Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 191
June 9, 2015
Lucian Freud's teenage love letters reveal his complex sexuality
The media is in a tizzy over news that Freud had a gay relationship with the poet Stephen Spender. But look closely at his paintings, and you can see the artist’s lifelong passion was for the human body – male or female
Lucian Freud had a gay relationship with the poet Stephen Spender, it appears from youthful love letters that are going under the hammer at Sotheby’s.
If you base your views of artists on gossip and news snippets this may seem surprising. Since Freud’s death in 2011 more and more details of his heterosexual activities have become known. He had “at least” 14 children with several mothers and apparently beat Picasso’s record for sleeping with his models by a long distance.
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Andy Burnham should embrace his black tie-wearing younger self | Jonathan Jones
Shock horror! A photograph has emerged of Andy Burnham in black tie. The Daily Telegraph is very excited. The old picture of Burnham and other rising stars of New Labour all dressed up for a Blairite football team dinner flies in the face, it suggests, of Burnham’s claim to stand outside the “metropolitan elite”.
The frontrunner in the Labour leadership election said on the radio the other day that “for too long there has been a sense of a metropolitan elite at the top of the Labour party”. Liverpool-born Burnham says he’s not part of that. But look on his lies! Behold his impostures! This besuited jackanapes is fit neither to represent English Magic nor lead the Labour party. He is plainly exposed as a member of the dark and dreaded Metropolitan Elite, in the same way Goody Proctor was exposed for consorting with the devil.
Related: Labour's Andy Burnham suggests he might back further welfare cuts
Continue reading...A distracting game of spot the fake: the Waddesdon Bequest – review
British Museum, London
There are many masterpieces among the treasures collected by Baron Ferdinand Rothschild in the 19th century – and plenty of forgeries, too. It’s a shame they weren’t separated out in this spanking new display
A row of golden cups glitter in a glass case. All are magnificent. But which are real Renaissance masterpieces and which are fakes? The British Museum should offer a prize for guessing correctly without looking at the labels.
The 19th-century art lover Baron Ferdinand Rothschild assembled a collection of sculpture, miniatures, daggers, wooden carvings, nautilus shell goblets and other miracles of craft at his home Waddesdon Manor that you might expect to see in some Habsburg cabinet of curiosities in Vienna. The British Museum, which inherited this rare collection in 1898, has now recused it from an obscure hidden niche somewhere in its least visited galleries and created a sparkling, glittering, dramatically lit treasury, where these wonders can be properly enjoyed and studied. Ever wanted to really get to grips with the history of cup-making in 17th-century Nuremberg? Just make for Room 2A.
Continue reading...June 8, 2015
Feeble, callow, moronic: Fighting History at Tate Britain
This exhibition should have been a fascinating look at the way we depict significant historical events. Instead it’s a glib cliche
There are lots of things you could do with £12, the full adult admission price to this exhibition. Buy a book, or go to the pub – anything you like – just don’t blow it on this feeble and half-hearted saunter through history and art.
In the 18th century, when British art first made international waves, painters aspired to tell mighty stories. The genre known as history painting meant a dramatic depiction of great events, whether mythological scenes or contemporary news. A captivating example – which is not, of course, in this exhibition – is John Singleton Copley’s painting Watson and the Shark, which depicts a real event when the unfortunate Brook Watson was attacked by a tiger shark just off Havana in 1749. Today, shock stories like this fill newspapers; back then, an artist was commissioned to depict the latest sensation in oils with the self-conscious poses of classical statuary.
Continue reading...June 5, 2015
James Turrell at Houghton Hall: a psychedelic legal high in the English countryside
The artist installation at the grand Norfolk country house is a mind-bending array of colour and light – like a beautifully silent music festival
People are walking out of the setting sun, between the trees and the ha-ha, like purple shadows. I am standing on the stone threshold of a Palladian country house, watching them intently. What am I on? It is perfectly legal. It’s not even a legal high that’s going to be banned by Theresa May. All I have taken, honest officer, is a dose of James Turrell’s mind-bending art.
It all started when we crossed the ha-ha – which is country house speak for a walled ditch – and found a folly that looks like a classical temple but is in reality an old water tower. Entering via a pitch-black corridor, everything became strange. I could only negotiate the tunnel’s bends by feeling the walls until suddenly I was inside a throbbing, pulsing purple cloud. With time, as more people stumbled in, a glowing blue screen appeared – but I soon found I could put my hand right through it, into the space beyond that seemed infinite and immeasurable, empty and yet solid: an entity of light.
