Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 232

Renaissance Impressions review – poetic chiaroscuro woodcuts

Royal Academy
George Baselitz's exhibition of woodcuts is a series of hand grenades thrown at the ruling cliches of the Renaissance

Renaissance art is killed for many people by its textbook status. It has been at the apex of western culture for so long that it has been buried by scholarship. The titles of books such as How to Read a Renaissance Painting suggest there is some pre-decided way to enjoy the Renaissance. It is the property of academics.

So, Danke Gott for Georg Baselitz. This eminent contemporary artist has an unusual hobby: collecting Renaissance woodcut prints. Being an artist himself, Baselitz does not look at thiswork through a dim veil of iconographic interpretation or see it as evidence for social history. He loves it as art. He revels in the colours and poetic atmospheres of the chiaroscuro woodcut, invented in early 16th-century Germany, which uses layers of coloured inks to give prints on paper some of the rich suggestiveness of painting.

This exhibition is a series of hand grenades thrown at the ruling cliches of the Renaissance. You thought it was all strait-laced religious art and perfect portraiture? Here are bizarre, wilful caprices whose pleasure lies in subtle chromatic suggestions and shadowy uncertainties. You thought printmaking was a German obsession? Most of this art is Italian, though the earliest examples of tonal woodcuts in the show are by Lucas Cranach and Hans Burgkmair.

Baselitz's enthusiasm fuels this exhibition, but his finds are supplemented by loans from the Albertina in Vienna. Without detracting from the artist's inspired eye that animates these rarities, the most beautiful things here are from the Albertina, including portraits of saints by the Sienese artist Domenico Beccafumi that use breathtaking shadow to give faces a profound character and spiritual mystery.

This is a seductive ride into the shadowlands of the Renaissance, with one qualification. In the first room, we get a glimpse of how the coloured woodcut was used in Gemany where it was invented. The Albertina provides one of Hans Baldung Grien's eerie chiaroscuro woodcuts of witches' sabbaths. But why not more German witches, more chiaroscuro sabbaths of the north? As it is, this exhibition says something unexpected: while Germans were the pioneers of this subtle style of printmaking, it was Italians who did it best. Surprisingly enough, Baselitz is selling Germany short.

Rating: 4/5

ExhibitionsRoyal Academy of ArtsJonathan Jones
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Cézanne and the Modern review – 'puts Ashmolean in the big league'

First full-scale exhibition dedicated to the Pearlman collection shows off the glistening colours and chaotic rhapsody of Cézanne's art

The glistening colours of one of Paul Cézanne's greatest paintings absorb every brain cell that has anything to do with visual attention in a beautiful new exhibition at Oxford's Ashmolean Museum. Deep greens, ochres, eggshell blues, all scattered and massed, fill the mind with a chaotic rhapsody of square brushmarks.

A mountain, you say? I got distracted – so it is. The masterpiece at the heart of this show is one of Cézanne's oil paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire, the Provençal peak this agonised onlooker from Aix could see from his studio window. It was painted in about 1904 to 1906. But go right up to it and what you see is paint, applied with a unique mixture of freedom and intensity. In this canvas's pixelated screen of planes and stabs of vibrating pigment every revolution of modern art is foretold. The urinal, the shark, the lights going on and off?

Before any of that jazz the Mont Sainte-Victoire had to reveal to Cézanne that the harder we try to see reality, the more we get entangled in our own memories, desires and fears. Cézanne and the Modern lives up to its bold Cezanne and the Modern, showcasing the Pearlman collection, is 'quite a coup' for Oxford's Ashmolean museum. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardiantitle. First of all, it has a formidable choice of Cézanne's art, from this great vision of a shimmering pale mountain above a field of ambiguities to a choice array of his endlessly suggestive watercolours. And second, it makes you think about modern art – when it began, and what it is.

