Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 190
June 22, 2015
Littered with fakes: why the Hitler art trade is such a sick joke
A batch of the Führer’s watercolours has just been sold at a controversial auction. But as well as having zero artistic value, most ‘Hitlers’ are probably fake – so why do we continue to collude in this grotesque deception?
A sale of Adolf Hitler’s paintings in Germany is rightly controversial. Who are these collectors that fork out considerable sums for the art of a man who caused murder and cruelty beyond imagining? The trade in Hitler’s paintings is repulsive and sick. But that’s not all: it is also transparently dishonest.
Perhaps because art historians have better things to do than authenticate the artworks of this monster, the market in “Hitler” paintings is littered with fakes. It is, however, slightly consoling that the dubious characters who long to own a masterpiece by the Führer are, much of the time, being duped.
Related: Hitler's art of flowers and fairytale castles sells for £280,000 at auction
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June 19, 2015
The mind-boggling art of MC Escher, Jackson Pollock unleashed in Liverpool and China's last 'lotus feet'
Plenty of art to mess with your mind this week, from Jackson Pollock’s abstract splashing, to MC Escher’s impossible staircases. We were also gripped by Jo Farrell’s portraits of the last women in China with bound feet – all in your weekly art dispatch
Jackson Pollock
Most of this great American painter’s life was wrecked by alcohol, until he broke free with the aid of a sensitive doctor into his glorious era of free abstract splashing and pouring. Then it all went wrong again. This exhibition explores the dark, imagistic works of Pollock’s final troubled years before the car crash that killed him in 1956.
Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, 30 June-18 October.
June 18, 2015
Scottish heroism at Waterloo should not be forgotten
Waterloo did much to create the British patriotism that is now disintegrating. Lady Butler’s epic painting showing the charge of the Scots Greys reminds us this was a battle fought – and won – together
They are charging straight at you, their horses like cannonballs hurtling forward, the men a gallery of courage, sabres aloft, red coats flaming as they advance in reckless unison.
This is a painting of the charge of the Scots Greys at the Battle of Waterloo 200 years ago, and one of the defining images of that bloody day. What we are seeing is a tragic folly, for the dashing cavalry charge so vividly represented here carried on straight through an array of French cannon and left the Greys isolated from their own lines. Their horses exhausted, they were cut down by Napoleon’s 6th and 9th cuirassiers.
Continue reading...June 17, 2015
Locked up in Bedlam, artist Richard Dadd was set free by fairies
We are transfixed by Dadd’s fantastical paintings not because he had a mental illness, but because they are nothing like the leaden Victorian art of the day
The strange case of Richard Dadd, whose paintings and drawings are currently on view at the Watts Gallery in rural Surrey, offers a melancholy perspective on art, mental illness, and our obsession that they might be related. A recent study in Iceland seemed to show a link between creativity and mental illness. Dadd was undoubtedly very ill. But did that make him a creative genius?
In 1842, this promising young artist went on a grand tour of the east as a gentleman’s travelling companion. The people and places he saw in Turkey, Syria and above all Egypt stayed with him all his life. If Dadd was not famous as a “mad” artist he would be best known as a Victorian Orientalist painter. Yet Egypt got inside his head in a way that went beyond art. On the long overland journey home he started behaving strangely. He seemed to believe he was in contact with the Egyptian gods. He also thought the Pope was out to get him.
Continue reading...Sad face: doom and gloom at the 2015 BP portrait award
The best portrait painters capture emotion, but there aren’t any Rembrandts in this competition – just a lot of badly daubed tattoos and very serious expressions
Cheer up, it can’t be that bad. This year’s sitters for the BP portrait award are a desperately serious bunch. Did I see a smile over there? Not quite. One painting is actually called Happy Melancholy. It is a grey and white portrait of an old lady clutching a bottle with a bleak-looking village behind her. I needed a drink too.
Related: Israeli artist Matan Ben Cnaan wins BP portrait award
The sheer battering misery of it all produces callousness and cynicism. Po-faced portraiture makes a stone of the heart
Continue reading...June 16, 2015
Unfinished ... Works from the Courtauld Gallery review
Bourgeois taste celebrates ‘finished’ art but as this exhibition shows, real poetry lies in a hesitant line, roughly splashed colour and patches of bare canvas
The greatest works of art in the world are unfinished. This is not a provocation. Leonardo da Vinci’s dreamlike, infinitely suggestive sketch of a painting The Adoration of the Magi, Michelangelo’s tortured Prisoners struggling to attain human form from blocks of rough-hewn marble, Cézanne’s fragmentary, unending studies of Mount Sainte-Victoire – for me these unfinished masterpieces literally are the definition of artistic greatness.
