Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 170
February 3, 2016
Painting Norway: Nikolai Astrup review – Tolkienesque scenes of Midsummer magic
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London
Munch’s contemporary evokes the wonder of Norse folklore, using an insider’s intimacy to turn his local landscapes into fairytales of another ‘middle earth’
There are two kinds of landscape artists. Let’s call them rangers and diggers. The first type travel far and wide, finding inspiration in exotic places and grand scenery. The second stay at home and dig down deep into their own world. If JMW Turner was the ultimate ranger, always off somewhere new, his contemporary John Constable was a digger who painted his “boyhood scenes” (as he called them) over and over again.
Related: Norwegian painter Nikolai Astrup emerges from obscurity
Related: Nikolai Astrup: the lost artist of Norway
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February 2, 2016
To oblivion and beyond: art and science at the edge of consciousness
From William Blake’s vision of a soul leaving the body to Goshka Macuga’s creepy somnambulist, a new exhibition explores the mysteries of the mind – but are we any closer to finding the answers Descartes was seeking when he dissected a human brain more than 350 years ago?
They hover between worlds. One woman seems blissful, smiling with acceptance. Another looks terrified as her big eyes flicker and roll. Aya Ben Ron’s film Still Under Treatment is a troubling and eerie study of patients being anaesthetised prior to surgery. Anaesthesia surely ranks with antibiotics as one of the pillars of modern medicine, allowing us to undergo surgery without knowing it. Yet the expressions of yielding and resistance on the faces of the seven patients in Ben Ron’s film and the total oblivion that descends reveal how mysterious this moment is when something is nulled inside them, when they are “put to sleep”.
“Physiologically it’s different from sleep – it’s dreamless”, explains Kevin Fong, a consultant anaesthetist at UCLH hospital in London. He says it’s more like “switching your consciousness off”. How that idea would have fascinated René Descartes, the man who famously said “I think therefore I am”. Aya Ben Ron’s film is showing at the Wellcome Collection in an exhibition called States of Mind, which begins with this great 17th-century scientist and philosopher’s illustration of a dissected brain, from his book De Homine, published in 1662. Descartes’ engraving shows the soft grey matter – a cauliflower crossed with a deflated balloon – cut open to reveal the pineal gland. He identified this precise place in the human brain as the exact spot where the mind or “soul” communicates with and controls the body.
Related: Why can’t the world’s greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness? | Oliver Burkeman
Continue reading...'Fake Rothko' trial reduces tragic art to farce
Mark Rothko railed against the money-obsessed art world; now one of New York’s oldest dealers is accused of knowingly selling copies of his work
It is a story that illuminates in fiery red and perturbing black Manhattan’s long decline as an art capital.
In 1945, New York City stood poised to become the new centre of modern art. Paris was exhausted by war and occupation. While great European artists like Picasso and Giacometti still had plenty of genius to reveal, it was a generation of young American painters based in and around New York who set the pace in the postwar years.
Related: Artist at centre of multimillion dollar forgery scandal turns up in China
Related: Are the most expensive paintings ever worth their prices? A definitive ranking
Continue reading...February 1, 2016
Prince Charles’s paintings are notching up millions. That doesn’t make them any good | Jonathan Jones
There was an emperor of China who spent so much time painting that he lost his throne. Let’s hope that never happens to our own Prince Charles. The Emperor Huizong, who died in 1135, was a gifted painter as well as a calligrapher and poet. He made a major contribution to the cultural golden age of the Song dynasty – but his fascination with beauty distracted him from military affairs and his kingdom was invaded. He died a prisoner.
A constitutional monarch in the 21st century has far less military responsibility than a Chinese emperor in the 12th. Much as he may wish to influence our government with his “black spider” letters, Charles will never have to make a personal decision about renewing Trident, going to war, or even renationalising the railways. He can paint all he likes without endangering the kingdom.
Related: And you thought Henry VIII was a tyrant | Natalie Haynes
It must help you to feel familiar with art if you see a Rembrandt in the lounge every day
Related: The best (and worst) royal portraits - in pictures
Continue reading...January 29, 2016
Andy Warhol may be in heaven but his art has a hellish darkness
A new Norman Rosenthal-curated exhibition at the Ashmolean is a haunting collection of the artist’s work across a range of techniques and subjects
Looking at Andy Warhol’s painting of a bright pink penis caressed by deep black shadows from his series Torsos/Sex Parts, veteran curator Norman Rosenthal becomes nostalgic. When Rosenthal used to visit Warhol’s studio in the 1980s, he remembers, the artist offered to portray him naked. Sadly, he was not willing to remove his clothes.