This is the first ever full-scale exhibition dedicated to the art collection of Henry and Rose Pearlman. It's quite a coup for the Ashmolean: this puts it in the big league of our most serious art museums. Yet some might doubt the "modern" credentials of the Pearlmans. While they lavished the fortune earned by Henry's business, the Eastern Cold Storage Insulation Corporation, on European art, they get a bit cautious after Cézanne. They preferred Modigliani to Picasso, Chaim Soutine to Matisse. What they really "got" was art that takes the traditional genres – landscape and still life and portraiture – and twists them in bold but still beautiful ways.

This makes them fascinating and original collectors of the modern, for those old genres are where modern art begins. Modernism did not leap fully-formed out of an abstract egg at the start of the 20th century. This revolution was rooted in a painful struggle with reality, as artists looked so hard at the world they became aware of the unreliable nature of their own perceptions. We see that happening here in Van Gogh's hallucinatory 1888 painting Tarascon Stagecoach and a marvel of unabashed staring by Degas, After the Bath: Woman Drying Herself (1890s). Most of all we see it in the watercolours and oil paintings by Cézanne that give the exhibition its authority. Cézanne never takes anything for granted. Whether he is looking at trees in a forest or fruit on a plate, he sees it and re-sees it, sizes it, weighs it, measures it and dreams about it. What he shows is the record of his looking, the autobiography of his existence as an artist. At once analytical and enigmatically passionate, every mark he makes is a tormented argument with himself. What is "the modern" this exhibition maps? It is art's recognition that nothing in nature is quite so strange and fascinating as our own perceptions and interpretations of it. Cézanne shows us that to look is to be lost in the mind's dappled lilacs and reds.

• Win tickets to the exhibition plus an overnight stay for two at Malmaison, Oxford. For more, go to theguardian.com/extra

Rating: 5/5

ArtAshmolean MuseumMuseumsPaul CezanneJonathan Jones
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The 9/11 attack seen from space – an image of impotence | Jonathan Jones

We witness world events as never before, but despite getting so much information so quickly, we remain ultimately helpless

This still from a video shot by an astronaut from the International Space Station offers a new perspective on world history. It was taken by American astronaut Frank Culbertson on 11 September 2001. As he looks down on New York from space, a vast plume of smoke hangs over the harbour. The smoke trail is longer than Manhattan island.

Culbertson saw an unnatural event as if it were a natural one. Like a volcano spewing ash, the destruction of the World Trade Centre sent enough dust into the sky to change the map-like view of the earth in an astronaut's eye. This startling off-world perspective is a reminder more than a decade on of the scale of what happened that day.

It is also an image of impotence. While people were dying down below – and he later found out he had lost a friend in the attacks – Culbertson could only see the eerie image of a distant event. He was sitting safely in a tin can far above the earth and there was nothing he could do to help.

This is the situation everyone is in who was not there. World events are witnessed by the world as never before; history can be seen as it happens – from you and me following a live blog on events in the Crimea to an astronaut watching the spinning earth. But does it make any difference that we have so much information so fast? Knowing up-to-the-minute what is happening on the far side of the planet – or even in your next door neighbour's house – may leave you as helpless and passive a witness as the astronaut who filmed that smoke plume.

Even as Channel 4 plans to show this video in a documentary on life in space, planes and ships have been scouring the sea looking for traces of the missing Malaysian airliner MH370. So far this "vanished" airliner has confronted the modern world with something unusual: a dearth of information, an absence of images. Yet even if every fact becomes known, even if every piece of the story falls into place, will this make the experiences of the people on that plane any less isolated? The eyes of the world are just eyes – watching is not helping. It is not being there. It changes nothing.

The Ukraine crisis in particular confronts us hourly with the uselessness of watching and waiting. The facts are all there, with or without satellite images to give the political map of the region a spurious scientific aspect. Each new development is seen around the world on a host of media platforms. None of this helps anyone as options for action appear starkly limited. William Hague speaks sombre words into the microphone in his space suit as he floats helplessly in the void; Barack Obama sweats in the control room and tries another rhetorical gambit worked out by the backroom boys. Washington, we have a problem. In space, no one can hear you threaten sanctions. Like astronauts watching from the ISS, everyone can see the problem, but there may as well be a galaxy between us and the Crimea for all the difference that knowledge makes.

