Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 216
September 4, 2014
The top 10 self-portraits in art
The top 10 codpieces in art
The top 10 ancient Greek artworks
Hockney is ruthless in his self-portraits; he never poses or tries to look good. What he does is to record the act of self-portraiture the fact of a painter looking in a mirror and trying to record what he sees and give it a deliberately awkward material truth. In doing so, he paints the ideal of honest observation.
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September 3, 2014
Were Neanderthals really artists?
The discovery of "art" carved by Neanderthals close, extinct relatives of our own species Homo sapiens in a cave on Gibraltar is being hailed as proof that these long-derided early human were just as smart as we are. But were Neanderthals really artists?
The engraved lines found on Gibraltar are said to be 40,000 years old, making them older than the the oldest-known cave paintings by Homo sapiens,which can be seen in the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave in southern France. It certainly seems that the capacity for symbolic thought is not unique to Homo sapiens, but do the incised lines of Gibraltar really prove a capacity for advanced thought? Can we call them "art" at all? I am not convinced.
Continue reading...September 1, 2014
Stonehenge was circular? Well, blow me down
Its great that we have evidence the Salisbury Plain monument was round but did anyone seriously ever think otherwise?
It is often hard to make sense of archaeological stories in the news. Are we, the public, being patronised by a profession that assumes were completely ignorant and must be spoon-fed information that doesnt add up to much? Or has archaeological science wandered so genuinely far from common sense that it sees news in what may, to interested outsiders, look blindingly obvious?
At the very end of the summer silly season comes the news that Stonehenge may have been a complete stone circle after all.
Continue reading...August 29, 2014
Frank Auerbach: a painter's painter of horrors and joy
When Frank Auerbach was a few weeks away from his eighth birthday his parents put him on a train from Germany to Britain, his luggage neatly packed and labelled. It was April 1939 and he would never see them again. Within little more than a decade this orphan of the Holocaust would be exhibiting bold, pungent, paint-laden pictures that fascinated critics and fellow artists. In the 1950s the art critic David Sylvester already thought young Auerbach might be a "great painter."
Another fan was Lucian Freud, nine years older and already established, who came to an Auerbach exhibition and simply said to the artist: "Thank you." They were to be close friends until Freud's death in 2011. Freud has left his friend an extraordinary gift. The bequest is technically to the nation. Freud's collection of 15 paintings and 29 drawings by Frank Auerbach has come to the government in lieu of inheritance tax. It is now on view at Tate Britain and will be allocated to public galleries.
Continue reading...King for a day: what I'd do if I ruled Tate Britain
I offended some people this week when I said that Frank Auerbach's art belongs in the Tate, and should not be scattered across a number of regional collections.
What I wrote was not a disparagement of museums outside London, which obviously do not need to perform the same role as a national museum. A great national museum focuses attention on the best artists, establishes the canon, safeguards the tradition.
Continue reading...August 28, 2014
The top 10 codpieces in art
The top 10 ancient Greek artworks
The top 10 talents lost in the first world war
This great portrait of a Renaissance military man throbs with masculinity. Francesco Maria I della Rovere exudes potency from his beard and his darkly glittering armour to his sword pommel and baton. He also displays it by wearing a chain-mail codpiece. And yet, his melancholy face betrays a world weariness that undercuts all this phallic pomp.
Continue reading...August 27, 2014
Will cyborgs turn art into a supersensory futureworld?
Wherever humans live or have lived, you will find art. It looms up on remote Pacific islands and on rocks in the Sahara. For students of human evolution it is what marks the coming of the "modern human mind": the superb cave art of the last ice age reveals the arrival of homo sapiens and our modern brains in Europe.
But is seeing art as unmistakably human a complacent bit of self-regard? Claims are constantly made that aesthetic impulses existed in our ancestors long before they were "modern humans". The symmetrical handaxes hewn more than a million years ago in places such as Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, for example, blur the creative border between artists and animals.
Continue reading...August 26, 2014
Frank Auerbach: the master painter of deepest, darkest London
London is a city of paint. It may not seem that way. Most people probably visualise the boulevards of Paris and skyscrapers of New York when we think about painted cities: of Camille Pissarro's Boulevard Montmartre, Robert Delaunay's Eiffel Tower or Georgia O'Keeffe's Radiator Building.
How about Frank Auerbach's Rebuilding the Empire Cinema, Leicester Square?
Continue reading...August 24, 2014
Turner and Constable exhibitions revive Britain's greatest art rivalry
The most spectacular artistic rivalry in British history will be revived in September when blockbuster exhibitions by two of the nation's most renowned painters pitch them into direct competition, just as they were in their lifetimes two centuries ago.
The simultaneous shows unavoidably provoke the question asked ever since the artists were showing side by side in the Romantic age: who is the greatest British painter ever?
Continue reading...August 22, 2014
The naked Italians in Barcelona are a sad reflection on modern tourism | Jonathan Jones
Tourists used to be onlookers. Once upon a time we travelled with guidebook in hand, eyes wide open to the wonders of art and architecture, of new places and other people. Or that was the ideal. Now, to judge from this photograph of Italian tourists partying naked on the streets of Barcelona, the nature of travel has been reversed: the tourist is the sight, the wonder, the monster to behold.
Its as if, in the age of the selfie, no one can stand to be a mere spectator. The centre of the show has to be me, me, me. The streakers parents may have travelled in tour parties led by a guide through La Sagrada Família or Las Ramblas but, at least to judge from this picture and other reports of casual mayhem at some resorts this summer, many people are now going abroad to make a spectacle of themselves.
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