Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 169
February 16, 2016
Tell us something we don't know: why science can't show us much about art
The scientific ‘discovery’ that Van Gogh’s art changed after his 1888 breakdown proves a forensic approach is no match for the subjective eye of an art lover
Related: Science peers into Van Gogh's Bedroom to shine light on colors of artist's mind
I am happy to announce a new annual award, the Vincent Prize for Scientifically Proving the Bleeding Obvious about Art History. The first winners are the researchers who, the papers tell us, have used chemical analysis of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings to reveal the astonishing fact that – get this – his art changed after his mental breakdown in late 1888.
There are objective results in science. There is no objective truth in art.
Related: John Dee painting originally had circle of human skulls, x-ray imaging reveals
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February 15, 2016
Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art review – a show about hero worship without a hero
National Gallery, London
The Romantic artist’s sinful sensuality is dulled in this worthy exhibition that overplays his influence on the French avant-garde while showing too few of Delacroix’s own masterpieces
Hero worship is a funny thing. It can inspire and liberate while often being grounded in fantasy. Did David Bowie influence modern culture quite as much as he is currently credited? Do artists really learn anything from other artists or do they just need to believe they do? Creation, after all, is such a scary thing; the blank canvas a terrifying void. Pinning up your artistic hero’s works in your studio may be as sentimental as playing Life on Mars a thousand times in a week.
You certainly can’t leave the National Gallery’s exhibition about the cult of the Romantic artist Eugène Delacroix without realising his Bowie-like status in the minds of rebels from Paul Cézanne to Vincent van Gogh, from Gustave Courbet to Henri Matisse. There is a wonderfully nutty quality to some of the homages the French pioneers of modern art paid to him. Cezanne’s The Apotheosis of Delacroix (1890-04) shows him and his fellow artists kneeling and praying as Delacroix is transported aloft. Henri Fantin-Latour’s Immortality imagines an angel scattering roses on his name, inscribed across a Paris park.
Related: Damnation, Dante and decadence: why Eugène Delacroix is making a hero’s return
Continue reading...Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art review – hero worship without a hero
National Gallery, London
The Romantic artist’s sinful sensuality is dulled in this worthy exhibition that overplays his influence on the French avant-garde while showing too few of Delacroix’s own masterpieces
Hero worship is a funny thing. It can inspire and liberate while often being grounded in fantasy. Did David Bowie influence modern culture quite as much as he is currently credited? Do artists really learn anything from other artists or do they just need to believe they do? Creation, after all, is such a scary thing; the blank canvas a terrifying void. Pinning up your artistic hero’s works in your studio may be as sentimental as playing Life on Mars a thousand times in a week.
You certainly can’t leave the National Gallery’s exhibition about the cult of the Romantic artist Eugène Delacroix without realising his Bowie-like status in the minds of rebels from Paul Cézanne to Vincent van Gogh, from Gustave Courbet to Henri Matisse. There is a wonderfully nutty quality to some of the homages the French pioneers of modern art paid to him. Cezanne’s The Apotheosis of Delacroix (1890-04) shows him and his fellow artists kneeling and praying as Delacroix is transported aloft. Henri Fantin-Latour’s Immortality imagines an angel scattering roses on his name, inscribed across a Paris park.
Related: Damnation, Dante and decadence: why Eugène Delacroix is making a hero’s return
Continue reading...February 12, 2016
Definitive Delacroix and five stars for Bosch out of hell – the week in art
Liverpool stakes its claim on the pre-Raphaelite beat, there’s history, too, in selfies, and Hieronymus Bosch stages a dramatic 500th-anniversary homecoming – all in your weekly art dispatch
Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art
For that drug-addicted bohemian art critic and poet Baudelaire, the definitive modern artist was Eugène Delacroix. Picasso agreed when he painted his own version of Delacroix’s Women of Algiers, which recently sold for an eye-watering price. Delacroix is the last of the romantics and the first of the moderns: a sensual, even depraved connoisseur of sex and violence as aesthetic themes whose visions of harems, mass suicides, massacres and struggles with angels are painted with infinite sensitivity to colour. Matisse was as much in his debt as Picasso, while Van Gogh admired him deeply. This ought to be great.
• National Gallery, London, 17 February-22 May
February 11, 2016
Van Gogh's bedroom or Tracey's bed: where would you rather sleep?
Following Airbnb’s recreation of Van Gogh’s room in Arles, the history of art has a wealth of possibilities for similar ventures – but whose crib would you book?