The history of political knowledge is a curve that peaked some time ago. From the age of Christopher Columbus up to 1914, improvements in communication – from the dissemination of printed maps to the rise of newspapers, telegraphs and photography – gave (western) societies increasing control over their fate. But for a century now, since August 1914, the hope that science would allow the world to govern itself rationally has been exploded. Knowing all the facts does not make political decisions any easier. Witnessing world events does not not mean knowing what to do about them.

An astronaut helplessly watches the planet below burn. We stare at our screens following the latest from Sevastopol, reaching for a snack that is floating away in the zero gravity of our times.

September 11 2001United StatesNasaSpacePhotographyJonathan Jones
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Cézanne, Wes Anderson and a memorial for Utøya – the week in art

The painter stars alongside Van Gogh and Gauguin in an exhibition of treasures from the Pearlman Collection. Plus Wes Anderson's fictional artwork Boy with Apple, and a 'memory wound' in Norway – all in your weekly art multipack

Exhibition of the week

Cézanne and the Modern
The awkward, isolated, thoughtful eye of Cézanne digs deep into the structure of things as he tries to paint not the passing show but the inner truth of nature. That struggle leads him to the discovery that everything is ambiguous and there are no certainties, as his pictures start to break up into planes of light. He and other founders of modern art, including Gauguin and Van Gogh, star in this exhibition of treasures from the Pearlman Collection.
• Ashmolean Museum, Oxford OX1, from 13 March until 22 June.

Other exhibitions this week

Renaissance Impressions
The artist Georg Baselitz collects strange and powerful German Renaissance chiaroscuro woodcuts; his collection is supplemented by works from the Albertina in Vienna to create what should be a fascinating encounter with witches and other visions.
• Royal Academy, London W1J, from 15 March until 8 June.

I Cheer a Dead Man's Sweetheart
Painting in Britain today is explored in this exhibition that stars Alessandro Raho, Frank Auerbach, Sophie von Hellermann and many more.
• De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea TN40, from 15 March until 29 June.

Michael Craig-Martin
The guru of conceptual art exhibits in the gardens of one of Britain's most spectacular stately homes.
• Chatsworth, Derbyshire DE45, from 16 March until 29 June.

Dieter Roth and Arnulf Rainer
Two great modern German artists are revealed here as longtime collaborators.
• Hauser and Wirth, London W1S, from 14 March until 3 May.

Masterpiece of the week

Paul Cézanne – Self-Portrait (c1880-81)
There is no more troubling diagnosis of the modern condition than Cézanne's restless self-portrait as a man uncertain who he is.
• National Gallery, London WC2N.

Image of the weekWhat we learned this week

That Norway is remembering its Utøya massacre with a 'symbolic wound' in the landscape

That the new Ruin Lust show at Tate is 'bonkers and brilliant'

Why dictators are being shoved in fridges in the name of art

Why Tameka Norris is the black Cindy Sherman

That the era of Helvetica domination may be coming to a close

Who the best women graffiti artists are

How Boy with Apple, the fake painting in Wes Anderson's Grand Budapest Hotel, stacks up against real Renaissance art

That Piranesi's fantastical visions have been 3D printed into life for the first time ever

A history of the Viking world – in 10 extraordinary objects

That there's so much more to Gauguin than lush colourful Tahitian paintings

And finally ...

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Paul CezannePaintingInstallationArtWes AndersonJonathan Jones
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Is The Grand Budapest Hotel's 'Boy with Apple' artwork plausible?

The coveted 'priceless' painting in Wes Anderson's film is actually a McGuffin. So how does it stack up against the works of the real Renaissance masters?

Boy with Apple is a quintessential product of the Czech mannerist, Habsburg high Renaissance, Budapest neo-humanist style. To put it another way, it is a finely constructed piece of nonsense in the same playful spirit as everything else in Wes Anderson's delectable middle European fantasy, The Grand Budapest Hotel.