Turning from sex parts to the faces that stare from the walls, caught in flashbulb lightning, it hits me that everyone is naked in Warhol’s art. The nudity is not that of the bedroom. It is the nakedness of the grave. Under every bright smear of lipstick lies a skull. In every camera-struck eye is the foreshadow of an empty socket. Or as TS Eliot, who Rosenthal thinks has a lot in common with Warhol, wrote: “Between the motion / And the act / Falls the Shadow.”
Continue reading...Warhol goes unseen but life's a beach for Martin Parr – the week in art
The pop master shows his sly side, Calder prizewinners display poise, and the great British photographer heads on holiday – all in your weekly art dispatch
Andy Warhol
Flowers, faces, films and Brillo boxes galore as the man who invented contemporary celebrity comes to Oxford. Warhol is always a surprise. His art is both funny and serious, his poise inimitable and he has a sly way of making you think and feel new things.
• Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 4 February-15 May.
January 27, 2016
Why a Swiss gallery should return its looted Nazi art out of simple decency
Nazi loot carries a legacy of hate. The latest ownership dispute – over a Constable painting, claimed by the heirs of British Jews – reminds us that respect is at the heart of the restitution debate
Memory has many colours. A work of art that survives the centuries is an embodiment of history, marked invisibly by all the hands that have held it. Who owned it? Where did it hang? These are not just arcane questions for scholars but the network of human experience that haunts works of art in museums and makes them richly alive.
The hunt for works of art looted by the Nazis matters. Researchers who discover the true owners of a painting stolen in wartime Europe and later acquired innocently or knowingly by a museum or gallery are piecing together shadowy stories of oppression, injustice, murder and destruction. Why did the Nazis loot art from Jewish owners? It was not only greedbut an ideological belief that Jews contributed nothing to European civilisation and did not deserve to share in it.
Related: The Black Years: how Nazi art came back to Berlin
Is there a backlash against restitution in the museum world?
Related: Not so neutral: wartime workers at a Swiss arms factory – in pictures
Continue reading...Why does contemporary art look so simple? You asked Google – here’s the answer | Jonathan Jones
Why do the lights keep going on and off? How is less more? What place does a balloon dog have in an art gallery? Or, as a lot of people have been asking Google: “Why does contemporary art look so simple?”
I am tempted to answer – because it’s idiotic. But first, we need to define what contemporary art means in this question.
Related: Public art is powerful, glorious and uplifting – it deserves to be saved | Rachel Cooke
Related: Damien Hirst: ‘What have I done? I’ve created a monster’ | Catherine Mayer
Continue reading...January 26, 2016
James Dean with a camera (and whip): Robert Mapplethorpe the film star
The darkly intense photographer was born for the big screen treatment he is about to receive. This is one provocative artist who deserves immortality
Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures - Sundance 2016 reviewRobert Mapplethorpe was born for the big screen. The controversial photographer who died in 1989 at the age of just 42, after a fight with Aids, was dashing, dark and dangerous. He imagines himself as some kind of sinister screen idol – James Dean reinvented by David Lynch – in a self-portrait out of which he gazes with sexually charged insolence, macho in black leather jacket and slicked hair, cigarette hanging from his lips, a dark star from Hollywood’s nightmares.
Related: Matt Smith to play photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in biopic
Related: Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures review – documentary pulls no punches
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Continue reading...January 25, 2016
Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse review – thrillingly cosmic
Royal Academy, London
This exhibition of psychedelic modernist pastoral art is a ravishing joy and takes Monet out of the chocolate box, revealing one of art’s great humanists
I am falling. I am drowning in beauty. Perhaps this is what it feels like to teeter on the edge of a black hole. Except it’s art that is pulling me into the void. Claude Monet’s Agapanthus Triptych (1916-19) reaches out to embrace the viewer in a shimmering world where soft reflections move on a bankless pond; a vast mirrored universe with lilies like supernovae.
This cosmic masterpiece, its three components owned by a trio of American museums and reunited here to overwhelming effect, is the final disorientating thrill in an exhibition of psychedelic modernist pastoral art that is a ravishing joy from start to finish. If you think an exhibition about gardens sounds a bit cosy or that Monet is just a pretty painter, then start at the end, with this painting that disrupts time and space as experimentally as any installation.
Related: Flower power: the gardens that caused modern art to bloom
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