Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 205

Charlie Hebdo: cartoon satire is a more potent weapon than hate

Humour is an essential force in the defence of free speech, as the murdered cartoonists’ final cover on Michel Houellebecq defiantly attests

Houellebecq’s Submission will still be published in English

The massacre at Charlie Hebdo was devastatingly effective. The terrorists objected to jokes about their religion, so they killed the jokers. Now nobody is laughing.

Sombre demonstrations do not defeat this assault on free speech. For comedy is killed as stone dead by collective sadness as it is by executing cartoonists.

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Space Jam, Daddies ketchup – and other bizarre inspirations for high art

With his homage to the 90s animated film starring Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny, LA artist Devin Troy Strother joins the canon of pop art greats who immortalise funny objects

The 1996 film Space Jam, in which basketball hero Michael Jordan stars alongside Bugs Bunny and other Loony Toons characters, has been immortalised in paintings by the Los Angeles artist Devin Troy Strother. Is this the most unlikely artistic appropriation of popular culture ever? The short answer is no, not at all. Pop art has chosen plenty of icons to celebrate since the 1960s that are just as unexpected.

Typhoo Tea, the hot drinks brand, is the inspiration for the most “pop” painting David Hockney ever made. His 1961 work Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style transposes a nude on to a box of the tea. Hockney’s wry Yorkshire version of pop art is perhaps a sideways joke about Jasper Johns’s bronze 1960 sculpture of two cans of Ballantine ale, which Johns made after a friend joked that his art dealer Leo Castelli could sell anything, even a couple of cans of beer.

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Will gay art tour of the Vatican get the Pope's seal of approval?

A new art tour celebrating the sexuality of some of the Catholic church’s most revered artists provides exciting new perspectives on the world’s best-known art

Visitors to Rome used to be told by tour guides that Michelangelo was “married to his art”. At least that was less shameless than the 1961 biopic that gives him a made-up girlfriend. It is a welcome sign of changing attitudes that an Italian tour company is now offering art tours of the Vatican that focus on the sexualities of Michelangelo and other great 16th and 17th-century masters.

Michelangelo was gay. Even very recently this was a controversial statement – in spite of copious visual and written evidence about his unconcealed sexual identity. Centuries of prudery and prejudice covered up the obvious, just as polite draperies added after Michelangelo’s death still cover the genitals and buttocks of some of his most potent nudes.

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National Gallery: a crushingly dull documentary that lacks an eye for art

Rather than letting the paintings speak for themselves, Frederick Wiseman’s insipid and elitist documentary just gets in the way of the National Gallery’s treasures

The National Gallery is a magic world in the centre of London. Outside it, on Trafalgar Square, street performers entertain tourists and contemporary art comes and goes on the fourth plinth. On the other side of the gallery, established in 1824 as a free public museum of European paintings, lie Leicester Square and Soho. But inside, you can time travel.

Stand in front of Giovanni Bellini’s portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan, for example, and you are in Renaissance Venice, breathing its air. Contemplate Vincent van Gogh’s painting of his humble wooden chair and you are right there, in his house in Arles in 1888 as he paces anxiously in the next room. He’ll soon be back for the pipe he left ready to smoke.

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Poverty lines: where are the poor in art today?

Caravaggio, Bruegel and Van Gogh all made studies of the poor in spite of rich patronage. Why aren’t more artists doing that now?

Art has a long history of entertaining the rich. From ancient artisans who made gold drinking cups for kings, to the artists of today who sell installations to plutocrats, art has been a luxury product, the servant of money. And yet it also has a social conscience. At this consumerist time of year, it is worth looking at some of the ways artists portray poverty.

Caravaggio never lets you forget the reality of Roman street life in the 17th century. His two pilgrims in The Madonna of Loreto look poverty stricken. The man’s feet are bare and dirty. Shoeless feet appear time and again in Caravaggio’s art, and from him this marker of poverty was adopted by other baroque artists. Even that great flatterer of the rich, Anthony van Dyck, imitated Caravaggio by showing unshod feet of the poor in Adoration of the Shepherds.

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Rubens the master decorator rides into Royal Academy

He used to be called ‘The Prince of Painters’ – this old term of praise is today more like a warning light

The first art blockbuster of 2015 will see Peter Paul Rubens riding into the Royal Academy, probably in a golden chariot pulled by four leopards with the muse of Painting at his side, a bevy of plump nymphs hailing his triumph and the gods declaring his apotheosis from fire-fringed clouds.

The art of this Flemish painter who decorated palaces and banqueting halls, went on diplomatic and spying missions, owned a landed estate and somehow found time to fill the Old Master galleries of the world with colossal canvases of boar and lion hunts, characterful portraits, epic history paintings and visceral sea monsters in the not so copious 63 years he lived from 1577 to 1640, is a world in itself. Rubens satisfied the horror vacui of an entire generation of absolutist monarchs.

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This Christmas, follow the original art stars of the east

Two thousand years ago, Buddhist not Christian art was our guiding light – and had all the best nativity scenes

A crowd of people gather round a man on a horse, in an ancient stone relief that roars with life. Is this Christ entering Jerusalem? Or even a nativity scene – a wise man heading for Bethlehem perhaps?

In fact, it is an image of Prince Siddhartha setting out from his father’s palace. This masterpiece of Buddhist art was carved in Gandhara, on the borders of modern Pakistan and Afghanistan, some time between the second and fourth centuries AD. But like many other artworks from ancient Gandhara, it uncannily resembles early Christian art. Indeed, it is evidence of a fascinating encounter of east and west.

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Starry, starry night: a history of astronomy in art

When the weather outside is frightful, Jonathan Jones looks to art rather than the night sky to follow the three kings’ Christmas star – with curious results

This is the season for stargazing. In December and January, the winter skies are cold and – sometimes – clear. A cloudless night reveals a bright canopy of stars, so it is the perfect time to get out your telescope or binoculars.

It also happens to be the time when astronomy is celebrated in the Christmas story. The magi, three wise men from Persia, followed a star to Bethlehem. What star was it? A comet? A meteor? I have no idea. Instead, I have been trying to follow their star through art, with some curious results.

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Sweet in the middle: map reveals Americans’ art tastes, state by state

A new map made by eBay shows the most searched-for artists by its US customers – and it seems that in the midwest, all Americans want for Christmas is the corny, cosy art of Terry Redlin

This is the time of year, if there ever is a time of year, to look at the art of Terry Redlin. This American artist loves Christmas. He paints cute Christmas scenes laden with snow and fairylit windows, reindeer, Santa, and the sun glistening over the whole bizarrely daubed winter wonderland.

Never heard of Redlin? I hadn’t either until I perused a map made by eBay showing the most searched-for artists by its US customers, state by state. Redlin comes top in a swath of midwestern states that form a solid column through the heartland of the map – North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas.

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Make your own Friends: street art turns New Yorkers into sitcom stars

Artists Justin Bettman and Gözde Eker’s Set in the Street project puts living rooms and bathtubs on the streets of New York – and lets the public take a seat and act out their own stories

Ever fancied starring in a New York movie? With Justin Bettman’s art project Set in the Street you can.

Bettman and collaborator Gözde Eker put up film sets overnight on the streets of New York, at corners and on open lots, and leave them for people to play with. Passersby sit in a bathtub or on a sofa, or at a dining-room table. Bettman photographs them, showing the graffiti and litter around them. He then produces a final, cropped image in which the street has been removed.

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