Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 200
February 27, 2015
The Iranian banksy, bonkers bridges and Slinky beards – the week in art
Impressionism is back, wild designs are unveiled for a new bridge across the Thames, Banksy returns to Gaza, and street artist Medhi Ghadyanloo’s eye-popping murals make Tehran smile – all in your weekly art dispatch
Inventing Impressionism
This exhibition explores the rise of the first modern art movement through the unusual perspective of the way it was marketed by pioneering art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. It’s the beginning of the art world as we know it.
• National Gallery, London, from 4 March until 31 May.
The resistible rise of Nigel Farage | Jonathan Jones
Looking at Nigel Farage posing like a movie gangster in a publicity photo for his American trip – the cosy pint he affects for British audiences replaced by a macho cigar – I found myself thinking of Bertolt Brecht’s play The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. In his 1941 satire on the far, far right, Brecht portrays Adolf Hitler as a Chicago mobster whose thuggish rise to power is made possible by his enemies’ weakness – his rise was “resistible”.
Farage is not Hitler, of course – I would not dream of giving him that much historical significance – but he looks a hell of a lot like Arturo Ui in this photograph. It appears on publicity material in the US, where he has gone down like a stormtrooper – sorry, a storm! – at a conservative Republican rally with his ramped-up rhetoric about the west’s “Judeo-Christian values” being undermined by an Islamist “fifth column”.
Related: Nigel Farage's anti-immigration chant strikes a chord with US Republicans
Like Arturo Ui or Richard III, he wears the right mask for the occasion. A normal guy, a nasty guy – whatever it takes
Continue reading...February 26, 2015
Alex Katz: Black Paintings review – 'A miraculous artist'
Timothy Taylor Gallery, London
Katz’s magazine-illustrator method seems doomed to fail, yet this sublime exhibition of portraiture exposes the simple truths he paints
The veteran American artist Alex Katz was inspecting the hang of his new paintings while I looked at them, but I could not ask him any questions. I was dumbstruck. The only thing I could have said to him at that moment would have been a stuttered, “How come you paint so well?”
How can simple pictures of faces be so unexpected, exciting and fascinating? Katz has been painting portraits for a long time now – he’s 87 and began his career in the age of Jackson Pollock – and his latest works do not shatter his established style. Their main novelty is that all the figures are set against black. Many of the pictures have a wide CinemaScope format so the people in them stand out as colourful shapes against a nightscape of glossy darkness. Nicole in a red coat looks like she’s walking at midnight in Central Park. Vincent in a white shirt has his back turned to the artist, as if lost in black thoughts. All these people, identified by first names only, stand quietly and softly in a delicate nocturnal mood. Tender is the night.
Continue reading...February 25, 2015
Tehran's answer to Banksy: Medhi Ghadyanloo hits Britain
Flying cars, magic portals, levitating giraffes … street artist Medhi Ghadyanloo’s eye-popping murals make Tehran smile – but his paintings also probe Iran’s turbulent past
The toast of Tehran: Iran’s superstar street artist – in picturesOn a wall in east London, two giant crows loom over two young women who are swinging a rope. As a child jumps over the skipping rope, he approaches a hole in the ceiling above him. But if he finally jumps high enough to rise above the confines of the concrete ceiling, he will become prey for the waiting birds.
This is a mural by Mehdi Ghadyanloo, an Iranian artist who is about to have his first exhibition in Britain. It is an unexpected addition to the walls of Shoreditch; the neighbourhood famous for its street art rarely sees anything as subtle as this. As if to make the point, a car park nearby is plastered with ugly, third-rate graffiti. Ghadyanloo, by contrast, makes use of trompe l’oeil, the technique invented in the Renaissance of using perspective to create eye-fooling illusions. It is eerily arresting and poetic.
Continue reading...Waqas Khan: the Pakistani artist who makes you want to say yes
Inspired by Sufi songs and scripture, Waqas Khan toils through the night making vast hypnotic pictures out of tiny dots – and his work is now being snapped up around the world. Jonathan Jones goes drinking with art’s hottest new star
Waqas Khan is talking to me in paradise. Or at least, his art makes me feel as if I’ve been transported there. The artist’s delirious drawings are all around us in Vienna’s Galerie Krinzinger: spirals, waves and circles that shimmer delicately in pink, black and white ink. Some are vast. One resembles a gigantic book. Yet when you walk close up to them, each turns out to be composed of thousands of tiny, extremely precise dots.