Bourgeois taste, in the 19th century and even today, means by contrast a dull admiration for the finished. Glossy paint and spanking enamel. The neatly finished paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites gleam boringly in their frames. Damien Hirst’s dots are drearily perfect. Often, real poetry in art belongs to the hesitant line, to roughly splashed colours and patches of bare canvas.
Continue reading...June 15, 2015
The more time we spend glued to our iPhone cameras, the less we actually see
Apple’s iPhone 6 campaign is keen to remind us that we can all take beautiful photos. But while we stare into our screens we miss out on the richness of the world around us
Life’s beauty is easier to capture than ever. Just point your iPhone 6 at something and the muchness, fullness and wonder of the world is yours. A backpacker on a precipice, a skyscraper skyline in gorgeous light, lovely reflections in a puddle – all can be snapped with wonderful precision and richness. This is what Apple’s global advertising campaign is currently telling us, with huge prints plastered on British billboards shot by users with names like Gabby K, Dan C and Andrew P. (What has Apple got against surnames?)
These people live in a wonderful world: all magnificent deserts, rustic paths and well-shod feet (photographing your own feet is a particularly cool idea, suggests Apple). It doesn’t take a misanthrope to find this array of perfect modern beauty a bit false. No wonder a couple of Californian pranksters have been putting up satirical Apple posters that show, instead of ravishing sunsets, the kind of things they reckon people really take photographs of with their phones – clumsy selfies, mostly.
Continue reading...June 12, 2015
Brutalist playgrounds, straw bears and Bridget Riley's intoxicating curves
It’s fun and games as a brutalist playground opens in London and Dreamland reopens in Margate. Bridget Riley took the edge off the awful Fighting History exhibition – plus we creep you out with photos of old English folk costumes, all in your weekly art dispatch
Bridget Riley
The British answer to Jackson Pollock shows how seductive and intoxicating abstract art can be.
De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, from 13 June until 6 September.
June 11, 2015
Leading your brain into a crazy pirouette: Bridget Riley at the De La Warr Pavilion
A Bexhill-on-Sea retrospective of mind-bending curve paintings shows why Riley is Britain’s most significant modern artist
Bridget Riley is the most important British painter of the modern age. Bacon? Freud? Hockney? None of those famous men took hold of the language of painting and remade it as she has. Most of the artists we are nationally proud of are sideshow performers who dallied with figuration long after it was blown apart by Jackson Pollock. Abstraction is the true destiny of modern painting and Riley and Howard Hodgkin are Britain’s two great living exponents of it. If Hodgkin resembles a poet, Riley is more like a scientist. In the 1960s she revealed a revolution hidden in the human eye.
To look at Riley’s 1964 painting Crest is to be sucked into a dazzling shimmering superstring universe. What has happened to reality? It has become a rushing cascade of black and white lines, warping in unison. The effect of this wave motion is to make the painting, as you approach it, move and expand. The brain cannot decipher what the eye sees. Instead of lines on a flat surface you experience a vertiginous plummeting waterfall of three dimensional space.
Related: Medical mural: Bridget Riley goes wall to wall at London hospital – in pictures
Continue reading...June 10, 2015
I love to travel to museums, galleries and historic sites – just please don't call me a tourist
The ancient site of Luxor in Egypt, which has suffered an attempted terrorist attack, has been dismissed as a tourist city. It’s so much more than that
Tourist. It’s a word I hate. It divides people, simplifies them, prejudges motives and behaviour, and trivialises what are often the greatest experiences and most sincere passions in our lives.
The troubled expatriates in Paul Bowles’ novel The Sheltering Sky pride themselves on being “travellers”, not “tourists”. In reality, we are all a bit of both. I was definitely a tourist by Bowles’ standards when I recently visited Marrakech. But we spent a lot of the time looking at masterpieces of Islamic art, including the gorgeously intricate decorations of the Ben-Youssef Madrasa and the Minba from the Kutubiyya mosque in the El Badi palace. So, yeah, tourism if you insist, but also an education.
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