Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 172
January 14, 2016
Images of children starving in Madaya can still shock us into action | Jonathan Jones
Pictures can change the world. There seemed to be little sympathy in Europe for refugees dying in the Mediterranean until images of the tiny body of Alan Kurdi, drowned as his family tried to reach Kos, impacted on hearts and minds last summer. The brutal death of one child can reawaken the conscience of a continent, thanks to the immediacy of a camera.
So why are the devastating pictures coming out of Madaya in Syria not having a similar impact? Photographs from this besieged city depict the stark reality of mass starvation. Children with barely covered ribs gaze at the camera. Emaciated corpses lie unburied. Yet the shocking visual evidence has not yet shaken the conscience of the world. It is just another sad story in the news.
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January 13, 2016
Museums are now part of Britain's pernicious north-south divide
Closure threats to museums in the north of England represent a cultural crisis that will hide art treasures from view and distort our collective history
Joseph Wright of Derby’s painting A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery may look familiar to you. It often appears on book covers, regularly flashes up in TV documentaries, and with good reason. No painting captures the wonder of science better.
Adults and children are gathered by candlelight around a brass model of the solar system, learning about astronomy from some unknown Brian Cox of the 18th-century Midlands. Painted in about 1766, it is a defining image of the Enlightenment and one of the greatest works of art ever created in Britain.
Related: One in five regional museums at least part closed in 2015, says report
Continue reading...January 12, 2016
I Am Van Dyck review – the Andy Warhol of 17th-century portraiture
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London
The surfaces of Van Dyck’s paintings are all glitter, but the stories they tell are often shockingly morbid
What would it be like if the ghost of a famous artist came back to see his paintings, flitting among the 21st century gallery crowds with his Laughing Cavalier moustache? That’s what happens in I Am Van Dyck at Dulwich Picture Gallery. While people queue for the gallery’s hit MC Escher exhibition, the 17th century master Anthony van Dyck, back from the dead, gazes past them at the gallery’s collection of some of his most memorable paintings.
Related: Rubens and His Legacy: crass analogies, bad ideas – and barely any Rubens
Continue reading...January 11, 2016
Turner's Dutch Boats need not stay anchored in Britain to wield their power
It is absurd to make a patriotic fuss about this painting staying in Britain – Turner is a great artist because he has something to say to the entire world
Selfishly, I am delighted that JMW Turner’s The Bridgewater Sea Piece – also known, drably, as Dutch Boats in a Gale is to stay at the National Gallery, in London. I was looking at it there just the other day: the roaring sea seems to lash against the very surface of this astonishingly mobile painting and seep out into the gallery itself. You should wear a lifejacket to look at it.
When Turner was an up-and-coming artist, collectors loved the “sea pieces” of 17th-century Dutch marine painters such as Willem van de Velde. Turner painted this ambitious reinvention of a “Dutch” style sea painting in 1801 to prove that he was a more powerful artist than the old masters beloved by collectors. Mission accomplished. Dutch Boats in a Gale shakes and shudders with the forces of nature in a way that makes Dutch marine paintings look like corks bobbing on a millpond.
Our artistic heritage needs to be shared, not hoarded
Related: Punk with a paintbrush: how Turner sunk the Empire
Continue reading...January 8, 2016
The Sistine Chapel in a council house – the week in art
Meet the outsider artists who have transformed their homes into masterpieces, and see the super slides that are about to take over the art world. Plus the Manchester street scene that went viral, and much more – all in your weekly art dispatch
I Am Van Dyck
So who was Anthony van Dyck? This 17th-century Flemish painter who died in Britain as the civil war started is a strangely elusive figure. The most brilliant pupil of Rubens and one of the great technical masters of all time, he seems to have been happy to ply his trade as a portraitist of the cavalier aristocracy in Charles I’s England. Some of his portraits have a startling truthfulness – and that goes for his celebrated last self-portrait, which is scrutinised in this show alongside self-portraits by Turner prize-winner Mark Wallinger. Is Van Dyck, then, the true father of modern British art?
• Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 12 January-24 April.