They make you feel differently about yourself and the world. Fifteen minutes after arriving at his latest exhibition, I felt cleansed and relaxed – like I’d been in a hammam. And after a couple of hours, I had the same feeling I got when I first walked through the light-as-air tiled wonderlands of the great Islamic buildings of Andalusia.
Continue reading...February 23, 2015
Goya: the Witches and Old Women Album review – staring at monsters
Courtauld Gallery, London
This extraordinary exhibition lays bare Goya’s thinking as he painted some of the most terrifying works of art
The hell of Francisco Goya has no parallel in art. No one has ever painted and etched such convincing and utterly terrifying visions of cruelty, superstition and madness. Goya’s Black Paintings unveil a world without hope. A dog drowns in quicksand. The god Saturn eats his children. The Fates – or are they witches? – float airborne over a barren twilit landscape. These visions that Goya painted in his late years on the walls of his house outside Madrid – they were later transferred to canvas and now hang in the Prado – have a unique atmosphere of reality, as if we are seeing matter-of-fact reportage from someone’s unconscious.
Even their most extreme and repulsive details have this quality of honest observation. They are not fantasy art. They are the awful truth. Now, at last, we know where these appalling pictures come from. An extraordinary exhibition at London’s Courtauld Gallery lays bare Goya’s thinking as he painted some of the most terrifying works of art that exist. This exhibition, it seems, is the key to the Goya Code, the door to this private artist’s inner world. It reveals exactly why his horrific scenes are so convincing, immediate, and yet inscrutable.
Continue reading...February 20, 2015
Pablo Picasso: Spanish by birth, French at art
The 20th century’s greatest painter was born in Malaga but came into his own amid the sleaze and bohemianism of Paris – the only city that could have matched his peerless imagination
Pablo Picasso, the greatest artist of the 20th century, was French.
Hold on … don’t comment yet.
Continue reading...Pete Christ: if this isn’t blasphemous, then what is? | Jonathan Jones
If the Church of England is fine about Pete Doherty being portrayed as Christ, perhaps so we should all be more relaxed about religious artistic depictions
Are there any limits to the way Christianity can be depicted in art? Are artists who depict Christ in a less than reverent manner taking a risk? Associated Press seemed to think so when, in the wake of the massacre at the Charlie Hebdo offices in January, it suddenly removed Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ from its image library.
Piss Christ – an image of a sculpture of the Crucifixion, suspended in what appears to be a tank of glowing urine – is one of the few recent works of art that have caused real offence among Christians. It was created in 1987 and became a hate object for cultural and religious conservatives in 1980s America. Serrano even got death threats.
Continue reading...Witchcraft, death threats and 25 years of Photoshop – the week in art
Goya’s witches, the fall-out from the Tower of London poppy artwork, plus John Terry and text-messaging cows – all in your weekly art dispatch
Goya
Extraordinary drawings of witchcraft by a man of the Enlightenment who was at once fascinated and repelled by popular superstitions.
• Courtauld Gallery, London, from 26 February until 25 May.
February 19, 2015
Who'd marry an artist? The women painted out of the picture
Pollock’s wife put his genius first, Picasso turned his photographer-girlfriend into the weeping woman and Rodin stole his lover’s ideas … modern art is littered with love affairs, but how many are actually fruitful and fair?
British painter Sheila Girling, who died on 14 February, was married for 63 years to sculptor Anthony Caro. They supported one another’s work – two artists happily living and working side by side for more than six decades. How rare is this? Are there other notable art couples, or is the usual pattern more one-sided and exploitative, or otherwise troubled?
Artists, after all, are often driven, egotistical characters. Living easily with others is not always a great artist’s best skill. Van Gogh alienated the women he pursued, and his attempt to share space with Gaugin, the Yellow House, in Arles, ended in violent self-harm.
Continue reading...Jonathan Jones's Blog
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