Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 215
September 11, 2014
The top 10 masterpieces of Scottish art
From nationalists like Alasdair Gray to honorary Scots like JMW Turner, here are the best works by the men and women who put the art in tartan
The top 10 self-portraits in art
The top 10 codpieces in art
The artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay created Little Sparta, Scotlands most ambitious permanent installation, as a modern meditation on the themes of 18th-century landscape gardening. Classical inscriptions and sculpture mingle with disturbing allusions to warfare and violence the lethal arrows of Apollo, Pan and Panzer tanks in this neo-pastoral masterpiece of conceptual art.
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September 10, 2014
Ming mania at the British Museum is it time we got over our obsession?
The word Ming conjures up precious, fragile, beautiful things. Man breaks priceless Ming vase was a story to remember in 2006, even though the three Chinese vases smashed by a clumsy visitor to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge werent Ming at all. They were made in the Qing (or Manchu) era. So why are we so quick to reach for this word? Why are we so fixated with this one period in the long, brilliant history of China? And does this Ming mania blind us to the intelligence, ambition and originality of other ancient Chinese art?
If you want proof that we westerners are still as in thrall to the Ming dynasty as our grandparents (mine decorated their house with fake Ming vases), consider the fact that not one but two blockbuster Ming exhibitions can be seen in Britain this autumn. Ming: The Golden Empire is at the National Museum of Scotland, while Ming: 50 Years that Changed China opens next week at the British Museum. Theres even a touring exhibit of a single Ming vase, courtesy of the British Museum, for those who cant get to Edinburgh or London.
Continue reading...Would Scottish independence unleash a British art identity crisis?
Tate Britain changing its name, no more YBAs, the return of English art and what about the Welsh? If seismic political change splits nations, what will Britains future artistic landscape look like?
If Scotland votes yes, it will have an obvious impact on British art. For it will no longer be British art. Will we be back to the days when Nikolaus Pevsner gave the 1955 Reith Lectures on The Englishness of English Art and will we also keep hearing loads about The Scottishness of Scottish art?
Its been a long time since anyone talked about English art. When a new generation of artists concentrated in London and Glasgow starting making waves internationally around 1990 no one called them English they were dubbed YBAs Young British Artists. Their fame was enhanced by the Turner prize, given every year to, and I quote the Tate, a British artist under 50 for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation of their work in the 12 months preceding.
Continue reading...September 9, 2014
Eyeballed: Suren Manvelyan's eerie animal close-ups are judging you
Suren Manvelyan's photographs of animal eyes are surely destined soon to fill magazines, coffee-table books and science museums. Who doesn't like to look at powerful images of nature? And these pictures are not just scientific; they are strange. Photographed in ultra high definition on a massive scale in intense colour, these eyes meet and trouble yours. What animals do they belong to? It is impossible to decide just by looking.
These fascinating pictures reach my desk in advance of the 50th Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition that opens at the Natural History Museum on 24 October. Art critics can bang on all we like about this season's big art events, but year in, year out one of the best-loved exhibitions of the British autumn is this mesmerising display of photographs taken by nature lovers of all ages, all over the world.
Continue reading...September 8, 2014
Marc Newson joins Apple the pair go hand in hand
One is famous for biomorphic designs that streamline modern materials into futuristic yet sensuously organic shapes. The other is renowned for actually for pretty much the same thing, as well as some deft electronics.
News that Australian-born designer Marc Newson has joined computer firm Apple does not seem that surprising. Youd be forgiven for thinking he already designed stuff for them, as well for the likes of and . After all, the curvaceous lines of the revolutionary (yet largely forgotten) original 1998 iMac had a lot in common with Newsons bioplastic designs for the Italian kitchenware company . For both Newson and Apple at their best, modern design means a dreamlike meeting of bodies and gadgets, rather than a cold, robotic grandeur.
Continue reading...John Cale's lifelong love affair with drones
Having brought drones to pop music with the Velvet Underground, the musician is now working with drones of a different kind at the Barbican in London
This weekend Velvet Underground founding member John Cale will unleash an art installation that tries to redeem the word drone.
Drones are today synonymous with war and surveillance. They are autonomous flying objects that can fire weapons at (presumed) terrorists, or film city life for the security services. It appears drones are going to become an ever-more visible part of our lives. No wonder artists are intrigued by these robotic aircraft. A video installation at this years Edinburgh festival combined the image of the electronic drone with the drone of Scottish bagpipes.
Continue reading...Bob Dylan and the rockers who paint reviewed
With the news that Miley Cyrus is to enter the world of visual arts, we set our art critic to work assessing what happens when musicians pick up paintbrushes. Hes not keen
Miley Cyrus sculptures to be exhibited in New YorkWhy do musicians feel the need to try their hands at visual arts? If you are successful in one creative field, you are probably wisest leaving it at that. Its not a given that creative talent will cross over from playing stadium rock to putting brush to canvas or making sculptures, as Miley Cyrus has now done. After all, Picasso never went on tour performing the Spanish gypsy music he loved. And yet, something drives one rock star after another to that desperate resort, the celebrity art exhibition. So how do the rock artists rate as visual artists?
Continue reading...Late Turner at Tate Britain review an exciting, entrancing show
Turner blossoms late at the Tate in pictures
The twilight of the gods has come to Tate Britain. Like a Wagnerian opera painted in mist and fire, the late works of JMW Turner rise from silence to throbbing power, wheel out their visionary leitmotifs, and crash in apocalyptic frenzy.
Wagner and Turner have a great deal in common. Both are artists of myth on a grand scale who wallow in magnificent ambiguities and lashings of atmosphere. In Turner's 1837 painting The Parting of Hero and Leander, a lover is drowned in a boiling roiling sea while heavenly fire glows red above a Greek city that hubristically totters on a mountaintop. How Wagnerian is that? It is all an allegory of doomed desire, a grandiose illumination of Turner's long, unreadable poem The Fallacies of Hope (again like Wagner, he wrote his own libretto).
Continue reading...Art, design and architecture: what to see in autumn 2014
A season for Turner and Rembrandt, Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei, Constable and Sigmar Polke all this, and the Turner prize, too
Autumn arts preview 2014 Continue reading...September 5, 2014
Turner, dwarves and dogs in space the week in art
Did JMW Turner discover abstract art in his old age? Or is that an unhistorical way of seeing this painter who loved ideas, history and myth? One thing is certain: his bow of burning gold will enflame us this autumn.
Tate Britain, London SW1P, from 10 September until 25 January 2015.
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