Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 175
November 30, 2015
This is a Leonardo da Vinci? The gullible experts have been duped again | Jonathan Jones
“Truly celestial was Leonardo da Vinci,” said the 16th-century art writer Giorgio Vasari. That verdict has stood for centuries. No one has ever doubted Leonardo’s genius, and in our own time his fame is greater than ever. We should probably therefore have some sympathy for experts so besotted with his name, fame and magic that they foolishly declared an obvious fake to be the real thing.
La Bella Principessa is a profile portrait of a young woman in late 15th-century dress with her copper hair flattened down at the sides and worked behind into an elaborately bound ponytail. Her skin is pink, her gaze cool – or bored. Martin Kemp, one of the world’s most renowned Leonardo authorities and emeritus professor of the History of Art at Oxford, hailed it as a rediscovered marvel in his 2010 book La Bella Principessa: the Story of the New Masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci. Museums and other experts have backed Kemp’s claim.
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November 27, 2015
Freud, Nazis and new bridges across the Thames – the week in art
Gavin Turk mocks Sigmund Freud, as a Berlin museum revisits the dark side of German art history. Plus Julia Margaret Cameron, Kate Moss and public fury over a new bridge in London – all in your favourite weekly art newsletter
The portraits and staged scenarios Julia Margaret Cameron photographed are among the most beguiling of all British artworks. Very early in the history of photography, she saw how the camera could be used to create romance and fantasy. Her pictures are Victorian miracles of light.
• Victoria and Albert Museum, London SW7, from 28 November to 21 February 2016.
November 26, 2015
Wittgenstein's Dream review – Gavin Turk mocks Freud in his own house
The Freud Museum, London
Ludwig Wittgenstein was deeply sceptical about the claims of psychoanalysis. Now, Gavin Turk gently ribs its founder with an entertaining takeover of his hallowed home
Sigmund Freud is probably the most famous modern scientist after Einstein. In the shop at the Freud Museum, his iconic status is all too apparent: it is full of Freud finger puppets, soft toys, framed photographs and comic-book retellings of psychoanalytic theory. But is the science this Viennese doctor founded even a real science? Not everyone would agree.
Freud is due for some mild mockery, and Gavin Turk provides just that in an entertaining intervention inside this hallowed house. In Freud’s study, among the ancient Greek and Egyptian curios of the great man’s art collection, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein stands holding an egg in the palm of his hand. The egg is a real thing, a simple fact. Is Wittgenstein holding it or dreaming he is holding it? Or is he one of Freud’s own dreams? For the dapper-suited figure is a waxwork, frozen in space and time.
Continue reading...November 25, 2015
John McDonnell’s Mao moment is a dirty trick on his own party | Jonathan Jones
The shadow chancellor may as well have unfurled the red flag, climbed up to the strangers’ gallery and waved the Little Red Book about while declaring a people’s soviet
The looks on the faces of the government front bench say it all. They literally cannot believe what they are seeing. David Cameron is bursting with mirth and happiness – this is beyond anything a Conservative prime minster can dream of. For there on the Table (this item of House of Commons furniture that divides the government and opposition front bench teams should apparently be capitalised) sits The Little Red Book of Chairman Mao. The book that pampered western student revolutionaries touted in the 1960s while cadres of the Cultural Revolution in China carried it as they bullied and punished intellectuals. It sits there on the green baize, bloodily, gorily, insanely and absurdly red, after shadow chancellor John McDonnell produced it, quoted from it and then flung it in George Osborne’s direction, attempting to make a satirical point about Osborne’s cosying up to China, affecting to offer him advice on how he might learn from his new friends – yet apparently not seeing the potential danger of a shadow chancellor seen as “far left” producing the Bible of the far, far, far, far left.
Related: John McDonnell under fire for quoting Mao Zedong in Commons
Related: Jeremy Corbyn would clear the deficit – but not by hitting the poor | John McDonnell
Continue reading...The dinosaur that proves the madness of the art market
Today’s dino sale (yes, you can buy them at auction) for a predicted £500,000 proves that we’re criminally underpaying for our ancient wonders – and even more criminally overpaying for modern art
If you want proof the art market is mad, consider the difference in price between dinosaurs and the most expensive contemporary art.
