Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 221
June 30, 2014
What is the painting of Charles Saatchi throttling Nigella Lawson really saying?
When photographs of Charles Saatchi apparently throttling Nigella Lawson were published in 2013, the public outrage they unleashed left the former Conservative party advertising man vilified and divorced. Saatchi is now best known as a celebrity chef's former husband and as a man who was violent towards a woman in public.
It must come almost as a relief to him to be mocked as the man who "throttles" the art world.
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Glory of the gutter: Dougie Wallace's photos of Blackpool stag and hen dos
Blackpool's wildest stag and hen parties in pictures
We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars, according to Oscar Wilde. Well, fine, Mr Wilde. But some of us prefer looking around the gutter, like photographer Dougie Wallace, who is also known as Glasweegie.
Not that I am calling Blackpool a gutter. But it's a bracingly real and raw theatre of British existence; on that we can agree. And in his new book, Stags, Hens and Bunnies, a collection of ripely coloured photographs of stag and hen parties in the renowned northwestern seaside city, Wallace revels in its down-to-earth thrills.
Continue reading...June 27, 2014
Tracey Emin stands by My Bed as it goes on sale for £1.2m
Vincent van Gogh never had to stand in the glare of a hundred cameras acting as salesperson for the art he had created out of the depths of despair and suffering.
Van Gogh was dead before his works ever became famous or saleable. By the time his painting of his homely straw-covered kitchen chair was cherished as a symbolic self-portrait, Vincent had truly left the building.
Continue reading...A new bridge for London and a trampoline funland in Wales the week in art
Radical Geometry
Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark are among the important artists examined in this survey of modernism in South America, featuring works from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros collection. A chance to see some genuinely revolutionary art.
Royal Academy, London W1J from 5 July until 28 September
The top 10 animal portraits in art
The top 10 unforgettable faces in art
The top 10 monsters
The top 10 beaches
In this subtle and lifelike painting, Fabritius concentrates on a pet bird with a fascination at once emotional and scientific. He paints the bird's feathers in free, almost impressionistic brush strokes. Yet there's something sad about it, something forlorn. Fabritius himself was to die young. His painted bird is lonely and vulnerable in its tamed beauty.
Continue reading...June 26, 2014
Generation: the mega-show that proves Scottish art is fizzing with energy
What kind of administration might an independent Scotland have? Perhaps it would be the Parliament of Funk, the Psychedelic Utopia, or the Rockabilly Empire.
That's what I found myself thinking as I paced the kaleidoscopic disco floor that is Jim Lambie's Zobop. This 1999 classic of contemporary Scottish art is made of lines of coloured tape that completely fill a room. Installed at Edinburgh's Fruitmarket Gallery as part of the mega-exhibition Generation: 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland, which can be seen at venues all over Scotland this summer, it is ecstatic, hallucinatory the ultimate legal high. Lambie is a rock'n'roll Matisse. His chromatic cocktails set the mind free.
Continue reading...June 23, 2014
Bounce Below: why a trampoline fun palace in a Welsh mine is pure art
Through the ages people have crawled into pitch-black subterranean spaces, holding torches to light their way, leaving behind them red, ochre handprints, charcoal drawings of mammoths and trampolines?
Cave art in the 21st century has got interactive. Let's call it art even if the creators make no such highfalutin claim. For art now is getting very close to play, and why not? The widespread feeling that video games are "art" is essentially a claim that art and play are the same thing, which perhaps they are.
Continue reading...Nicholas Penny announces his departure from the National Gallery
They're doubtless cheering in the world of scholarship. The announcement that Dr Nicholas Penny, director of the National Gallery, will retire once a successor is appointed next year means that one of Britain's best art historians will be able to get back to writing books.
Before he took on the National Gallery directorship in 2008, Penny wrote and co-wrote outstanding books about the history of taste, the materials of sculpture, the art of Raphael and the National Gallery collection itself. Walking around the National Gallery collection with him was a dazzling experience as he revealed layer upon layer of erudition about both its masterpieces and its lesser works.
Continue reading...June 20, 2014
Easy riders, erotic Vermeer and Scots on fine form the week in art
Dennis Hopper
The director and actor's photographs are a vivid record of American life in all its subcultural glory.
Royal Academy, London W1, from 26 June until 19 October
Pearl of a museum: Vermeer shines among Dutch icons in new Mauritshuis
The young woman painted by Johannes Vermeer in about 1665 has never looked better. Her perfect skin and lively eyes, as bright as her famous earring, are exquisitely lit as she parts her lips to say what?
The Girl with a Pearl Earring's wordless utterance hints at an erotic come-on that historians cannot explicate but novelists and filmmakers can't help guessing at. Was she Vermeer's lover? His obscure object of desire?
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