Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 225
May 21, 2014
Hallelujah! Why Bill Viola's Martyrs altarpiece at St Paul's is to die for
Bill Viola's second coming: watch the eerie video installation Martyrs here
Bill Viola has created a powerful modern altarpiece for St Paul's Cathedral that perfectly suits the restrained spirituality of this most English of churches.
Coming into Christopher Wren's great building on a weekday morning when crowded buses surround this London icon, you notice how ascetic its atmosphere is. Greek mosaics and the perfect geometry of a dome that suggests the clockwork universe of Wren's contemporary Isaac Newton make St Paul's a place of cool, even philosophical, prayer.
Continue reading...
May 20, 2014
The top 10 goddesses in art
The top 10 monsters in art
The top 10 unforgettable faces in art
The top 10 sexiest artworks
The ancient Greek goddess of wisdom glares powerfully out of Klimt's visionary fin de siecle masterpiece that mingles ancient mythology and modern psychology. In Klimt's Vienna, artists, writers and not least the doctor of dreams Sigmund Freud were fascinated by the power of the unconscious and the magnetism of sexuality. Athena here is not so much a divinity of reason as a primitive archetype of female authority and strength.
Continue reading...Faking a fortune: why Damien Hirst's paintings are poor imitations of art
Wait, wait. Let me get my head around this. A man has been jailed for selling fake Damien Hirst paintings to an art dealer, having originally bought them believing them to be real?
To add a surreal footnote, he happens to be a Florida pastor. He was judged guilty and must go to jail because by the time he sold them on, he knew them to be fake.
Continue reading...May 19, 2014
Kenneth Clark: Looking for Civilisation review 'A destructive waste of time'
What should have been an exploration of Clark's witty championing of great art turns him into a prehistoric old fart
Kenneth Clark: arrogant snob or saviour of art?
Why should people of the 21st century be interested in an art historian who died in 1983 and was widely attacked in his own lifetime for celebrating old genres and out-of-date attitudes; for praising the nude as if feminism never happened, and doting on the lofty heights of western civilisation without appearing to acknowledge that any other civilisations exist?
There are several excellent reasons: because he explained the art of giants such as Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael more clearly than anyone else; because he championed unfashionable, "elitist" art in ways that are still thought-provoking; because he was so good at starting arguments that people still argue with him today.
Continue reading...Tomb raider: enter the British Museum's underground mummy store
It was a couple of days after I visited the mummy store that my nightmares began. Bandaged bodies on shelves. A loose wrapping, perhaps about to uncoil further as the corpse within awoke from its 3,000-year sleep. Most of all, the painted face of a young man gazing untiringly into darkness as the curator turned out the lights behind us and firmly locked the door.
Hidden in the heart of the British Museum, deep within a labyrinth of research departments the public never sees, is a secret world of the dead. This museum, whose collections blossomed in the age of empire when Egypt was under British control, owns more than 100 mummies. Many are on permanent display. Eight were taken to hospital to undergo CT scans for the museum's revelatory new exhibition Ancient Lives. Others lie here, on wooden pallets, layered one over the other, in London's most enigmatic morgue.
Continue reading...May 16, 2014
Mummies, Marina Abramovic and the 9/11 Memorial Museum the week in art
Ancient Lives
This fascinating exhibition is centred on eight mummies from the museum's collection that were taken to hospital to undergo CT scans. The results are displayed as interactive videos that gradually reveal the mummies' interiors. Fragile treasures that are not usually on display, including an ancient Egyptian wig, heighten the intimate encounter with the people inside the bandages.
British Museum, London WC1B, 22 May until 30 November.
May 15, 2014
The top 10 monsters in art
The top 10 unforgettable faces in art
The top 10 criminal artists
The top 10 drinkers in art
This terrifying silent film of Dracula made by Murnau in 1922 is a masterpiece of German expressionist art. It is a hugely original creation, with a vampire who looks like a ghoul or rat-man prowling about, casting deathly shadows. In fact the appearance of Nosferatu's undead creature echoes such expressionist paintings as Munch's Scream and Schoenberg's self-portraits. Like these expressionists, Murnau uses grotesque and strange images to touch the inner mind.
Continue reading...Ivory: the elephant in the art gallery
Ivory is beautiful. Carved and polished by craftsmen in fantastic shapes, this hard yet highly workable material fills the great museums of the world with curiosity and wonder. Consider the fantastic intricacy of a 16th-century ivory mask from Benin (in modern Nigeria) that can be seen at the British Museum, or the superb medieval ivory artworks in the V&A that include a Ninth-century Adoration of the Magi carved out of elephant tusk.
And yet ivory is murder. No one today can defend the killing of animals for their tusks. Ivory is dead as an art material no more of that, thanks. But what about all the ivory treasures that already exist, from the Lewis Chessmen to Islamic masterpieces?
Continue reading...May 14, 2014
Blood, semen and tears: why artists are obsessed with using their bodily fluids
Art made with bodily fluids appears the essence of the weirdly and wonderfully new. Artist Rose-Lynn Fisher, for instance, has just made a series of landscape images using what she claims are 100 varieties of tears revealing the difference between tears of sorrow and tears caused by chopping onions, and many other instances of weeping. Well, if you cry easily, you may as well get some art out it, I suppose.
This tearful art joins with outpourings of piss most famously Andres Serrano's Piss Christ and ejaculations of semen like Vito Acconci's Seedbed (who masturbated for eight hours) in the copious archive of body fluid art. Another artist who has used semen is Antony Gormley, while Matthew Barney extrudes all kinds of strange stuff in The Cremaster Trilogy, most of it probably synthetic but we can't be sure.
Continue reading...May 13, 2014
The first world war in German art: Otto Dix's first-hand visions of horror
Art of the apocalypse: Otto Dix's hellish first world war visions in pictures
In 1924 the German artist and war veteran Otto Dix looked back at the first world war on its 10th anniversary, just as we are doing on its 100th. What did he see? Today there is a fashion, in Britain, to celebrate the heroism of our grandfathers and their hard-won victory of 1914-1918. It's as if the clock is being turned back and the propaganda of the war believed all over again. Even the German war guilt clause written by the victors into the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 has been turned into "fact" after all, who wants to trawl through the complex causes of this conflict and face the depressing truth that it ultimately happened because no one in July 1914 understood how destructive a modern industrial war could be?
We need to shake off the nostalgia of a centenary's forgetful pomp and look at the first world war through fresh eyes German eyes. For no other artists saw this dreadful war as clearly as German artists did. While British war artists, for example, were portraying the generals, Germans saw the skull in no man's land.
Continue reading...Jonathan Jones's Blog
- Jonathan Jones's profile
- 8 followers