The plot of Anderson's pink gateau of a movie, with its dowager duchesses, murderers and bakers, turns on the fate of a "priceless" Renaissance portrait of a youth pensively clawing an apple with long, bony fingers. It's only a McGuffin in the end – it's actually been painted for the film by artist Michael Taylor – but Boy with Apple is a fiction within a fiction that pays delicately knowing homage to the art history of old Europe. Pretending it is a real Renaissance masterpiece, what do we see?

The boy is short-haired and melancholic, his codpiece a sinister presence among the velvets and brocades in which he is clad. Unusually, he is seated, a pose normally reserved for women in Renaissance portraiture – standing would be more manly. In the shadows behind him a mysterious note is pinned behind a parted curtain. Are we to conclude that he is an unmanly young man, and if so, is the note from a male admirer?

Stylistically, the artist Johannes Van Hoytl the Younger, to whom this renowned and unimaginably expensive masterpiece is attributed, has much in common with other masters of the Renaissance in northern Europe. His fascination with the boy's extravagantly crooked fingers resembles drawings by German artist Albrecht Dürer – in particular a self-portrait sketch in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, in which he displays almost precisely the same hand gesture. His revelation of an enigmatic message behind a curtain is reminiscent of similarly portentous objects in such Renaissance masterpieces as Hans Holbein the Younger's portrait of the merchant Georg Giese surrounded with the stuff of trade, or the emblems of greed and vanity with which Quentin Metsys accuses the couple in his picture The Moneylender and His Wife. The moral emblem at the heart of Van Hoytl the Younger's painting is of course the oldest of all Judaeo-Christian symbolic objects: the apple with which the serpent tempted Eve.

So this portrait is a study in temptation, and as such it is inflected with a sensuality typical of mannerist art. In 16th-century Europe, artists bored by the classical rules of the Renaissance portrayed the human figure in a more "mannered" way, stretching out limbs and necks, distorting poses. This youth's long fingers are typically mannerist. So much about him – his short hair, finely clad form, those hints of depravity – echoes the mannerist genius Bronzino. It's not hard to work out how such a painting found its way into an art collection in central Europe. The eccentric Habsburg Emperor Rudolph II, who filled his palace in Prague with curiosities, lured many Dutch and Flemish mannerists to his mad court. The Habsburgs were the greatest art patrons of the Renaissance, and the heritage they left behind is rich in masterpieces of Boy with Apple's ilk. This is exactly the kind of painting you can expect to see in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Szépművészeti Múzeum in Budapest or the picture gallery of Prague Castle.

Boy with Apple really is priceless, as an art history in-joke. The punchline, however, comes when the film's villain realises it is missing. In its place hangs a watercolour of lesbian lovers by real-life Austrian genius Egon Schiele. In his rage at losing a completely fictional work of 16th-century art, the character smashes this modern treasure over a chair.

ArtWes AndersonJonathan Jones
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Piranesi, Fantasy and Excess review: where imagination and reality collide

Giovanni Piranesi's 18th-century gothic visions on a page are made real by 21st-century magic at Sir John Soane's museum

The 18th century artist, antiquarian and would-be architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) possessed one of the most imaginative minds ever to have brooded on the visual arts.

Piranesi presented himself as an expert on ancient Rome and a designer of practical buildings and objects.

In fact he was a spellbinding fantasist whose exquisitely etched visions of overpowering ruins and monstrous prisons have influenced experimental culture from the first Gothic novels to the architecture of Rem Koolhaas.

As well as creating architectural images that tease and haunt the mind, Piranesi invented objects to decorate a dreamer's home.

He fabricated such fictions as a gigantic "Roman" vase, the ultimate fake antique for an English stately home, now owned by the British Museum.

Working in Rome when it was the destination of every artist and aristocrat on the Grand Tour, he "restored" ancient remains from sites such a Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli.

Most of Piranesi's ideas for interior design stayed, however, on the printed pages of his ravishing books – until now.

In a delightful exhibition at Sir John Soane's Museum in London, Piranesi's dreamlike prints are shown next to objects that translate his extravagant notions – table legs shaped like goats' limbs with faces on them; a teapot that rests on a tortoise and has a bee for a spout – into the three-dimensional world.

These visionary artefacts have only ever existed as flat designs on paper. Now they have been made real by Factum Arte in Madrid using the miracle of 3D printing.

