Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 222
June 19, 2014
The top 10 corpses in art
The top 10 crime scenes in art
The top 10 monsters in art
The top 10 weirdest artworks ever
The novelist Dostoevsky said you could lose your faith looking at this painting. It contains no hint of Christian resurrection. Holbein has simply painted a dead body, showing its greenish skin and tautening sinews as decay sets in. It is the most frightening of his images of death, which also include darkly comic prints of the dance of death and a huge, distorted skull that sears balefully across his painting The Ambassadors.
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June 18, 2014
Thomas Pynchon: what art can learn from the great pop author
The 1960s produced many pop artists and one great pop novelist. The fiction of Thomas Pynchon is not pop in the sense of popular he's fairly "difficult" but in the true sense of pop art, in that it takes its images, language and references directly from the big, bad, modern world around it.
Today, Pynchon is one of the most important creative figures on the planet. Still pumping out formidable and monstrously contemporary fiction his latest novel Bleeding Edge deals in an engrossing, hilarious and shocking way with the Deep Web, video games and 9/11 he not only disproves all those pessimists who fear literary novels are doomed in the digital age but points a way forward for serious practitioners of all the arts not least for visual artists.
Continue reading...June 17, 2014
Making Colour review enter a dazzling, eye-opening world
This scientific look at how artists risked their lives to create gorgeous colours will blow your mind and open your eyes to art
The magic of Making Colour in pictures
When we see, the different wavelengths of light are registered as the "spectrum" of colours first analysed by Isaac Newton in the 17th century in his famous experiment with a prism. All the colours of the rainbow except it's our minds that convert these lightwaves into what we call colour. When we look at nature, our mind perceives an infinity of colours. One of the basic urges of art through the ages has been to reproduce them but how?
The first colour was red. It blazed on bodies and covered corpses long before it appeared on the walls of painted caves. About 80,000 years ago, homo sapiens in South Africa used an iron ore known as red ochre to make body art. This led to a fundamental discovery that the earth's minerals could be used to paint with.
Continue reading...The World Cup's Abu Ghraib moment? It's not even a World Cup image | Jonathan Jones
The photographer has caught an empty plastic bottle in mid flight. It has been casually aimed by a man in a Brazil football shirt who may or may not be aware that a woman is rooting in the rubbish at the bottom of the bin into which his bottle is bound.
It falls like a missile heading straight for her, the nose cone about to strike her body. The message, intentional or not, is clear enough: this woman is human rubbish. Not only is she scavenging for scraps tossed away by football fans who are leaving the stadium after a match in Brazil, but rubbish is also being dropped on to her, reducing her to detritus.
Continue reading...June 16, 2014
Garry Winogrand, street photographer: a retrospective in pictures
Prolific street photographer Garry Winogrand captured the strangeness of 1960s America. As a major retrospective opens in New York, we take a look at his dazzling images
All photographs © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy of the Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
Continue reading...Louise Bourgeois at Tate Modern review fatally complacent
It wasn't mere sexism that Bourgeois was never ranked alongside her New York contemporaries ... the venerated grande dame's sketches and prints lack the urgency of great art
Unseen Louise Bourgeois artworks in pictures
Louise Bourgeois is famous for room-like installations and giant spiders, for being larger than life in her art as well as her personality. She was the first artist to exhibit in the Tate's Turbine Hall, where her colossal, symbolic sculptures kicked off the new museum's reputation for outsized art. Yet, four years after her death in 2010 at the age of 98, the museum that will always be associated with her steel arachnid Maman has just opened a display of some of her smallest and most intimate works.
All her life Bourgeois, so renowned today as a multimedia artist, made drawings and prints. A generous selection of these, lent by American collectors and Tate friends and many never-before-seen, feature in a new exhibition that has the feel of consecrating an old maîtresse of modern art.
Continue reading...June 13, 2014
How can HP sauce be an icon of Britishness? It's made in Holland
So what are British values and what is British identity? It is the question de nos jours (if that is not too French a way of putting it). The government wants all schools to instil "British" values. While this response to a crisis in Birmingham schools raises the question of what Britishness is, that very same question is raised by the rise of Ukip and the wave of xenophobic nationalism it seems to reveal.
The biggest and most serious challenge to the very idea that Britons share a common identity is, however, the vote in Scotland that will soon decide if the union survives. Is it a bit late to be asking what Britishness is when it might be gone in the autumn?
Continue reading...Why Rio's street artists hate the World Cup, and much more the week in art
Making Colour
This exhibition looks into the rich and strange history of artists' pigments and reveals how paintings in the National Gallery collection use them to create complex beauty and vivid feeling. Should be as summery as a sunflower.
National Gallery, London WC2N from 18 June until 7 September
June 12, 2014
Student work lost in Glasgow School of Art fire is reimagined in digital show
A crane lifts charred debris from the roof of Glasgow School of Art. Windows on the building's ruinous west side, their glass gone, reveal the burnt-out studios within. It is a scene of devastation.
But, in a gallery a few steps away, the courage and creativity of students whose biggest moment was wrecked by the fire that rampaged through Charles Rennie Mackintosh's great building last month makes for what must be the most moving of this summer's graduate exhibitions.
Continue reading...The top 10 beaches in art
The top 10 unforgettable faces in art
The top 10 backs in art
The top 10 black magic artworks
Wind and sand get in your eyes when you look at this astonishingly immediate painterly snapshot of a moment at the seaside. This is a masterpiece of impressionism, and when it was painted its fast, natural, flowing perceptions were utterly removed from what people expected a painting to look like. The beaches of Normandy, especially Trouville, gave the impressionists a perfect arena where middle-class pleasure and unpredictable nature created moments of spontaneity and surprise.
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