Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 204
January 15, 2015
The 1926 painting that foresaw how London would look today
Most artistic visions of London’s future have been darkly pessimistic. But this Underground poster painted by Montague B Black in 1926 offered an uncanny – and much more optimistic – view of the modern city
In 1926, London Underground published a poster painted by Montague B Black, a publicity artist who also created images for Liverpool’s White Star Line, which imagines London in 2026. A golden sky enfolds a cityscape of skyscrapers over which various types of flying machine hover.
We’ve more than a decade to go to fulfil its prophecies (still time for the dirigible to make a comeback), but Black’s vision of London in 2026 looks remarkably similar to a view across the City in 2015. His skyscrapers, inspired by the innovative American cities of his own day, look remarkably like the Walkie Talkie and other contemporary metropolitan monoliths.
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January 14, 2015
Celebrating fakes is moronic ... it’s real art that matters
Dulwich picture gallery’s flirtation with fakery is neither clever nor funny. It’s a betrayal of the museum’s duty to preserve and present art
Gallery challenges art lovers to spot the fakeFakes are fun. Fakes are cool. This week, Dulwich picture gallery launched a conceptual art project in which a replica made in China is concealed among its “real” paintings. Can visitors spot the fake? The intervention, said the gallery’s director, “will provoke a new way of looking at our collection”.
No, it won’t. It will confuse the public, undermine the pleasure of looking at the great paintings on its walls, and replace the joy of learning about art with a glib postmodern game that is pretentious and destructive. I personally don’t intend to go anywhere near Dulwich until this silliness is done with.
Continue reading...January 13, 2015
Unseen review - a beguiling delight full of intimate surprises
Emma, Lady Hamilton’s lips pout and pucker in empty space in no less than seven repeated drawings of the sensual mouth of Horatio Nelson’s lover on a sheet of sketches by the Georgian artist George Romney. There’s a formally posed drawing of Lady Hamilton on the sheet too but it’s in his intense studies of her lips that Romney – who portrayed this famous beauty again and again in his paintings – reveals the erotic fascination she held for him.
Drawings are far more personal than paintings. To look at a painting that has survived the centuries is to look at a restored, even remade, object whose connection with the hand of its original creator is sometimes quite remote – even when it is not the work of the artist’s assistants. But a drawing is a simple, direct, sometimes highly experimental creation. It has a private, informal quality that makes it truly intimate. Romney’s paintings of Lady Hamilton are muffled by a social politeness that his drawing crazily escapes to expose his surreal passion for her luscious lips.
Continue reading...Did Charlie Hebdo's cover get it right? | The panel
• Charlie Hebdo: first cover since terror attack depicts prophet Muhammad
• The Guardian view: show solidarity, but in your own voice Continue reading...
A manifesto of no ideas: artist Gordon Shrigley stands in the general election
Elections only interest artists when democracy is in crisis – and Shrigley is standing with apathetic slogans like ‘I have nothing to offer but offer itself’
It is a marker of Britain’s political malaise that an artist is to stand in this year’s general election with no ideas, no commitments and no manifesto, except for a series of open-ended remarks designed to make voters think.
“I’m from your imagination, and I’m here to help”, declares Gordon Shrigley, who is running for the Campaign Party in Hackney South and Shoreditch against sitting Labour MP Meg Hillier. “I have nothing to offer but offer itself” – that’s another of his slogans. And what about, “I’ve seen the future, and it doesn’t exist.”
Continue reading...A short history of mental illness in art
From Hogarth to Van Gogh, art has challenged our understanding of mental illness. Jonathan Jones’ shares his top ten for our mental health appeal
Click here to donate to the Guardian and Observer Christmas appealArt has led the way in seeing mental illness not as alien or contemptible but part of the human condition – even as a positive and useful experience. Modern art has even celebrated mental suffering as a creative adventure. This psychiatric modernism started with the “madness” of Vincent van Gogh and led to work by patients being discovered as a new kind of art. Yet it has much deeper historical roots. Albrecht Durer portrayed genius as melancholic as early as the Renaissance and Romantic painters identified with the “mad”.
Perhaps it is not hard to see why artists often show empathy for what society calls illness: all creativity is an irrational voyage. The idea of going outside yourself to see things afresh is probably as old as the torchlit visions of cave artists and was expressed by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato when he wrote that poetic ecstasy is the only source of divine truth. “Madness is a gift from the gods”, as Plato put it.
Continue reading...January 12, 2015
Renato Guttuso review – the communist painter who loved Marilyn Monroe
Estorick Collection, London
This surprising Sicilian painter and staunch communist showed the joys of real Italian life – by inserting Monroe and Picasso into its streets
Socialist realism is not exactly the most fashionable of art movements. The early avant garde art of the Soviet Union is widely celebrated; El Lissitzky’s red wedge is agreed to be cool. But when Stalin came to power and proclaimed the doctrine of realism, communist art stepped back and never recovered its vitality.
There’s a lot of willed historical ignorance in this mantra for slaughter that was already part of Soviet life when the Suprematists were painting their utopian dreams. Abstract propaganda was propaganda nonetheless. But what can be said in artistic defence of the realist hacks who were promoted by communism from the 1930s to the 1980s?
Continue reading...January 9, 2015
Why the art world needs to ditch the rich Russians
As Russian investors snap up an even greater stake in the contemporary art world, Jonathan Jones asks if there can ever be a truly independent art press
There’s an interesting story on the Art Newspaper website about Russian artists protesting with their feet against president Vladimir Putin’s government. Yet the most significant aspect of the story may be that it has actually been published.
Crackdowns on freedom of speech are driving artists into exile, reports Sophia Kishkovsky, citing subversive muralists Dmitri Vrubel and Viktoria Timofeeva, who now live in Berlin, and interviewing other Russian artists tempted to follow their lead.
Continue reading...The art market is disgustingly inflated, yes – but surprisingly meritocratic | Jonathan Jones
Art prices are among the most awful, repulsive, and sickening aspects of modern culture. There is no equivalent in any other field for the ostentatious extravagance of art collectors in a world that unapologetically confuses luxury and aesthetic appreciation.
Literature, theatre and grand opera are ascetic practices compared with the art world, where the current record for the most expensive painting ever sold stands at $250,000,000. It’s a world where money is increasingly hard to separate from “serious” values, as commercial events such as the Frieze art fair are treated like public institutions, and where David Hickey, a leading critical champion of what he once called “the big, beautiful art market”, retired in disgust after finding that rampant greed is not so beautiful after all.
Continue reading...The power of satire and pointless lifehacks – the week in art
Anti-fascist painting from Italy hits London in a week that demonstrated beyond all doubt the political clout of visual art – all in your favourite weekly art dispatch
This anti-fascist, social-realist painter from Sicily – who also illustrated Elizabeth David’s cookery classic Italian Food – is an important and radical Italian artist, the painterly equivalent of postwar film-makers such as Rossellini and De Sica.
• Estorick Collection, London N1, from 14 January until 4 April.
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