If you thought 3D printers were only good for making guns, think again. Here is a truly mind-boggling use for digital technology.

As Factum Arte's Adam Lowe explains, digitally scanning the phantasmagoric forms of Piranesi's chairs, tripods and other classical follies takes vast amounts of memory.

The results fit like a Gothic gauntlet into Sir John Soane's Museum where they take up natural places among this Georgian architect's collection of ruins and fragments exhibited in deep wells of shadow and mirror-enhanced vistas.

Soane, as this exhibition makes plain, was profoundly influenced by Piranesi. They met in Rome in 1778 and Piranesi presented his young architectural fan with four prints.

This was to grow into the finest collection of the Italian visionary's graphic works in Britain, amassed by Soane and still kept in the house and museum that is his own masterpiece of bizarre dreamlike architecture and decor.

The prints are at the heart of this show. There's a rare bound volume of the Carceri – "Prisons" – imagining a prison so vast it encompasses the entire world.

Apparently endless vaults, towering staircases and spectacular interactions of light and darkness define spaces that are at once exhilarating and terrible, anticipating the works of de Sade in their fascination with power and cruelty.

Mercifully it is not yet possible to 3D print Piranesi's prisons, but the free rein of fantasy that his Carceri exemplify also ran to ideas for Egyptian-style chimney pieces and unreal views of impossible jumbles of Roman ruins.

The real-world objects that Factum Arte have generated from such images are shown alongside Piranesi's designs and subtly scattered through the house and museum.

In the Monk's Parlour, an eerie, dark corner of the spooky crypt where Soane arranged medieval fragments to create an atmosphere fit for reading the ghost stories then coming into fashion, sits a grotesque golden chair.

It is – literally – straight out of Piranesi. I want to sit in it and read something frightening. Imagination and reality collide in this exhibition, and imagination wins.

Rating: 4/5

PaintingRem KoolhaasSir John Soane's MuseumArtMuseums3D printingJonathan Jones
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Dictators in fridges: the artist putting Franco and co in cold storage

Spanish artist Eugenio Merino has stuffed mannequins of totalitarian leaders into chiller cabinets. It's just what we need in this age of burgeoning nationalism

It seems incredible that General Franco is still oppressing artists in Spain from beyond the grave. The dictator who rose to power by defeating Spain's Republic in the 1930s civil war and ruled until his death in 1975 might seem to be a forgotten nightmare in today's democratic Spain. But an artist has succeeded in provoking a foundation that preserves his memory into taking some distinctly intolerant legal steps.

Eugenio Merino is being taken to court – for the second time – for works he has made using the image of the late authoritarian ruler. His work Punching Franco is a lifelike head of Franco designed to be used as a punchbag; the Franco Foundation says it is "demeaning".

He has also been sued for his work Always Franco, a lifelike figure of Franco inside a fridge. He has now extended this out to create a whole series of dictators in fridges.

Merino's refrigerated dictators sound great. Hopefully we can look forward to Mussolini by the cold pasta, Stalin next to the vodka and Pinochet's fridge being left off so he goes rotten and has to be dumped in the rubbish. Can you recycle fascists?

Apparently you can, in 21st-century Europe. The amazing thing about Merino's dictator art is not that he does it but that people will come out of the woodwork to take offence at a satire on someone like Franco.

The atrocities that brought Franco to power are well-documented, not least in art. Picasso would not let his painting Guernica be shown in Spain while Franco lived. It is a howl of rage at the bombing of Guernica by the Luftwaffe, carried out on Franco's behalf in the Spanish civil war. The poet Federico García Lorca was murdered by fascists in the same war.

Franco won but his true face was seen by artists and still is, in these appropriately contemptuous portraits of him as punching bag or chilled corpse.

How can anyone speak out in defence of Franco's reputation? Yet in contemporary Europe this is no surprise. Neo-fascists have become part of the political scene in Greece, while the current situtation in Ukraine has eerie echoes of the 1930s. In Britain the "patriotic" rantings of Ukip are taken seriously, Scottish nationalists pursue autarchy and even the centenary of the terrible first world war is seen by some as an opportunity for nationalist nostalgia.