January 7, 2016
'Warhol’s ghost in a public toilet': an art critic reviews this season's fashion campaigns
The spring/summer 2016 shoots are out and, not for the first time, resemble artistic tableaux fit for the Tate. Art critic Jonathan Jones reviews six
Looking in a fashion magazine these days is like wandering through a very chic art gallery full of intensely radical artworks. It is only when you notice the £2,000 bag that lies casually across a model’s waxed leg that you realise these are ads. On the other hand, posh art galleries with their willowy squadrons of couture-clad staff are also easy to mistake for fashion magazines. Does the Gagosian now sell shoes? These spring and summer campaign images for leading fashion houses reveal that it’s all getting even artier. Provocative settings, abstract angles and minimalist bodies are everywhere. But how do the new looks being sold to us in 2016 really stack up as art? Are these ads Turner prize winners or Turnip prize nonsense? I put down my copy of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters to take a look at the latest convolutions in the art of style.
Continue reading...January 6, 2016
Saatchi Gallery's all-female exhibition could start to shift male gaze of the art world
Champagne Life exhibition, featuring 14 female artists, seems to represent all the oppressed generations who never got the chance to pick up a paintbrush
A white-haired woman looks unnervingly across a huge white space in the Saatchi Gallery from ashen eyes magnified by huge tortoiseshell-framed spectacles. What has she seen? What does she know? And why does her judgment seem so severe?
Ljubica is one of three colossal portraits of older women by Jelena Bulajić that feature in Champagne Life, an exhibition entirely by female artists that opens at the Saatchi next week. Bulajić is in her 20s, but the women she portrays bear the marks of time: they are “old women”, but here one of modern society’s most marginalised identities is painted into power. These faces seem to represent not just themselves but all the oppressed generations who never got the chance to pick up a paintbrush or sell an unmade bed at Christie’s.
Wig out! The bizarre game that lets you create mammoth hairdos
With Design a Wig, you can use feathers, powder and giant ship ornaments to make your own version of the wacky hairstyles people wore in the 18th century. It’s the perfect entry point to the V&A’s scintillating new collection
The V&A is two museums. One is a glittering fashionista hangout where immaculate visitors queue for the latest blockbuster about glam rock or fetish style. The other is a deeply serious and exhaustive collection of art and artefacts from which you can pretty much learn the history of the world, if you have a lifetime to look at them all.
A lovely new wheeze brings the two together. The museum has launched a new online game called Design a Wig. It lets you create your own version of the fantastic – and artificial – hairstyles women wore in the late 18th century. The game tells you how the grand wigs of the Enlightenment were built to massive proportions using horse as well as human hair. “Gooey pastes made from pig fat kept everything in place,” it explains.
Continue reading...January 5, 2016
Super slides are the slippery slope into art's babyish new era
From London’s looping Orbit slide to a giant Czech mountain ride, art is becoming a theme park for the selfie generation
I went sliding on a mountain in the holidays. In mud. My family and I set out for a gentle Christmas walk in Wales that became an unplanned mudbath after we climbed a rocky riverbed in search of fossils and ended up stranded and soaking on a steep mountainside. We were trying to pull ourselves up by tree trunks but kept sliding down again and again as the sun started to set. It was hilarious and slightly terrifying.
A new attraction in the Czech Republic offers a similar experience – but one that is planned and safely designed and won’t leave you covered in mud. The Dolní Morava Skywalk on the Králický Sněžník mountain includes a giant slide that’s clearly inspired by the artist Carsten Höller. Not only can you see spectacular vistas of the surrounding peaks while making your way nervously along a glass-bottomed skywalk, but you can slide in the sky.
Continue reading...January 4, 2016
Sistine perfection or pissed-up Manchester street scene? Let's put things in perspective
Forget its supposed compositional harmonies: comparing a photo of some drunk revellers to the masterpieces of the Renaissance is an insult to the deeply skilled and difficult enterprise of painting
Oh, come off it. I know you may have had a few. I know this time of year can bring out a bit of sentimental hungover tosh. But seriously – why are so many people comparing a photograph of New Year’s Eve in Manchester to the masterpieces of Renaissance art?
Related: 'Like a beautiful painting': image of New Year's mayhem in Manchester goes viral
Thanks to @GroenMNG for proving the golden ratio can be applied to this pic: pic.twitter.com/Fa1EYSV6ih
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