Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 166
March 21, 2016
The picture that shows why Obama is right to visit Cuba | Jonathan Jones
Air Force One descends like a chariot of hope over a decaying and deprived street in this powerful image of President Obama’s arrival in Cuba, hoping to end one of the cold war’s strangest stories. A chubby man in a white T-shirt looks up at the vast yet elegant craft, easily identified as the world’s most famous personal plane. The cars beside him are ancient and decrepit emblems of a society frozen in time, one of the last communist societies on earth. It is like the classic American tale of Rip Van Winkle, as Obama’s customised Boeing 747, a symbol of the wealth and power that the United States has continued to accumulate since the victory of the Cuban revolution in 1959, roars above this sleepy corner of Cuba that seems not to have changed in decades. Or is that a ridiculously pro-American reading of this picture? Does it in fact show a benign socialist society about to be swallowed up by the capitalist Leviathan that this plane represents?
Related: Where now are the earthly paradises from which an idealist can take hope? | Tim Bale
Related: Obamas tour Old Havana as Cubans catch a glimpse of city's future
Continue reading...
Cara Delevingne: more than a mere muse for male painters
Celebrated portraitist Jonathan Yeo has called Cara Delevingne the “perfect muse”, as he unveils a series of paintings of the model and actor. This patronising word belongs in a Victorian era of deluded lust
Women are still fighting for full equality with men as artists, but there is one role in which the art world has always embraced them and still does: that strange entity of the “muse”.
Related: Cara Delevingne: 'I'd love to punch a photographer, I dream about it at night'
Continue reading...March 18, 2016
Joseph Wright, Justine Frischmann and posing for Paul Strand – the week in art
A Grand Tour of the Midlands, Top Gear’s controversial spin around the Cenotaph and Britain’s best new architects – all in your weekly art dispatch
Joseph Wright and the Lure of Italy
The great Derby artist Joseph Wright was entranced by Italy and, like many culturally aspiring 18th-century people, he made the journey there. Wright painted fireworks in Rome, sea caves on the Mediterranean shore and no fewer than 30 depictions of Mount Vesuvius erupting. This exhibition is part of The Grand Tour, a constellation of events across the region this spring that remember the cultural pilgrimage undertaken by Wright and his contemporaries and update it to modern Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire.
• Derby Museum and Art Gallery, 18 March-12 June.
March 17, 2016
No junk mail please: the man who popped YBA art in the postbox
Matthew Higgs’ visionary Imprint 93 was snail mail’s artistic swansong and helped to deliver a new generation of artists from Chris Ofili to Martin Creed
Martin Creed Work 88 is today considered a modern masterpiece. Collectors covet it and any museum would be proud to display it. However, when Creed posted it to Tate director Nicholas Serota and about 150 other art-world folk in 1995, this radical sculpture was not so reverently received. Work 88 is, after all, essentially (entirely) a piece of paper crumpled into a ball. Serota’s secretary, presumably thinking it was just a crazy piece of junk mail, carefully flattened it out and posted it back.
In one sense, Creed’s crumpled piece of paper really was junk mail – an unsolicited, slightly enigmatic object sent through the post. Artists have a long history of turning the postal service to their own ends. During the first world war, the dadaist George Grosz sent abusive “care” packages to German soldiers as an anti-war protest. He also worked as a postman and tipped his sacks of mail into a ditch. Much later, the subversive Ray Johnson, who worked on the fringes of the pop movement in 1950s Manhattan, invented “mail art”. In 1962, Johnson created The New York Correspondence School, an informal network of recipients for the idiosyncratic, unpredictable artworks he sent by mail.
The 1990s British art scene was much more complicated than the story allows
Continue reading...March 16, 2016
Russia and the Arts: The Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky review – 'intense, tortured and troubled'
National Portrait Gallery, London
Enjoyed War and Peace? Then visit this showcase of Russian portraits whose artists share the sensitivity and searching unease of the writers they portray
The National Portrait Gallery recently explored The Face of Britain in an exhibition of the same name curated by Simon Schama. Its new exhibition – a collection of portraits of writers, musicians, actors and artistic patrons lent from the superb Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow – might have been called The Face of Russia.
