – or perhaps, embracing its madness. In a picture that no artist would be daring enough to stage, 26-year-old Ben Innes from Aberdeen grins merrily next to hijacker Seif Eldin Mustafa, who looks politely at the camera while wearing what appears to be a suicide belt.
Related: Ben Innes on taking a 'selfie' with the EgyptAir hijacker
The brilliance of this picture is that it treats being held hostage by a man wearing a suicide belt as a social moment
Continue reading...March 28, 2016
Van Hoogstraten’s palace is a monstrosity – but it’s not an insult to the homeless | Jonathan Jones
The British landscape is marked with grandiose architectural indulgences, from the ruins of gothic towers built by slave owners to columns that commemorate long-ago battles. Eccentric architecture is such a national tradition – kept very much alive today by Grayson Perry’s House for Essex with its gingerbread Hansel and Gretel nuttiness – that the English language even cherishes the formal architectural term, “folly”: an extravagant, decorative, apparently useless building. Apparently useless because Greek temples on aristocratic estates often turn out to be water towers in disguise.
Nicholas van Hoogstraten’s Hamilton Palace in Sussex is a folly – a colossal country house begun in 1985. Yet to judge from recent photographs it sits still unfinished and unlived-in, a vast cold husk of a place with scrappy builders’ debris scattered on one side while the other facade glares at a wintry English countryside. It is a singularly macabre structure, with a golden domed mausoleum for Van Hoogstraten at its centre. Is it a mansion or a tomb?
Related: Lynn Barber meets Nicholas van Hoogstraten
Continue reading...March 26, 2016
From Ansel Adams to Stephen Shore: famous photographers shoot their favourite food
After 40 years, a cookbook by some of America’s best-loved photographers is being published for the first time
Perhaps the salient thing about food, from a photographer’s point of view, is that it doesn’t last. Even the most gorgeous, curvaceous pepper – those shot by Edward Weston in 1930 are among the camera’s greatest still lifes – must either be chopped up and eaten, or rot.
Back in 1977, Deborah Barsel, a bored employee at George Eastman House in New York, home to the US’s finest photography collection, had the idea of asking artists to contribute food-related pictures and recipes to a cookery book. Nearly 40 years on, the project has been brought to fruition after a box of letters and pictures from the likes of surrealist legend Brassaï and William Eggleston, who captured the US south, was discovered in a store room.
Related: The 20 photographs of the week
Continue reading...March 25, 2016
Modernism, Da Vinci, junkies and Bagpuss – the week in art
The V&A’s retrospective of the great US photographer Paul Strand opens this week, while the Science Museum has the perfect Easter treat – all in your weekly art dispatch
Paul Strand
This great American photographer not only portrays his times, but in such works as his 1915 masterpiece Wall Street, sees an abstract grandeur that makes him a true modernist.
• V&A, London, until 3 July.
March 24, 2016
William Morris: a Victorian socialist dreaming of a life in symmetry
The English craftsman’s birthday is celebrated by Google today, and his designs for fonts, wallpaper and textiles remain relevant today – as do his ideas about the ravages of capitalism
William Morris was a Marxist with a very spiritual passion for beauty – a paradoxical visionary who saw no contradiction between socialism and soft furnishings. Today’s Google doodle goes to the heart of his genius because it captures his joy in repetition, his love of the middle ages and his dream of a culture at one with nature.
He dedicated his life to inventing beautiful and useful products for the modern world
Continue reading...March 23, 2016
King Arthur forged our Britain – English Heritage is right to celebrate him
Cornish historians are outraged at new plans for Tintagel Castle, including a sculpture of Merlin and a flashy new bridge. But we should be revelling in a myth whose power has been felt from Henry’s court to Renaissance Italy
What’s wrong with carving Merlin’s face into a rock? Nothing, if you care about keeping Britain’s greatest legend alive. English Heritage does, and it is making some changes to the way it displays Tintagel Castle in Cornwall, a place that for nearly a thousand years has been shrouded in the mists of Arthurian romance.
Related: Bridge with gap wins Tintagel Castle design contest
Continue reading...March 22, 2016
Stoned love: why Tracey Emin married a rock
The British artist has married a stone in her garden in France, which she calls ‘an anchor, something I can identify with’. It’s the latest act in a life that has prized intimacy and soulfulness over lust and the self over the body
Tracey Emin’s new husband may not talk much or do the ironing, but when it comes to fidelity, he’s a rock. Really, he’s a rock. No, you don’t understand. Her husband actually is a large lump of rock.
Related: Tracey Emin: soundtrack of my life
Related: Tracey Emin is still the real thing – and that's why we love her
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