Related: Bed down with Van Gogh, your Airbnb host for the night
I am not sure I want to sleep in Vincent van Gogh’s bed. But it’s a door now open to you, thanks to the Art Institute of Chicago, which has created a three-dimensional simulacrum of Van Gogh’s bedroom in Arles, as he painted it in some of his most moving works. The room can be rented through Airbnb, allowing up to two people the chance to sleep in style in this recreated room in Vincent’s Yellow House.
Continue reading...Hieronymus Bosch review – a heavenly host of delights on the road to hell
Noordbrabants Museum, Den Bosch, Netherlands
An astonishing homecoming for this madly inventive artist sets the grotesque against a deep but compassionate melancholy that burns into your soul
They nibble giant strawberries and cavort inside transparent spheres, naked as newborns. Towers as pink and moist as bodily organs rise above the nude revellers, as they ride unicorns and camels bareback, swim with mermaids or crawl inside an egg. There’s always so much to do in The Garden of Earthly Delights.
At the turn of the 16th century, a Netherlandish painter who signed himself Hieronymus Bosch created one of the world’s most fascinating and confounding works of art. The Garden of Earthly Delights is a triptych, a three-part painting whose side panels can be closed like doors. Between Eden to the left and Hell to the right is Bosch’s vision of naked bliss. But what does it all mean?
The Noordbrabants Museum has put on one of the most important exhibitions of our century
Related: Dutch museum achieves the impossible with new Hieronymus Bosch show
Continue reading...February 10, 2016
An even Bigger Splash: why David Hockney's pop-art poem lives on
Tilda Swinton’s new erotic thriller shares the enigmatic title of Hockney’s Californian masterpiece, co-opting its eerie drama and languid intensity
A Bigger Splash review: entertainingly oddball psychodramaSome painters – and some paintings – are the silent type. They fear language. Their art is a wordless enigma.
Caravaggio left almost no trace of his speech, let alone any writing. The court cases his violent life led to are the only record of the way he accounted for himself, verbally. His paintings are great frozen moments of wordless power.
Related: David Hockney: ‘Just because I’m cheeky, doesn’t mean I’m not serious’
Continue reading...February 8, 2016
Why was Leonardo da Vinci such a genius? He was just like you and me
As a new Science Museum exhibition shows, Leonardo remains a cultural titan in the digital age because, like Shakespeare, he was an artist of the people
Leonardo da Vinci is the Shakespeare of art and engineering. Both creative titans died many centuries ago, but live so vibrantly in modern imaginations they feel like our contemporaries.
Getting into the hottest new Shakespeare production is a tricky business but this weekend, I finally watched Michael Fassbender in Macbeth. The text was too severely cropped, I thought, but it’s a marvel that in our century, which thinks itself so new, Shakespeare’s dramas are still so damned hot. It’s the same with Leonardo – witness the National Gallery queues for his blockbuster show in 2011.
Related: Leonardo da Vinci: The Mechanics of Genius review – an eye for destruction
Continue reading...February 5, 2016
Turner on acid, and Da Vinci runs like clockwork – the week in art
JWM Turner expands his consciousness, Leonardo shows off his blueprints and Bradford loses out bigtime to London – all in your weekly art dispatch
Impressionism: Capturing Life
The impulsive eyes of the impressionists chased the flow and dance of modern life in city streets and steam-filled stations. They showed the world its own reflection. This exhibition explores their portrayal of reality with loans from the Tate, National Gallery and other British collections.
• Holburne Museum, Bath, 13 February-5 June.
February 4, 2016
Bruegel in Black and White review – a brief but harrowing encounter
Courtauld Gallery, London
While the best-loved paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder overflow with life, there are no cakes and ale in these images drawn from his darker side
It will soon be Fat Tuesday. Eggy batter will sizzle heartily in pans across the land. One of modern Britain’s last lovely echoes of pre-industrial life, our pancake festival on the last Tuesday before Lent is a homely relic of the great carnivals that once rocked every village in Europe, releasing laughter and communal joy, and flipping the whole world upside down.
The art of Pieter Bruegel the Elder preserves that lost age of carnival in plump rollicking pictures that overflow with life. In his 1567 painting The Battle Between Carnival and Lent, a village square explodes into subversive fun. Masked revellers, dice players, dancers and drinkers let it all hang out. Broken eggshells litter the ground as a cook heats up an iron skillet to cook the next batch of pancakes. Bruegel is riotous, generous, and Shakespearean in his appetite for the whole of human life.
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