That’s right, dinosaurs – they can actually be bought at auction.
Continue reading...Gilbert and George Banners review – art as undeniable as a punch in the face
White Cube, London
For their eight-millionth exhibition, the naughty boys of art are showing Banners that could be slight and trite – but actually turn out to be nasty prophecies for our dreadful age
For their eight-millionth exhibition, Gilbert and George have chosen to exhibit their shopping lists. Or not even that: their small but perfectly publicised installation in one room at the White Cube gallery is a collection of hangover rants, raw remarks delivered over a bacon butty in their local greasy spoon.
“FUCK THE PLANET,” say G&G as they read the latest miserable newspaper article about global warming. “Fuck HIM,” seeing someone go past. “BURN THAT BOOK,” reading book reviews. And most offensive of all (they perhaps imagine) to liberal sensitivities: “GOD SAVE THE QUEEN.”
Continue reading...November 23, 2015
Artist and Empire review – a captivating look at the colonial times we still live in
Tate Britain, London
The stiff upper lips and square jaws may be gone, but it’s hard to escape the modern parallels in this provocative exhibition that brings the British empire back to life
The British Empire has become invisible. It is an abstraction that people argue about. Right and left lay claim to its pride or shame, but the historical entity – whose rights and wrongs patriots and radicals now debate – lies cold in its grave, its banners, medals, statues and pith helmets neglected and ignored.
It is the genius of Tate Britain’s exhibition Artist and Empire to resurrect the British Empire as a physical reality you can see and feel, and almost smell and hear. Is that a Highland marching band; are those the cries of rebels approaching the compound? The ghosts of empire become flesh and blood in this awe-inspiring, exciting and provocative exhibition.
Continue reading...November 20, 2015
Bill Murray and Robert Mapplethorpe – the week in art
A show dedicated to the beloved kook of Hollywood hits the UK, as Mapplethorpe continues to shock America. Plus unseen Francis Bacons and a secret art society – all in your weekly art dispatch
Artist and Empire
The British empire is a fundamental part of British history, and indeed the history of the modern world. This exhibition features artists from Joshua Reynolds and George Stubbs to Hew Locke and Sonia Boyce. It should be a fascinating survey of a complex, tangled story that is global, intimate – and unfinished.
• Tate Britain, London SW1, from 25 November to 10 April.
November 19, 2015
An Imagined Museum review – unforgettable art from the year 2052
Tate Liverpool
This fantastical exhibition catapults us into the future – when civilisation is on the brink of collapse – and shows us how to save the world’s greatest artworks
A boy sees a beautiful woman on a concrete jetty at Orly Airport a moment before a shot rings out and a man falls dead, throwing the airport into terror and chaos. The memory of her face will stay with him all his life, as he survives the destruction of Paris and then is sent back in time to find this woman he saw for just a moment many years ago.
That is the premise of Chris Marker’s great 1962 film La Jetée, now showing as part of Tate Liverpool’s haunting new exhibition An Imagined Museum. The exhibition has a science-fiction premise worthy of Marker, or other such apocalyptic films of the French new wave.
November 18, 2015
Robert Smithson: the epic life of an American enigma
His masterpiece Spiral Jetty took psychedelia back to nature, but Smithson was once a city boy dazzling New York with his porn pastiches. A new show revisits a legend’s unlikely beginnings
Robert Smithson is one of the most enigmatic artists of the late 20th century. In 1970 he created Spiral Jetty, a snail-like coil of heaped stones that extends far out into the Great Salt Lake in Utah. This modern monument in the middle of nowhere (for years it vanished under the lake, only to resurface in recent decades; to actually see it is an epic quest) is one of the very few artworks of our age that most people would instantly and unerringly call a masterpiece.
When Smithson built Spiral Jetty, he reinvented the stone age. Its mysterious marking of the landscape deliberately resembles the prehistoric architecture of neolithic Britain, the banks of Avebury and sarsens of Stonehenge. It also has forebears in the Americas, from the Nazca lines of Peru to Ohio’s Serpent Mound. This neo-primitivism lives on in art, from James Turrell’s continuing bid to turn Roden Crater in Arizona into an astral observatory (or temple) to Olafur Eliasson’s current efforts to place 12 huge lumps of Arctic ice in the heart of Paris.
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