These are confused days. The lies and delusions of every variety of nationalism get an absurdly tolerant hearing as the global economic optimism of a decade ago seems a long, long time ago.

The opposite of global capitalism is not, it turns out, a new left but a new right which casually dabbles in odious nationalism of various tints. So we can't be sure the age of the dictators is gone. Maybe Franco and his brethren really are just waiting in their fridges.

SculptureInstallationArtFrancisco FrancoSpainEuropeJonathan Jones
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Why has looking at art in Britain become a snob's rite of passage?

Art appreciation should be classless. But these days you just aren't posh if you can't talk the talk about contemporary art

The love of art should be a simple, universal emotion. That's how I think of it. That's how I experience it. What a fantastic equalising thing it is that all of us can go and look at Leonardo da Vinci's Virgin of the Rocks in the National Gallery, for free, and linger as long as we like. Art should be for all. But that's not how it is in Britain.

Looking at art in this country is a snob's rite of passage. There's currently a debate about class after a government adviser said working-class children who want to go to top universities and get top jobs need to get middle-class cultural experiences like going to restaurants and the theatre. The wonderful thing about this advice is what a shallow view of culture it reveals. Knowing how to pronounce Verdi and holding your knife and fork correctly are accomplishments on the same level in the class ideology of the top people.

Art is deeply mired in this outlook. To have "taste" in art and know a bit about it is part of the battery of glib accomplishments that mark out the elite from ordinary folk. This hateful art snobbery has nothing to do with a true love of art – it is just about being able to talk the talk.

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu produced a frightening analysis of culture and class. In his book Distinction he showed that in France when he was writing, cultural attitudes mirrored social positions not just broadly but minutely – for instance, people at the very top of the elite with the greatest "cultural capital" were more likely to like minimalism.

I've never entirely trusted minimalist art since reading this. It just seems so true. To be refined is to distance yourself from dirt: the most refined modern art is surely a minimalist work like a Donald Judd stack. The simplicity and austerity of minimalism is today's most dramatic assertion of superiority.

This helps explain why the British middle class (which in this debate actually seems to mean the English upper middle class) has taken so easily to contemporary art. It used be the done thing to sneer at modernism. Then at a certain moment, when the Sun was sneering at the Turner prize, posh people suddenly got it that the clever and therefore posh thing was to LIKE new art.

All those public-school kids learning art history are not just studying the Renaissance – they are getting a head start on Grayson Perry.

Once upon a time, the snobs went to see cathedrals. Today they go to the Serpentine. It's the same old fakery, and it's easier to absorb the ideas of Andy Warhol than it is to remember which is the perpendicular style, in between going to the opera and eating at the latest restaurant or whatever other rituals make you fit for polite society according to our government of Tracey Emin-loving snobs.

ArtPaintingJonathan Jones
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Vikings at the British Museum: great ship but where's the story?

The longship at the heart of the British Museum's new Viking exhibition is spectacular – but the rest of the show is a bloodless collection of bowls and brooches

It cuts through the air like a sword through flesh, relentless. The prow is as sharp as a shark's tooth. A fragile heart of oak survives within the metal skeleton. This ghost ship is solid yet empty, there and not there.

Roskilde 6, the biggest Viking ship ever found, is the lifeblood of the British Museum's exhibition Vikings: Life and Legend. This colossal exhibit – it is 37 metres long in its reconstructed totality, though only about a fifth of the hull is original timber – is spectacular, beautiful, thought-provoking and profound. It embodies not just the nautical ingenuity and martial prowess of the Vikings but their art and beliefs, too.

Around its enigmatic presence are displays that amplify its meanings. A carved, eighth-century "picture stone" from the Swedish isle of Gotland shows such a longship ferrying a dead warrior to Valhalla, the hall of the god Odin, where Vikings who die bravely in battle will feast until they are called to fight in the last battle, Ragnarok.

