Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 206
December 19, 2014
Abstract art unlocks the truth about the universe
Great abstract painters like Pollock and Monet lose themselves in colour, sensation and memory to show that reality is subjective
Abstract art is a kind of miracle. How can a painting that is just a white surface, or a swirl of colour, mean something? But it can and it does, and the unlikely greatness of abstraction is one of the most moving achievements of modern times.
The Whitechapel Gallery’s new-year exhibition Adventures of the Black Square explores the story of abstraction since Kazimir Malevich exhibited his Black Square in 1915. But I’ve got to be honest: it wasn’t the revolutionary European abstract painters of the early 20th century who made me fall in love with this kind of art.
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Prince Harry and the herdsman: can we really fall for this imperial hokum? | Jonathan Jones
Prince Harry squints like a serious photographer as he points his £729 Fuji X100 camera at a Lesotho herder. The red-walled room they are in emphasises the intimacy of the moment, as the youth poses patiently and Harry seeks that perfect, defining instant of truth.
What is wrong with this picture? Where to start? It is a specious salmagundi of complacent assumptions and frightening arrogance.
Continue reading...December 18, 2014
Why a charcoal of police in Ferguson is the most important artwork of 2014
Robert Longo’s powerful drawing of police holding back protesters in Ferguson is a vital record of the resurgence of racism and a history painting for our time
2014 has produced horrific politics. Racism has returned, that hydra-headed idiot, everywhere from Missouri to Rochester, where a Ukip candidate won a byelection after openly speculating about repatriating Europeans. It is not much by way of compensation to say the year also produced a mighty piece of political art. But it did.
Robert Longo’s Untitled (Ferguson Police August 13, 2014) is a 10-ft wide charcoal drawing of a line of faceless cops, clad and helmeted in black, silhouetted against searchlights in a swirl of illuminated smoke. This is a brilliantly powerful drawing, based on photographs taken on the angry streets of Ferguson, Missouri, after 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot dead by a police officer there on 9 August. Since the first protests and police reaction that Longo set out to draw, this has become an ever more significant moment in the old and unending story of racial injustice in America. Longo’s picture looks prophetic and monumental. It should be purchased by the Museum of Modern Art or the National Gallery of Art. This is a true history painting for our time, done from photographs in desolate charcoal.
Continue reading...December 17, 2014
Olafur Eliasson conjures a delightful grotto of lights and wonder in Paris
Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
The alchemist of the art world effortlessly transports us into the sublime with a warren-like world of awe-inspiring optical illusions
Romantic art is not dead. It glows on, a blazing horizon, in the work of Olafur Eliasson.
Eleven years ago, Eliasson set the Turbine Hall at London’s Tate Modern alight with a gigantic illusory sun that was the most seductive and entrancing project ever staged there. It became a psychedelic happening, where people lay on the floor, stoned on light, as if we had wandered inside a Turner painting and were dancing like his peasant revellers on the banks of some golden ocean.
Continue reading...December 16, 2014
Wassily Kandinsky at 148: a revolutionary Google Doodle star
The great abstract artist’s paintings are spiritual symphonies that reveal hidden truths and speak directly to our senses and feelings
The fascinating thing about Wassily Kandinsky, whose 148th birthday has got him a Google Doodle today, is how seriously and carefully he evolved from figurative painting to abstract art. Kandinsky did not become an abstract painter lightly. He reached abstraction in a strenuous, thoughtful way that gives his art huge authority.
In his early expressionist paintings villages glow in radiant colours. These landscapes pulse with wild chromatic splendour that resembles the freedom of the fauves. In fact Kandinsky’s expressive landscapes are already partly abstract, in their use of colour. This innovation, that started with the French fauves and was rapidly adopted by the German expressionists, was the first, huge step towards abstraction in 20th-century art. But the wild colours enflaming art in the early years of the century still portray a very recognisable world. Kandinsky took it a revolutionary step further by reaching a logical conclusion – what if painting were pure colour? What if it created its own imaginary world, like the world of a symphony?
Continue reading...December 12, 2014
Spectacular beards and the best shows of 2014 – the week in art
An exhibition devoted to the hirsute is announced, as our critics pick their top events of the year. Plus California’s pioneering skaters and rollergirls, ancient trees and the world’s most expensive photograph – all in your weekly dispatch
Melvin Edwards
The first solo show in Britain for a pioneer of African-American art, taking in his work since the 60s, which includes his celebrated Lynch Fragments.
• Stephen Friedman Gallery, London W1 until 17 January
Jonathan Jones’s top 10 art shows of 2014
From Anselm Kiefer’s rotting sunflowers to a rollicking super-show all over Scotland, via Rembrandt, Matisse, Andy Warhol and Egon Schiele … it was an eye-opening year
From the rusty submarines hanging in a vitrine in the courtyard to bookworks in which photographs and black paint created eerie provocative assemblages, Anselm Kiefer’s retrospective rocked me. In a year of eye-opening exhibitions of old and modern masters, it was something else to encounter a living giant. Like a novel by Thomas Pynchon or a building by Frank Gehry, the paintings of Kiefer make me feel that our time is truly creative. He is at once remarkably serious and riotously pleasurable.
Continue reading...December 9, 2014
Christmas and contemporary art? Like chalk and blue cheese
The Yuletide spirit makes today’s art look brittle, cold and unseasonal – it’s time to set aside good taste and embrace the kitsch
Let’s face it. Contemporary art and Christmas are not even a tiny bit compatible. Nothing is less Christmassy than up-to-the-minute art. There is a complete lack of fit between minimalist austerity and the magically silly spirit of Yuletide.
Who wants to see cool conceptual art at Christmas? Not me. I’d rather look at a Lego reindeer. The display of Santa and his sled team at Covent Garden market, all made out of Lego, is my idea of a Christmas decoration. It is kitsch and jolly and fun. Christmas is a time to set aside good taste. It’s the season of fairy lights and tinsel and mulled wine – and not for “disturbing” or “thought-provoking” modern art.
Continue reading...December 8, 2014
Teaching Nigel Farage the fine art of breastfeeding
Renaissance art rejoices in breastfeeding. Does the Ukip leader think all the paintings of Madonna and child should be banished from UK galleries?
Nigel Farage’s problem with breastfeeding mothers would have baffled anyone who visited a church in Catholic Europe five centuries ago. Perhaps, in fact, there’s an anti-European logic to Farage’s sympathy with establishments that ask women to feed their babies “in a corner” – for breastfeeding is one of the great themes of continental art. Is Ukip going to repatriate all the European paintings of breastfeeding mums from our museums?
Its milk monitors might start their censorship in the National Gallery’s Flemish art section, where a painting done in about 1440 by a follower of Robert Campin shows the Virgin Mary at home with her infant. The chamber is warmed by a fire, and there’s a book – religious of course – beside her as she offers Jesus her breast. It is a superbly natural scene.
Continue reading...December 4, 2014
Mr Turner’s record year should blaze a trail for British painting’s other greats
The avalanche of interest in JMW Turner is welcome – but he was not the only artist to give colour to the 18th and 19th centuries. Let’s give some others a chance
• Auction sets new record for Turner
Joseph Mallord William Turner has had one hell of a year. His exhibition at Tate Britain is a blinder. His reincarnation by Timothy Spall was hailed as a masterpiece of acting. Turner is making headlines and stirring souls. Perhaps he should get the Turner prize.
Just to confirm what a big year it has been for this painter who died in 1851, a record price has just been paid at Sotheby’s for one of his works. His 1835 oil painting Rome, from Mount Aventine was auctioned this week for £33.3m, the most ever fetched by a pre-20th century British artist.
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