Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 173

Nikolai Astrup: the lost artist of Norway

He should be as famous as Edvard Munch, but the world seems to have forgotten him – until now. Astrup is getting his first major show outside Norway ... and his visions of the Scandinavian landscape are eerie and sublime

Norway’s legendary modern artist who captured his country’s fantastically eerie landscapes is about to be celebrated. And no, it isn’t Edvard Munch.

It’s Nikolai Astrup – a legend in his own land, but barely known outside of it. In fact, the Dulwich Picture Gallery, in London, is putting on the first significant show of Astrup’s work outside Norway in the new year. Will it make him as famous as Munch, his contemporary?

Continue reading...

Unleash the badness! Why the art world needs more sleaze and less morality

Art is being smothered by good intentions – and it’s becoming a bland, pious porridge. Let’s reinject the rebellion, please

Why has art lost its wickedness? What happened to the wildness, the sinfulness, the sleaze and the decadence?

This year saw politics and ideology smother the art world in good intentions. The Venice Biennale was oh so serious. The Tate Modern Turbine Hall’s latest project was unveiled and turned out to be a garden deck with weeds growing in pots – a work whose ecological message is banal and visually null.

Continue reading...

The strange tale of the Snowflake Man

Using chilled velvet, tiny wood chips and turkey feathers, Wilson Bentley caused a flurry with his pioneering pictures of these miniature wonders. His results are astonishing – so why was he seen as an oddball outsider?

The structure of a snowflake is one of the most beautiful things in nature. Every flake is different, they say; each one an intricate lattice of frozen water molecules with spectacular symmetry. Everybody knows this. When children make paper snowflakes they cut them out to mirror this crystal magic.

But no one knows any of this intuitively. To the naked eye, snowflakes are just white dots. The universal image of them as wondrous crystalline formations is a product of microscopes, photography– and one man in Jericho, Vermont.

Continue reading...

Why are there no great British nativity scenes?

You’ll find plenty of bleak midwinter paintings, but don’t go looking for British artworks of the stable, the manger and the wise men bringing gifts. They don’t exist. Here’s why not

Whatever happened to the great British nativity scene? It’s the time of year when paintings depicting a birth in a stable 2,000 years ago proliferate on greetings cards and attract attention in art galleries. We love these Christmas pictures. Think of Botticelli’s The Adoration of the Magi, Guido Reni’s The Adoration of the Shepherds and Geertgen tot Sint Jans’ Nativity by Night – to take just three favourites in the National Gallery.

One thing you won’t find there, however, is a British painting of the stable, the manger and the wise men bringing gifts. The closest thing to a British Christmassy scene in its collection is probably JMW Turner’s painting The Evening Star – an eerie beach scene that could just about make a melancholy Christmas card.

Continue reading...

Soviet dreams: the tough, toylike beauty of Russian space relics

With scorched capsules, space dogs and sci-fi art, Cosmonauts tells the moving and shocking story of the Soviet Union’s space programme

When astronaut Tim Peake blasted off into space in time for Christmas, he went in a Soyuz rocket, from the very launch pad Yuri Gagarin used to become the first human being in space in 1961.

It was not really a triumph for Britain, but for Russia. If seeing Peake soar into orbit in Russian cosmonaut technology with echoes of the Soviet era whetted your appetite for Sputnik and space dogs, or if your kids are into space, or if you want to see one of the most impressive collections of space-age artefacts ever assembled in Britain, the best exhibition to visit over the holidays is Cosmonauts at the Science Museum in London.

Continue reading...

Flight by Arabella Dorman review: relic of a rough crossing illustrates refugee crisis

St James’s church, Piccadilly, London
Dorman’s heartfelt installation in the shelter of a beautiful Wren church asks you to think about the unthinkable cruelty of our time

To say that Arabella Dorman’s artwork Flight is totally inadequate to the reality it wants to make us see is not intended as dismissal – far from it. What artistic response would be sufficient to the deaths of more than 3,600 people this year trying to cross the Mediterranean in flimsy, overcrowded or unseaworthy vessels, sometimes locked below decks in boats left to drift and sink?

If Rembrandt painted the plight of refugees trying to reach Europe and Bach composed an oratorio for the unveiling, it would still seem a flimsy gesture. Art cannot save lives. It cannot replace a drowned child. Even to make art about something so obscene may be a kind of betrayal, a hypocritical gesture of fake sympathy. So it was right that instead of an art world opening with clinking glasses, Dorman’s installation in St James’s church, Piccadilly, was inaugurated with prayers and meditation at Sunday communion.

Continue reading...

Jeff Koons: master of parody or great American conman?

The Koons mystery deepens as another charge of plagiarism has been lobbed at the artist. But the latest claims are truly shocking

Jeff Koons has been accused of plagiarism. Again.

Related: Jeff Koons sued for appropriating 1980s gin ad in art work sold for millions

Continue reading...

Jeff Koons: master of parody or great American con man?

The Koons mystery deepens as another charge of plagiarism has been lobbed at the artist. But the latest claims are truly shocking

Jeff Koons has been accused of plagiarism. Again.

Related: Jeff Koons sued for appropriating 1980s gin ad in art work sold for millions

Continue reading...

Jonathan Jones's top 10 art shows of 2015

Jackson Pollock’s dark years, Mat Collishaw’s monstrous animations, Bridget Riley’s debt to Seurat and Goya’s terrifying imaginings: all were wonderful but topping the list is a brilliant portal on the prehistoric imagination – Celts

Tell us your favourite exhibition of 2015More on the best culture of 2015

I loved this exhibition. It’s the first show that has made perfect use of the British Museum’s huge new exhibition space (although Defining Beauty, the blockbuster about Greek art, was also excellent). The virtue of this slightly cavernous space is now apparent: you can breathe and move about. Critics tend to get early access to exhibitions – when I saw this the first time the only other visitor was Julian Cope – but I’ve gone back with my family, and it’s been captivating every time. The misty shadows, glints of gold and swirling patterns in green or brown bronze open up another world; gods and myths haunt hoards and manuscripts. This is a portal on the prehistoric imagination. It’s Game of Thrones without the slaughter, The Hobbit without the overlong film version. If you leave untouched by mystic fire, you have no imagination. Or are a Saxon. Read the full review

Continue reading...

Young Negro Girl: should artworks with offensive names get an update?

The Rijksmuseum is being criticised for removing racist words like ‘negro’ from the titles of its paintings. But they’re not being overly PC at all – they’re right

Very few artists give their works names. When a painter has just put the last touch to a masterpiece, she does not stand back and wonder what to call it. Titles are almost always given later by the public, writers, art historians or museums. They don’t necessarily have any connection with the artist’s intentions.

This is why I can’t join the chorus of disapproval criticising Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum for changing titles in its collection that it deems “offensive”. The museum is removing words such as “negro” and “Mohammedan” and replacing them with more neutral descriptions. Thus a painting by Simon Maris once called Young Negro Girl has become Young Girl Holding a Fan.

Continue reading...