Continue reading...June 4, 2015
Kapoor's vagina isn't shocking. French art has always been a hotbed of amour
French conservatives are outraged over Anish Kapoor’s work in Versailles. But he’s not the first artist to bring sex into the country’s establishment
Anish Kapoor is putting the vagina in Versailles. Why on earth are the French so shocked? What has happened to the nation that gave us Courbet’s explicit painting The Origin of the World, among other masterpieces of French sauce?
Some say Versailles should not even be showing contemporary art – and its previous programme featuring the likes of Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami has gone out of its way to tease conservative sensibilities, as if trying to drive the entire French cultural right to an early grave. But it’s sometimes fun to place the new against the old and in the case of Kapoor there is a real creative conversation going on between past and present – let’s call it a vagina dialogue.
Related: Anish Kapoor’s Versailles 'vagina' causes controversy in France
Continue reading...June 3, 2015
Julian Opie's portraits in motion: this is what genius looks like – review
He paints with simple black lines and primary colours, and most of his characters don’t even have faces. Yet Julian Opie captures our world in stunning detail
Art is a mere imitation of life. Worse, it is not even an accurate imitation. All it can really do is point to the way things look, and hope we recognise a human face in what is just an oval shape with dots for eyes and a line for a mouth.
All representational art works like this, from ancient Greek vase paintings to Picasso’s cartoon babes, but few artists have ever explored the reductive essentials of picturing the world as relentlessly as Julian Opie. This lover of dumb beauty, connoisseur of modern life and scientific explorer of the nature of perception wears his thinking lightly. So lightly he might be mistaken for a vacant pop stylist. Yet his exhibition of up-to-the-minute observations of the way we look now is a wonderland for the eye; a revelation of the fleeting beauty of this world. It will make your day, refresh your soul and change the way you see city streets, faces and fields full of sheep for a long time to come.
Continue reading...June 2, 2015
Love locks are the shallowest, stupidest, phoniest expression of love ever – time to put a stop to it
Some of Europe’s most beautiful bridges are being destroyed by rusting clumps of metal, so I’m delighted to hear that Paris is clamping down on this daft trend
Paris is removing all the “love locks” from its historic Pont des Arts. This pedestrian bridge was originally built by Napoleon, though the present structure is a replica created after the original was declared unsafe in the 1980s, and it is part of the grand riverscape that makes Paris one of the world’s most beautiful cities.
In recent years, it has become encrusted with padlocks left by amorous tourists who throw the keys in the Seine. May it never see another padlock. Vive Paris. Someone has to stand up against one of the shallowest, stupidest, phoniest expressions of love ever devised.
Related: Paris 'love locks' removed from Pont des Arts bridge – in pictures
Continue reading...June 1, 2015
Prada and Louis Vuitton new patrons of art – shame they're so boring
Fashion houses are pouring money into shiny new art galleries across Europe. It should be explosive, but sadly they’ve left their imaginations on the runway
Fashion houses are the new art patrons of our time. That would be fine, if only they would show the boldness they bring to bags and rags when they collect art. Instead, they follow the rules of the art world, conform to its set taste and dully imitate last year’s look.
This month, the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris unveils a new hang of its contemporary art collection – the third since it opened less than a year ago. Prada has just opened its spectacular “art city” in Milan, while Paris also has the comparatively venerable Cartier Foundation. Meanwhile, the hottest “art exhibition” in London is Alexander McQueen at the V&A.
Related: Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris review – everything and the bling from Frank Gehry
Related: Miuccia Prada: I hate the idea of being a collector. I really hate it
Continue reading...May 31, 2015
Sculptural oasis: why the giants of art made for Jeddah
From Joan Miró to Jean Arp and Henry Moore, the Saudi city was a magnet for big names in art in the 1970s, as fascinating new book Sculptures of Jeddah shows
In the 21st century art is moving eastwards – literally – as masterpiece after masterpiece is sold to the oil-rich state Qatar, and the Louvre Abu Dhabi nears completion in the neighbouring United Arab Emirates. Huge and imaginative investments are turning these small wealthy nations on the eastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula into the Manhattans of the middle east, brimming over with Cezannes and Gauguins and perhaps – although the rumours were denied – Picasso’s $179 million Women of Algiers (O).
But while Qatar and the UAE glitter with modernity, their neighbour Saudi Arabia seems mired in regressive ideas from the middle ages. It gets in the news for flogging the liberal blogger Raif Badawi, taking women to court for driving a car and nurturing the extreme Wahhabist religious ideology adopted by Isis.
Related: Sculptures in the sand
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