Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 181
September 25, 2015
Zaha Hadid's walkout and a throne of weapons – the week in art
Glasgow gets ready for the Turner prize. Plus, Damien Hirst’s new exhibition space opens, and Zaha Hadid has a tense interview with the BBC – in your weekly dispatch
Turner prize
Is the prize that once had the nation arguing about winners like Rachel Whiteread and Damien Hirst still an important event? Last year was bad enough to revive arguments from some that it has had its day. Yet often when the Turner is in trouble, it suddenly produces a vintage year. This year’s shortlisted artists are Assemble, Bonnie Camplin, Janice Kerbel and Nicole Wermers – and it’s in Glasgow, home to so much of Britain’s best contemporary art.
Hartwig Fischer: the German helping the British Museum change the world
He is the perfect choice to continue Neil MacGregor’s bold global vision for a museum that is British only in name
Related: German art historian to become first foreign director of British Museum
It somehow seems fitting that Neil MacGregor’s successor as director of the British Museum has been found in Germany. One of MacGregor’s most personal and – in the petty context of British national prejudice – courageous campaigns has been to reverse a century of Germanophobia and make us see the greatness and originality of the land of Goethe, Friedrich and Dürer.
Continue reading...September 24, 2015
Mat Collishaw's shock tactics: 'Cruelty happening before your eyes'
New Art Gallery, Walsall
Massacred babies, death row meals, naked statues doing appalling things to each other … Collishaw’s grisly works challenge art’s relationship with violence
The Massacre of the Innocents is one of western art’s most horrific themes. The slaughter of infants ordered by King Herod has been depicted among others by Bruegel as a war crime in a snowy village and by Poussin with an appalling intimate realism.
Now Mat Collishaw has turned it into an evil three-dimensional animated sculpture that swarms with cruelty and sadism under the arches of a huge domed temple. It is as if Ray Harryhausen collaborated with the Renaissance sculptor Giambologna to create a monstrous battle of stop-go statues that come to juddering life and do appalling things to one another. Picture the scene in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad where Harryhausen makes a multi-armed statue come to life, a sword in every hand. Replace one statue with multitudes of naked fighting figures and you start to get close to the awful wonder that Collishaw has created.
The Massacre of the Innocents is the most disturbing British work of art since the Chapman brothers' Hell
Why do we look at media images of suffering? Is it true compassion or emotional pornography?
Continue reading...The pope’s ‘ugly’ chair row is pathetic: what matters is what he says, not where he sits | Jonathan Jones
In a world of war and suffering when refugees are dying and governments failing in their human duties, it really is odd to get angry about a chair. But people have got cross about the plain wooden throne with white upholstering that New York’s Catholic community commissioned for Pope Francis. Apparently it is a sin against good design, a disgrace to the papal backside.
Is it really? Or is this chair’s simplicity, even its “ugliness” if you say so, just an expression of the pontiff’s lack of pretension and commitment to compassion?
Thrones are an expression of everything the modern age does and should abhor
Continue reading...September 23, 2015
Side by side, Edvard Munch and Vincent van Gogh scream the birth of expressionism
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
The exhibition Munch: Van Gogh shows the two artists, who never met, shared a passionate desire to paint the savage intensity of life – and it casts fresh light on the Dutchman’s tragedy
A gunshot and a scream reverberate through the yellow house, echo across the fjord, and fill a new exhibition at the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam with pity and terror.
In 1890 Vincent van Gogh fatally shot himself in the French countryside. Three years later the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch was walking near Oslo’s fjord at sunset. As the sun went down, he remembered years later, he was seized by a dreadful vision:
Munch was the friend Van Gogh never found. Would he have been a better companion than Gauguin?
If a psychiatrist were asked which of these painters was most troubled, the diagnosis would be easy: Munch
Continue reading...September 21, 2015
Celts – Art and Identity review: an unintentional resurrection | Jonathan Jones
British Museum exhibition seems intended to bury the Celts but ends up reviving them in all their misty splendour
Celts – Art and Identity is a great exhibition that achieves the opposite of what it intends. In wall texts and a richly detailed catalogue it sets out a sceptical approach to the ancient peoples of north-western Europe. Celts, we’re told, never called themselves Celts and modern constructions of a genetic and eternal Celtic identity – promoted by Scottish, Welsh and Irish nationalists – are as insubstantial as mist on a loch.
