Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 180
October 8, 2015
Cy Twombly makes me want to plan the art heist of the century
Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, London
The last great masterpieces of abstract expressionism have descended on Mayfair – but this exhibition feels too market-led to let such colossal works shine
You can’t fault art dealer Larry Gagosian’s taste. Not only has he commissioned a spacious and elegant new art gallery in London’s Mayfair, but it opens with a Cy Twombly exhibition.
By the time Twombly died in 2011, he had become a figure of unique mystery and authority in modern art – an American who chose to live in Italy, an abstract artist fascinated by myth and history, a man who never spoke to the press, and when all is said and done, the most intelligent and emotionally eloquent artist of our age. Gagosian gave Twombly astonishing support. This artist, who painted up to the last, was able to show his final paintings, fresh from the studio, at Gagosian’s galleries across Europe and the US.
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October 7, 2015
To all you Renoir haters: he does not 'suck at painting'
A new campaign wants to ban the French impressionist. Here are the paintings that prove what daft philistines the ‘Renoir sucks at painting’ protesters truly are
It has happened. The gates have fallen. Artistic civilisation has collapsed. A mob has gathered outside the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, demanding that Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s paintings be removed from its walls because they “suck”. This is it, surely. The End.
Or perhaps not. Max Geller, whose Instagram account “Renoir sucks at painting” has mushroomed into a real life semi-serious protest movement against the French impressionist who died in 1919 and is a mainstay of every art museum worth its salt, has learned one rule for looking at art. You need to have opinions. In order to love some artists, you have to hate others.
Related: 'Renoir sucks at painting' movement demands removal of artist's works
Continue reading...October 4, 2015
Goya in hell: the bloodbath that explains his most harrowing work
His horrifyingly bleak Black Paintings are said to be a result of Goya going deaf. But is there another reason? As the National Gallery show opens, Jonathan Jones finds the shocking answer in the artist’s hometown of Zaragoza
A dog is drowning in quicksand. Its grey head pokes defiantly out of the brown sludge, even as a dead yellow sky above insists there is no hope. No saviour. In the next painting, supernatural shapers of the world reveal themselves, but they are grinning hags floating eerily above a lifeless landscape in the dead of night – the Fates, arbitrary and uncaring. Over on the other side of the gallery is a paternal god, of sorts, but it is the ancient deity Saturn and he is eating one of his own children, as if chomping on churros at a Spanish bar, with blood instead of chocolate sauce.
Continue reading...October 2, 2015
Auerbach astonishes and Indian textiles delight – the week in art
Two great painters battle it out in London, while the fabulous colours and textures of India come to the V&A – in your weekly dispatch
Frank Auerbach
One of Britain’s great painters gets a long overdue retrospective that is bound to astonish, impress and move.
October 1, 2015
Art is universal – no country should claim a masterpiece for their own
Two Rembrandt portraits have been jointly bought by France and the Netherlands. Why not, when art belongs to us all?
There was a weighty meeting between two international leaders at the UN this week. But it did not involve war. It was about art. François Hollande and Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte shook hands on an extraordinary deal that means a pair of portraits by Rembrandt will be bought jointly from a member of the Rothschild family by the Netherlands and France, and shown alternately at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Louvre in Paris.
Are there any precedents for two countries agreeing to share a painting instead of engaging in a vicious “art war” with one another?
Continue reading...Why are so many people moved by this wedding photograph? | Jonathan Jones
This ‘dazzling’ Sydney wedding picture was nothing of the sort. It was a cheap bit of pimped-up nature treated as if it were real art
It is natural to expect that with technological advances we will also become more civilised, culturally sophisticated and capable of intelligence in understanding art. But the rise of digital photography proves this to be untrue.
Superb widely available cameras, often on our phones, have turned us all into “artists”. But the art we make, coo over and share on Instagram is often unbelievably corny, sentimental, vacuous nonsense. The more easily created and universally visible photography becomes, it seems the more flesh-crawlingly stupid its aesthetic values. We are turning into a world of bad artists, cosily congratulating one another on every new slice of sheer kitsch.
Continue reading...September 30, 2015
What Britain really needs is a memorial to the Easter Rising
In the wake of media overreaction to Jeremy Corbyn’s plans to honour Constance Markievicz, a memorial to both Irish and British deaths in 1916 would stop the demonising of Irish nationhood and help end old grudges
Jeremy Corbyn has been making yet another provocative comment about Irish republicanism. Now, according to reports at the weekend, he wants to put up a memorial to a violent republican.
Outrageous … no, wait a moment.
Related: Geoffrey Wheatcroft: The evil legacy of the Easter Rising
Continue reading...September 29, 2015
John Hoyland: why is Damien Hirst opening his new gallery with this second-rate artist?
Newport Street gallery, London
Hirst’s choice of a mediocre and justly forgotten artist for the first show at his new exhibition space reveals his deficiencies as collector and curator
Great artists are often great art collectors. It is fascinating, for instance, to see what Picasso owned: paintings by Cézanne, lithographs by Degas, masks from the Pacific, all choices that reflect his revolutionary vision. Few artists, however, have gone so far as to create a gallery just to exhibit their own collection. Trust Damien Hirst to go the next step. What a shame that, as a collector, he is no Picasso.
The opening exhibition at Hirst’s Newport Street gallery in London is a perverse and pointless attempt to impose his lack of insight on the public. It is dedicated to a man he apparently regards as a painter’s painter, a master of expansive, colourful abstract art. I thought for a moment he’d made John Hoyland up. This is clearly some postmodern exercise in which Hirst has commissioned a team of fabricators to make pastiches of expressionist daubs. The American artist Richard Prince goes in for similar ironic exercises, except that he adds obscene jokes.
Continue reading...A chilling handshake between Obama and Putin, while Syria disintegrates | Jonathan Jones
The devil has all the most convincing solutions in Syria. But will you shake hands with him?
President Obama looked extremely reluctant to do so at the UN yesterday. Then again the devil – or rather, Vladimir Putin – did not seem too keen on pressing the flesh with him either. Their public handshake was a terse and stiff occasion, over in a few camera flashes. They came out of a door together, quickly shook hands, and were gone. There was no repartee. There were no smiles.
Putin and Obama walk towards each other like marionettes. They raise their hands robotically
Related: The Guardian view on the bloodshed in Syria: Russia has a lot to answer for | Editorial
Continue reading...September 26, 2015
Artwork showing Sylvanian Families terrorised by Isis banned from free speech exhibition
Isis Threaten Sylvania by the artist Mimsy is removed from Passion for Freedom exhibition at London’s Mall Galleries, after police raise security concerns. Below, Guardian critic Jonathan Jones reviews the artwork
Visitors to a London exhibition celebrating freedom of expression this week found plenty of familiar taboo-busting work, from Jamie McCartney’s The Great Wall of Vagina, a nine-metre long cast featuring the genitals of 400 women, to Kubra Khademi’s video of an eight-minute walk she made through Kabul in Afganistan, dressed in lushly contoured body armour. But they will have looked in vain for one work detailed in the catalogue by an artist known only as Mimsy.
Related: The four questions we need to answer before bombing Isis or Assad | Paul Mason
Related: Cameron must include Assad in any strategy to defeat Isis in Syria | Avi Shlaim
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