A phantom Viking ready for that apocalyptic fight glares from a glass case near the warship. He's a surreal composite of metal and bone. His head is a helmet. Under this grins a jaw, with its teeth filed to create a horrific snarl intended to terrify monks. Tattoos would have added to the warrior's scary aspect as he jumped off Roskilde 6 into the surf, screaming and roaring as he rushed onshore to kill and steal and burn.

On 8 January 793, men like this in ships like this appeared on the horizon off Northumbria. Monks were illuminating manuscripts and chanting prayers in Lindisfarne monastery. Within hours, records the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, "the heathen miserably destroyed God's church ..."

Britain was an easy target for the Viking raiders. A straight line westward from southern Norway leads directly to north-east Britain. The same instinct to forge westward led Vikings from Greenland to America, where they fought native Americans. Roskilde 6 reveals something else about their sailing skills: it is wide with a very shallow, flat underside. This design meant Viking ships could easily navigate rivers. They besieged Paris by sailing up the Seine. They created the kingdom of "Rus" – the origin of Russia – by sailing down its rivers until they reached the Black Sea, and even terrorised the eastern imperial city of Byzantium.

It's an incredible story. The Vikings burn in history, unforgettable antiheroes. I just wish this exhibition made a more engaging and humanising job of telling that story. The longship is sublime, the swords and skeletons that surround it are terrifying, but Vikings: Life and Legend is, until you reach these wonders, a pedantic exercise in pure archaeology that fails to shape its subject into a stimulating narrative.

I've started my account of it at the end because that's where it finally comes alive. The huge space where Roskilde 6 glides majestically among swords and skeletons is this show's conclusion, which you reach after a journey so badly staged it left me numb. Are the curators resting on their shields, confident that a real Viking ship is enough of a stunner to float everyone's boat, or do they have more obscure reasons for rendering the Viking world mute, impersonal and even – can this be – boring?

Vikings is the first exhibition in the British Museum's new state-of-the-art gallery. It takes advantage of this huge space to display that ship, no less. But when you enter the show there's no excitement at all. The new gallery is not as charismatic as the museum's old Reading Room, where great shows like The First Emperor (and his terracotta warriors) and Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum were staged. The circular shape of the Reading Room made for magical labyrinthine displays. This place feels, on first sight, more like a big grey box where display cases are laid out in dismal straight lines.

There's no stage-setting. No gory recreation of the Lindisfarne raid, say, to get us in the mood. Instead, cases of smallish, similar objects throw visitors straight into some thorny problems of archaeology. How do Viking artefacts compare with things being made at the same time by Baltic and Slav peoples? One of the first cases offers a chance to find that out.

I felt like crying. Where were the swords? And if I was ready to bawl, what does this exhibition offer its younger visitors? It can't claim not to be for them. You can't put on an exhibition called Vikings without expecting some kids. The only way this exhibition could sound more child-friendly would be if it was called Vikings and Dinosaurs. But the austerely beautiful cases of brooches and golden rings and amber offer very little to fans of Horrible Histories. This is mean, especially as the shop at the end is quite happy to push a lucrative array of Viking toys.

Even the soundtrack to the first displays, a reading of classic Viking literature, is in Old Norse. Instead of opening up this world, as a well-read translation might, it closes it off in melancholy Nordic words. This is perhaps a clue to what the curators think they are doing. They want to estrange our view of the Vikings. Forget those rehashed Norse myths in The Hobbit, forget the song in Horrible Histories where the Vikings are a heavy metal band who are "gonna paint the whole town red tonight – literally ..."

No wait - it's even madder than that. Don't just forget modern images of the Vikings: forget what was written about them in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and forget (or learn to appreciate in Norse) their own great works of literature, which were written down in the middle ages but draw on oral traditions going back to the age of the Viking raids.

These sagas of the Vikings are full of characters. Just to reel off some nicknames is to get a taste of their vivid humanity: Ragnar Hairy-Breeches, Ivar the Boneless, Eric the Red, Thorstein the Black, Olvir Hump. The Vikings left a legacy of stories in which legend and truth mingle. They'd have told this exhibition as a story.