Yet I have never seen such a stupendous display of Celtic art. There is a total disconnect between seeing the abstract swirls and golden curling torcs, tangled crosses and spiralling shield bosses that fill this exhibition so wondrously and reading the captions that insist on the absence of a single Celtic identity.
Related: Julian Cope on Celts: my wild romance
Continue reading...September 20, 2015
Brian Sewell's pungent views got people arguing – that’s what matters
The controversial art critic railed against so many things because he knew newspapers and criticism should be great popular entertainment
Newspapers – and critics – love to pretend otherwise, sometimes even headlining the opinions of their arts commentators as “verdicts” as if we were high court judges, but in reality, a review at its best is just a bloody good read. It is a stimulating, provocative or plain annoying blast of verbal adrenalin whose purpose is to create enjoyable discussion about the arts, not to make or break artists in some terrifying Old Testament way.
Brian Sewell, who has died aged 84, understood that and played the part of a critic brilliantly. He was the profession’s equivalent of Dame Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey, a hugely entertaining old monster. His ratings were on the Downton scale too. He was genuinely loved by legions of readers, a national celebrity. The first time I ever met him, as we waited to board a train in the early morning, a commuter came up to him to thank him for his work. That kind of enthusiasm is rare for a reviewer to experience and it was genuine and very widely shared.
Related: Brian Sewell's cutting critiques – six of the best
Related: Young British Artists at play in the 1990s – in pictures
Like a thread of 10,000 hostile online comments might be today, the letter was the making of him
Continue reading...September 18, 2015
Ai Weiwei, Julian Assange and graffiti grannies – the week in art
Ai Weiwei and the Celts conquer London. Plus extraordinary outsider artists, endangered buildings and the real Alice in Wonderland – in your weekly dispatch
Celts
The misty world of druids, King Arthur and the Book of Kells is brought to life in an epic survey of ancient Britain and our ideas about it.
• At the British Museum, London, from 24 September until 31 January.
September 17, 2015
Free and easy: how European drawing finally caught up with China
This year’s Jerwood drawing prizewinners epitomise a welcome looser style, showing us a whole new generation of pencil pushers
Recently I was looking at Renaissance drawings with a Chinese friend. The works we were looking at were vast and made with a complex mix of coloured media. She explained that it’s hard to describe drawings like this in Chinese because there is just one word for “drawing”, which simply suggests a flowing sketch. China’s art has always been based on this kind of free drawing, while European art has a long history of being tightly disciplined and studious.
Today, as this year’s Jerwood drawing prize shows, the west has caught up with China: this drawing is so open, free and unpredictable it can be almost anything – from the study of a work by Joseph Beuys (step forward student prizewinner Bryan Eccleshall) to a construction made of thread by Lois Langmead, who won the other of this year’s student prizes.
Continue reading...September 16, 2015
Bridget Riley review – pounding psychedelic art that will make you see the world differently
Courtauld Gallery, London
Britain’s most revolutionary painter joins the dots between Georges Seurat’s pointillist paintings and her own utopian explosions of joy in an exhibition of pure genius
Looking from Bridget Riley’s mind-boggling 1960s paintings to Georges Seurat’s calm river scene in The Bridge at Courbevoie, painted in 1886-7, is not only thought-provoking but puts your eyes to the test. After looking at her pounding psychedelic art, I could barely see the Seurat. I had to let my eyes readjust before I could properly make out its misfits and fishermen on the banks of the Seine, let alone appreciate the play of tiny dots that creates its pointillist shimmer.
Riley is the most revolutionary British painter of modern times. Her paintings don’t merely hang on the wall: they warp and pulsate, sucking your imagination into unreal worlds of impossible depth and hallucinatory colour. What was she on when she came up with her dangerous vision?
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