How different those faces are. Russia, in this gathering of cultural heroes from the later 19th century up to 1914, is intense, tortured and troubled. I counted two and a half smiles in the entire exhibition. One of the women who does manage to bend her lips at all is the opera singer Nadezhda Zabela-Vrubel, whose husband was the brilliant and tormented artist Mikhail Vrubel. Soon after painting one of his many portraits of her, Vrubel was in a mental hospital. She didn’t have much to smile about after all.
I counted two and a half smiles in the entire exhibition
Continue reading...March 15, 2016
Cloudy ... with a chance of artworks
Tacita Dean was so surprised to see clouds in LA, it got her drawing again. From Turner to Hockney, why are British artists always under the weather?
Tacita Dean is an artist who identifies strongly as British, while living abroad. Actually, it’s more precise than that: she identifies as English. Her latest exhibition at the Marian Goodman Gallery, in New York, is entitled, quoting Shakespeare, “... my English breath in foreign clouds”. At its heart is a series of drawings called A Concordance of Fifty American Clouds, in which she uses techniques such as chalk on a blackboard to portray the lofty cloud formations she observed recently while living in Los Angeles.
The clouds that glide above Thomas Gainsborough’s fields are silver-coloured veils of national identity
Continue reading...March 14, 2016
Top Gear: Chris Evans should never have apologised for Cenotaph stunt
Lutyens’ monument is one of Britain’s greatest public sculptures. But that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with driving a fast car past the memorial.
The Cenotaph in London – arguably Britain’s greatest public sculpture – reinvented the war memorial when it was erected in 1920. It is shocking now to look at 18th- and 19th-century military memorials and find they only list the names of officers, as if these losses counted more than the deaths of men in other ranks.
Related: Top Gear: Chris Evans apologises for 'disrespectful' Cenotaph stunt
It makes no sense to complain that someone has driven a car in central London
Continue reading...There’s nothing wrong with Hillary Clinton hugging George W Bush | Jonathan Jones
How can she embrace the man who invaded Iraq? Because the alternative is Donald Trump’s world of hate and resentment
It speaks volumes about the peril American democracy is in that a photograph of two opposing politicians displaying mutual affection can be seen as a glimpse of the reptilian conspiracy of elites.
George W Bush met Hillary Clinton at Nancy Reagan’s funeral and a clearly unposed, unfeigned picture shows them sharing a laugh like very old friends. He has his arm around her, his face almost ecstatic with delight. Her face shows the same pure hilarity and lack of control. This is no brittle encounter at a funeral. The former and would-be president are genuinely getting on very well – and one of them has just made a very good joke.
Related: It’s Clinton v Trump for the White House: let the real contest begin | Richard Wolffe
Continue reading...March 11, 2016
Shrigley scrawl and the celebrated Botcher of Cádiz – the week in art
The comic genius of Shrigley, the accidental genius of the restored Fortress of Matrera, and the forgotten genius of Giorgione – all in your weekly art dispatch
David Shrigley
One of the most incisive, original, comic and humane artists around reveals his latest dark drolleries.
• Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, 18 March to 23 April.
Are there really only seven different types of beauty?
Extravagant, transgressive, elemental ... the Cooper Hewitt design museum in New York has taxonomised the indefinable – beauty. Is this wrong-headed scientific precision or the brave tackling of a taboo?
So now we know. Humanity’s Keatsian quest for the true meaning of beauty is effectively over, the subject sussed once and for all. It’s fully understood, in the same way particle physics fell into place when the Higgs boson was proven to exist. What makes you beautiful, asked the boy band. New York’s Cooper Hewitt Design Museum not only knows the answer but, like a medieval scholar identifying seven kinds of angel, has specified beauty’s seven varieties.
To be fair to the Cooper Hewitt, it has done something brave here. The museum’s newly opened Design Triennial takes the elusive idea of “beauty” as its theme – a topic contemporary criticism too often shies away from. The celebration of beauty is seen as bourgeois, safe or – when it comes to human society – oppressive, in its association with rigid norms few of us can live up to. In art, it can be seen as premodern and regressive. Today’s art often aspires to be something more than beautiful – serious, critical, radical or “disturbing”.
Continue reading...Jonathan Jones's Blog
- Jonathan Jones's profile
- 8 followers
