Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 210
November 4, 2014
The art worlds shame: why Britain must give its colonial booty back
The self-righteousnessness of British museums stops them from returning masterpieces pillaged long ago to their rightful owners. Its time they stopped hogging the worlds treasures
Britains museums need to face up to a reality. Cultural imperialism is dead. They cannot any longer coldly keep hold of artistic treasures that were acquired in dubious circumstances a long time ago.
Amal Clooney may or may not be the best ambassador for the Greek government in its long campaign to return the Parthenon marbles to Greece. The celebrity support this cause has attracted ever since Lord Byron made it part of his romantic image in the early 19th century keeps it in the limelight, but also allows the British Museum, where the best sculptures from the 5th century BC Parthenon continue to be kept, to portray its critics as self-publicists.
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October 31, 2014
History and all its grisly facts are worth more than the illusion of memory | Jonathan Jones
David Cameron is wrong. Poppies muffle the truth about the first world war
In 1924 the German artist Otto Dix depicted a skull, lying on the ground, a home to worms. They crawl out of its eye sockets, nasal opening and mouth, and wriggle among patches of hair and a black moustache or are they growths of grass? that still cling to the raw bone.
This horror comes from Der Krieg, a series of etchings in which Dix recorded his memories of fighting in the first world war. He was a machine gunner at the Somme, among other battles, and won the Iron Cross, second class. But he remembered it all as pure horror, as did other participants who happened to be artists or writers such as George Grosz, Siegfried Sassoon, Ernst Jünger and Robert Graves.
Continue reading...The real Mr Turner: has Mike Leighs film got its man?
Timothy Spalls Turner is a strange, magnificent being. He gurns, he growls, he mumbles and grumbles. It is impossible not to be fascinated and moved by him. His onscreen death made me cry. But how much does this great plum pie of a man churning his way through a 19th-century England resemble the actual JMW Turner, who was born in 1775 and died in 1851?
The real Turner was a lot more handsome and elegant, at least in his own eyes. Spalls Turner admits that when I look in the mirror, I see a gargoyle. Real Turner, when he was about 24 years old much younger than when we meet him in the film gazed in the mirror and saw a handsome, debonair, fiercely perceptive youth, his wide open eyes looking straight ahead, seeing everything.
Continue reading...Ukip, poppies and an astonishing art fraud case the week in art
The debate over the Tower of Londons poppy sculpture hots up, as northern England gets its first Andy Warhol solo show all in your favourite weekly art roundup
This is the first solo exhibition in northern England about the artist who defined the 1960s and is still at the leading edge of our unfolding reality.
Tate Liverpool, Liverpool L3. from 7 November until 8 February 2015.
October 30, 2014
The Sistine Chapel in 3D? The Vatican must think we are all idiots
3D experiences cannot replace seeing Michelangelos wonderful art in the flesh. Does Italy just hate tourists?
Does the Vatican think everyone who visits the Sistine Chapel is an idiot?
New arrangements to see Michelangelos frescoes in the Vatican seem to view tourists as the enemy, to be fobbed off with 3D spectacles and virtual reality while perhaps being allowed to spend only a limited time looking up at Michelangelos real paintings. Yet meanwhile, the pope is allowing the chapel to be used for corporate events.
Continue reading...October 28, 2014
The Tower of London poppies are fake, trite and inward-looking a Ukip-style memorial
Four million people will flock to see the 888,246 ceramic poppies deposited in the Towers moat to mark Remembrance Day. Its disturbing that, 100 years on, we can only mark this terrible war as a nationalistic tragedy
Otto Dixs hellish first world war visions in pictures
I accidentally got swept into a tide of humanity at the weekend, or to put it another way, couldnt move for crowds. What was going on? Why were so many people choking the streets of the City of London, where shops are closed on Saturdays, looking for a bite to eat?
It turned out to be overspill from a vast tumult at the Tower of London, where it is expected that four million people will visit by 11 November to see its moat full of red ceramic poppies.
Continue reading...October 27, 2014
Top hats off to Marie Duval, a lost Victorian cartoonist sensation
The woman behind Ally Sloper, the feckless rogue who became a hero for a fusty age, is finally getting the attention her husband may have stolen
The cartoonist Marie Duval is one of the forgotten wonders of 19th-century art. Her drawings have something in common with Honoré Daumier, but also look forward almost uncannily to modern comics in their fantastical surreal wit.
Its exciting that a research project at the University of Chester aims to recover the lost fame of this Victorian woman artist and restore her to her rightful place in the story of modern culture.
Continue reading...October 24, 2014
Jake and Dinos Chapman review a hilarious, horrifying orgy of darkness
Jerwood Gallery, Hastings
From copulating plastic dinosaurs to crucified Ronald McDonalds and the severed feet of God, the arch-provocateurs teeming macabre landscapes offer a powerful vision of modern brutality
Jake Chapman is looking down from the balcony of the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings on to a pebbled beach scene with fishing boats and seafood stalls. The seaside towns quaint old quarter is, he insists, all trompe loeil. He points to a sign on a fish-sellers hut that he interprets to mean all its produce comes from Lidl. The boats on the horizon are cardboard cutouts, he says.
The Chapman brothers, arch-provocateurs of Young British Art, have returned to their hometown to put on a bold exhibition titled In the Realm of the Unmentionable at its beachside art gallery. It seems a generous, affectionate gesture to come back to the place where they grew up and which is so keen to welcome them that locals have crowdsourced nearly £30,000 to fund the show. Yet they just cant be sentimental about growing up here.
Continue reading...Butt-plug scandals and Banksy vandals the week in art
Vandals took centre-stage this week, with Paul McCarthys Tree sculpture targeted for its resemblance to a butt plug, and Banksy and Jeff Koons art spray-painted all in your favourite weekly dispatch
Jake and Dinos Chapman: In the Realm of the Unmentionable
Raucous, rancid, funny and insidiously disturbing, the most provocative British artists of their generation return to their hometown with a grotesque seaside extravaganza.
Jerwood Gallery, Hastings from 25 October until 7 January 2015.
Hogarth's anti-progress: how the father of British painting went missing from our galleries
The scathing satirist William Hogarth put Britains painters on the map, but on the 250th anniversary of his death youll have a hard time seeing his work
It is 250 years since William Hogarth died, so I decided to visit him. I set out to Tate Britain to see his pugnacious self-portrait, painted in 1745. Hogarth depicts himself as the archetypal British painter, tougher, more streetwise and more witty than all those European daubers whose works were coveted by the aristocrat collectors of his day.
You can see those continental masters, adeptly parodied, cluttering the walls of a noble mansion in the first painting in his visual narrative Marriage à-la-Mode, at the National Gallery. Medusas head and a slathering of nudes hang in dimly lit magnificence as a marriage settlement is brokered between a noble in need of cash and a merchant who wants to give his family blue blood. All that posh art, for Hogarth, is a kind of moral poison, whose corrupting cynicism helps bring about the impotence, adultery, duelling, syphilis and deaths that unfold in the next five scathing satirical paintings.
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