Why not weave their tales and the histories written by their enemies into the mix of archaeological stuff to give it warmth and context? The refusal to do so cannot be an oversight. It looks like an archaeological dogma: only material objects painstakingly excavated are to be relied upon as evidence. The rest is romantic twaddle, apparently.

For instance, where are the gods? The picture stone showing a ship arriving at Valhalla is one of just a handful of images of mythology in this exhibition. There's more about bowls and bracelets than about Thor.

Maybe I am being too hard on the curators. Perhaps the Vikings are innately difficult to bring to life in an exhibition. Their art is full of atmospheric swirls and crafty detail, but it is not their greatest cultural achievement. They really were better with words. Egil's Saga is the first psychological novel, a portrait of a tortured genius who is at once a poet and a serial killer. Where does Viking visual art attain that complexity?

The art historian Kenneth Clark said the Vikings had a culture, not a civilisation. Their everyday life looks hard, cruel and repetitive in this exhibition. A beautiful ivory flask from Byzantium just seems in another league of sophistication and layered meaning. But when you reach the ship hall you will see that Clark was wrong. The Vikings created something that went beyond any civilisation of their age. The greatest work of art here is the longship. It is a great human image of endeavour and exploration: these were not just killers but intensely curious pathfinders who even colonised the icy wastes of Greenland. A clever Viking called it that, according to the sagas, to make it sound more attractive for settlers.

If you sail these troubled waters, take my advice. Head straight for the longship and the Viking armour. Gaze on Roskilde 6 and let its eerie magic work on you. There is elvish gold here, but to find it you must fight your way past some oddly joyless ogres.

ExhibitionsArchaeologyJonathan Jones
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Ruin Lust at Tate Britain review – 'a brilliant but bonkers exhibition'

This show of artists' obsessions with broken stones, Nazi bunkers and decaying castles is bold and clever. But its name is misleading – the 'lust' Tate insists on is actually sweet sorrow

• Ruin Lust: our obsession with decay – in pictures

When the visionary architect Sir John Soane built the Bank of England he commissioned an artist to picture it as it might look hundreds of years in the future when time had laid it waste. Joseph Michael Gandy's 1830 drawing of this fantastic labyrinth of broken columns and honeycombs of brick is a bizarre testimony to the seduction of ruins. Soane's architectural style was inspired by ancient Greece and Rome, and what he most wanted was to see his own building ruined like the temples of the ancient world.

The pleasure the human mind takes in ruins is not easy to explain. It has something to do with time. In JMW Turner's sketches of decayed abbeys that come like Soane's broodings from the Romantic age, the artist lingers over the details of each crumbly, broken stone. Looking at his studies you get a powerful sense of the time he spent on them and the escape from daily care this involved. A ruin, in other words, is a time machine that releases the mind to wander in nooks and crannies of lost ages – and ages to come. That is why John Constable finds the ruins of Hadleigh Castle so grimly consoling in his painting of this medieval heap quietly decaying, the wars and oppressions it once embodied long forgotten.

Ruin Lust at Tate Britain is a clever essay of an exhibition, which makes such a brilliant argument that it doesn't matter if some of its claims are nonsense. It juxtaposes the mental wanderings of the Romantic age with modern meanderings like Jane and Louise Wilson's photographs of decayed concrete Nazi bunkers in Normandy to uneasy, thought-provoking effect. Yet it takes the idea of what it calls a "lust" for ruins to teasing extremes. Is it really true, as the exhibition claims, that when John Piper painted buildings destroyed by bombing in the second world war he was taking delight in these new ruins? Surely he was mourning the lost churches.

In reality the rich thoughts inspired by ruins go beyond pleasure, let alone "lust" – artists who linger over broken stones may be pondering mortality and coming to terms with grief, and generally having emotions for which "lust" is a completely misleading word.

Leon Kossoff's painting Demolition of the Old House, Dalston Junction, Summer 1974 churns mixed feelings into tangles of colour. Little men clamber through a morass of thick paint, pulling apart a building that seems as vast as Soane's ruined Bank of England. Who lived in this "Old House"? What stories are being consigned to oblivion as it is dismantled? In theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds