Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 238

The 10 most subversive women artists in history

From the 17th-century painter who repeatedly depicted a woman beheading a man to the last great surrealist, Louise Bourgeois, here are 10 artists who took on the patriarchy and won

Artemisia Gentileschi

When she was a teenager, this 17th-century baroque artist was raped by a painter. She responded by turning her art into a weapon. In Gentileschi's repeated paintings of the biblical story of Judith slaying Holofernes, the Israelite hero is helped by her muscular servant. As one woman holds down Holofernes on his bed, the other saws through his neck with a sword. Blood spurts everywhere in a sensational image of women taking revenge on patriarchy.

Hannah Wilke

In her SOS Starification Object Series (1974-82), Wilke was photographed with blobs of chewing gum stuck on to her flesh. Dotting her face and bare body, these bizarre markings resembled a modern form of tribal scarification (this was before ritualistic body modification became fashionable) and resemble vaginas. Or are they eyes? Wilke's "starification" marked her with the burden of being objectified by the male gaze.

Adrian Piper

In her Catalysis performances (1970), Piper turned herself into a human provocation in public places such as the New York subway. In one performance, she rode the subway after soaking her clothes in pungent substances for a week to make them stink. She muttered in the street, entered the elevator of the Empire State Building with a red towel stuffed in her mouth or simply made eye contact with strangers. Her purpose was to dramatise social unease and ultimately the unspoken tensions of race in America.

Georgia O'Keeffe

In the early 20th century, Georgia O'Keeffe posed nude for her lover, the modernist photographer and art impressario Alfred Stieglitz, and painted abstractions that have an explicitly vaginal beauty. Compared with some artists in this list she may seem soft, but her cussed exploration of her own body and soul mapped out a new expressive freedom for women making art in the modern age.

Claude Cahun

In photographs taken from the 1920s to 1940s, this French artist often portrays herself in male clothes and hairstyles, contemplating her own transformed image as she experiments with the fictions of gender. Cahun's pioneering art is typical of the freedom the surrealist movement gave artists to question sexual and social convention.

Louise Bourgeois

The labyrinthine mind of the last great surrealist envelops the spectator of her art in memories of an early 20th-century French childhood, intense secret worlds and the very interior of the body. Collapsing the masculinist art form of sculpture into something organic and ripely carnal, she is the spider of subversion weaving a web that has transformed the very nature of art.

Lyubov Popova

Art exploded in the early 20th century into the revolutionary fragmentations of cubism and its spinoffs. Popova claimed the freedom of this new art for her fractured visions of Russian life. Working on the eve of the Russian revolution, she took apart the traditional subjects of art with ruthless scientific skill. In her 1915 painting The Model, a nude becomes a gigantic tower of blocks as the conventions of gender disintegrate.

Cindy Sherman

In her Untitled Film Stills, this contemporary Arcimboldo endlessly remakes her image and reimagines her identity. Sherman's insight is that the self is created by storytelling. From early black-and-white photographs in which she poses as a Hitchcock heroine in unresolved scenes from films we almost recognise, to later works that more violently transfigure her features with monster makeup, Sherman evokes the tales that shape who people become.

Francesca Woodman

Does art have to be public? Does it have to be political or progressive? Woodman's haunting photographs are subversive in a quieter and stranger way. She used her art to explore a secret world. Poetic reveries in silent rooms, fleeting glimpses of a rich inner life make for an art that suggests the freedom of the introspective self.

Eva Hesse

The honeycomb yellows and urine golds of Hesse's synthetic yet organic-seeming materials make you intensely aware of possessing a body packed full of strange stuff. Where men had built statues for centuries and then arranged steel girders in the macho arrangements of minimalism, her sagging, hanging sculptures reveal other dimensions to the physical world. For Hesse, mind and body are not separated in a hierarchy. We too are stuff.

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Art on Mars: rover images are a wonder of our time

The photographs taken by the rovers Spirit and Opportunity, on show at the Smithsonian, are the first works of art from the red planet – and modern masterpieces

• Art from Mars – the best pictures

In January 2004, two robotic rovers – Opportunity and Spirit – landed safely on Mars and started their slow treks over the surface of the red planet. Now, a new show at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington celebrates a decade of their remote exploration. And it is full of their gorgeous photos – the first works of art (as far as we know …) ever to be made on Mars.

"Red" may no longer be an adequate epithet for the most Earth-like of our planetary neighbours. The truly remarkable colour in these photographs is a rich aqueous blue. It is the colour of small spheres packed with hematite found dotted on and within the geological formations of Mars. Some of these space oddities have a subtle violet hue; others are the colour of the life-giving water Mars may once have possessed.

The pictures taken by Spirit and Opportunity and – of course – processed on Earth to give them colour and visual coherence are modern masterpieces of Romantic art. The art historian Elizabeth A Kessler points out in her book Picturing the Cosmos that in their selection and editing of raw images captured by the Hubble telescope, Nasa astronomers are influenced by 19th-century paintings of the American west by the likes of Albert Bierstadt – they give space the sublime grandeur of these Romantic landscapes.

This is even more true of the awe-inspiring artistic works of Spirit and Opportunity. Their epic views of the dusty orange Martian desert eerily resemble vistas in New Mexico or Arizona. Nasa has sent these sophisticated planetary rovers 34m miles across the solar system to take pictures that look just like the wild west. Watching the Martian sunset over shadowed broken crags, I half expect Heisenberg – the drug manufacturer in the TV western Breaking Bad, not the physicist – to appear on the horizon.

Others may spot similarities to the desert planet Tatooine in Star Wars, or a Victorian painting of exotic lands such as The Scapegoat by William Holman Hunt. The fact is that we see Mars through the lens of our own imagined landscapes. The beauty that results from earthbound scientists polishing up raw pixels beamed backed by robot rovers is shaped by convention just as much as EH Gombrich claimed any landscape art is.

This is why I feel confident in calling these pictures taken by machines on a faraway planet "art". The images in this exhibition, and those coming from the latest Mars mission Curiosity, are a marvellous synthesis of scientific fact and human imagination.

Is there art on Mars? Yes, and it is a wonder of our time.

PhotographyPaintingArtMarsNasaSpaceUnited StatesJonathan Jones
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The Simpsons strip off and bins break into song – the week in art

Homer and Marge get sexy as rubbish goes interactive. Plus, why Hannah Höch was art's first punk, and how Renzo Piano joined the senate – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Hannah Höch
The centenary of the first world war's outbreak has started with controversy over its origins. Arguably, these matter less than its consequences. A defeated Germany, blamed for the war by the victors and subjected to onerous punishment by the Treaty of Versailles, tottered between revolution, far right militias and brittle democracy. In this chaotic broken land, the art that mattered was dada – a dazzling assault on reason and sanity. Hannah Höch's raw cut-up images are glorious embodiments of Berlin dada that consume the media of the time and spew them out as grotesque dreams of liberation.
• Whitechapel Gallery, London E1 from 15 January until 23 March

Other exhibitions this week

Manet's The Execution of Maximilian
One of the most troubling masterpieces of the 19th century, this painterly report on death by firing squad that looks coolly at a terrible event is on tour from the National Gallery.
• The Beaney House of Art and Knowledge, Canterbury CT1 from 17 January until 16 March

Picasso's linocuts
These bold and bright 1960s prints by Picasso celebrate love and life.
• Prints and Drawings Gallery, British Museum, London WC1B from 10 January until 6 May

Jackie Irvine
Ireland and Mexico City come together in Irvine's new video works.
• Frith Street Gallery, London W1F from 17 January until 1 March

Hans Arp
One of the most lighthearted and ludic of modern masters gets a well-earned re-examination.
• Hauser and Wirth, London W1S until 1 March

Masterpiece of the week

Together with his friend Picasso, the restlessly enquiring Braque was taking apart the entire heritage of European painting when he created this complex and profound investigation of what things are.
• Tate Modern, London SE1

Image of the weekWhat we learned this week

The Simpsons have stripped off for a sexy 2014 calendar …

… And Homer really suits stilettos

That a white-van man may be the new Van Gogh

What singing bins and crime-fighting lampposts have in common

That a Blood Bricks campaign is being launched to stop slave labour in India's brick kilns

How Renzo Piano has gone from the Shard to the senate

That Hannah Höch was art's original punk

That you can now bed down at the Bauhaus

And finally …

Follow us on Twitter

Here are your best shots of sunrise and sunset in cities around the world

Boost your energy levels this January and share your art on the theme of movement

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Naughty and naked: The Simpsons strip off

Eat my shorts ... the Simpsons have stripped off for a racy calendar. Alexsandro Palombo's satirical drawings are good for a laugh, but do they miss the point of the show?

Have you ever had erotic fantasies about Marge Simpson? If so, you may be a cartoon character. Bartender Moe used to be obsessed with Homer's wife. She has also drawn the unwelcome attentions of Mr Burns. And let's not forget her romance with a French bowling instructor.

Anyway, Simpsons fans, prepare to be thrilled, shocked or profoundly embarrassed. Because for all you Moes out there, here's a flamin' Marge. Italian comic artist Alexsandro Palombo, who is well known in the fashion world, apparently, for his satirical depictions of haute couture, has created a 2014 calendar full of extravagant images of Marge – and Homer – posing in sadomasochist gear in the high-fashion style of the photographer Helmut Newton. So you always wanted to see Springfield's suburban icon in a black leather number slit to the thigh? Or naked with big bazoomas? Get a loada this, playdudes.

But the decadent vibe is not just about men ogling women; Palombo has Homer posing as a Newtonian reprobate wearing scarlet high heels. It's all very sophisticated. Palombo has also drawn Marge as Kate Moss in her recent photoshoot for Playboy's 60th anniversary. Relentless, he has depicted her in 100 iconic dresses of the modern world, from Madonna in Jean Paul Gaultier's notorious cone bra to Geri Halliwell in the union flag dress.

This is where it gets a bit redundant. Palombo portrays Marge wearing a pink Chanel suit modelled on one worn in the 1960s by Jackie Kennedy. In fact, a whole episode of The Simpsons turns on Marge – who shares Kennedy's pre-marriage name, Bouvier – buying a very similar Chanel suit in an outlet sale, then having to rework it on her sewing machine to pretend to a rich friend that she really is part of the elite. In the end, of course, she realises the futility of such pretences. The trouble with making jokes about The Simpsons is that the best writers in the TV business have been doing that for a long time in the scripts of the show itself.

Sex has never been off-limits for The Simpsons, either. Quite apart from their occasional affairs or visits to bordellos, Marge and Homer regularly "snuggle". They are not timid about sexual fantasy, either. Marge didn't mind Homer losing his snowplough business, as long as he occasionally puts on the Mr Plow costume in the bedroom. Palombo, it seems, is a bit late when it comes to sexing up Springfield's hottest couple.

Palombo has a lot of fun but misses the real humour of The Simpsons at its best: the humanity and warmth, the delight in the ridiculous. That name again is Mr Plow.

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Santa bought me a PlayStation. But it's still not art

Video games are great fun but why try to categorise them as art or non-art? It's like asking if Jane Austen qualifies as sport

I've occasionally been asked for my comments on video games. Are they art? My quick answer, when asked, has always been a fairly curt "No".

And then guess what – Santa brought a PlayStation. Plus a variety of games, old and new. So am I all turned around on the joys of virtual play?

I certainly know (slightly) more. I am no expert (honestly, Lara Croft, I thought you could jump off that cliff without a scratch). But do I still suspect these computer game thingumajigs are the devil's mind candy? Well, no. I think they're a fantastic pastime.

The great defence of video games is that they are not the internet – no offence intended – with its ceaseless assaults on attention span. While many aspects of digital culture minimise concentration (hey you! You know who you are. Please read to the end of this short article before posting a comment …), games demand absolute attention over long periods of time. They create fictional worlds of great conviction and intensity. Above all, in an age when free online stuff is the norm, games have expensive production values and no one seems to resent paying money to reward those.

So in many ways, the world of computer games is an alternative model of digital life – a more creative, even contemplative, style of interaction. Until you post your scores online and blog about which game is better and the whole noise of random comment starts again.

Which brings me back to that old chestnut … can video games be art? And the answer is still No, or at least, Not Likely. It seems a bizarre and irrelevant question to ask. Like, if I was reading Jane Austen and you said, "But is it sport?" No, it's not sport, it's a novel. Why would it need to be anything else?

Electronic games offer a rich and spectacular entertainment, but why do they need to be anything more than fun? Why does everything have to be art?

Very few things count as Art. I would argue that very little art is actually art – because most of it fails, and failed art is not art. We just politely pretend that it is.

Better to create a good game than a bad work of art. Games give us pleasure and freedom. Art also does that, in a different way. But it is rare. I enjoy games. I hate bad art.

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Picasso: a cut above

He may have depicted his lovers in terrible ways – but a new exhibition of linocuts reveals a tender side to Picasso. Jonathan Jones on the artist who shaped his childhood

Nude Woman with Necklace is a strange, shocking work. I am looking at it at Tate Modern, aware of people around me stopping, giggling, moving on. When you think of all the wild work that fills this museum, it's amazing that a mere oil painting can still get such embarrassed reactions.

Pablo Picasso's 1968 portrait of his wife Jacqueline seems at first like a traditional nude, albeit one that's sketchily painted in savage scribbles of red and blue. Then you notice how Picasso has arranged things so that Jacqueline's anus and buttocks bulge out, allowing viewers to stare at her front and back simultaneously. The old goat was a few weeks short of his 87th birthday when he painted this. Even as an octogenarian, he was capable of creating an astonishingly fleshy carnival, but that's not what's giving me such a kick. It's the fact that I was two when he painted it. Which means I was, in some small way, the great artist's contemporary, until his death in 1973.

If that doesn't seem such a big deal, think who else he was contemporary with. In 1972, David Bowie was being Ziggy Stardust, The Godfather hit cinemas, and Glenda Jackson was on The Morecambe and Wise Show. In other words, Picasso was part of the 1970s. He may not have watched Morecambe and Wise, but he did enjoy a classic 1970s TV sport: all-in wrestling. Jacqueline reportedly had to look up listings and write down times so he could come out of his studio to watch matches. When you look at the carnal, grotesque energy of his last paintings, it makes a bizarre kind of sense.

How do you find yourself loving one artist above all others? Well, Picasso got under my skin when I was a kid growing up in north Wales – and first loves are the best. While he was watching men in leotards grunt and groan, I was watching The Clangers and Blue Peter. There were no art galleries in north Wales and Tate Liverpool did not yet exist. Instead, the first works of artistic beauty I experienced were oak tables and chairs made in a graceful modern style by my father, Eric Lewis Jones. Maybe seeing the force it takes to cut, carve and shape wood (my dad made me massive toys, including an Apollo rocket I could go inside) gave me an instinctive sense of art as something hefty and muscular.

If so, this would have predisposed me to Picasso, whose art grasps the world so beefily. The craftsmanlike side of him can be seen in a lovely set of linocut prints about to go on show at the British Museum. In the 1970s, making linocuts was a big craft activity in schools – and Picasso was the ultimate craftsman, making things in every medium, endlessly experimenting with techniques, as you can see in these works. Many depict the same still life, but Picasso kept recutting to add new details: a lightbulb changes from a blank globe in one print to a fiery ball in another.

There is also a passionate portrait of Jacqueline. Grave, shadowed and enigmatically beautiful, it's a reminder that it's unfair to see Picasso as a misogynist bully. Yes, he could do terrible things – visually – to his lovers, like giving them an anus in the wrong place. But there's a delightful sense of love and admiration in his prints of his young wife reading. She was in her early 30s when he made these in 1962, and he seems in awe of her. To look at them is to encounter the prodigious creator himself, there in his studio, enjoying himself. That sheer pleasure in making art is one of the things that drew me to Picasso.

That and his signature. Strong, forceful and bold, it was the first thing I glimpsed of Picasso. One summer shortly after his death, my dad drove us to Rome for a family holiday, the road taking us through Avignon in the south of France. Picasso's signature was plastered all over the town: he seemed to be worshipped there. I was about 10 and remember thinking: who is this hero? In fact, Picasso had held his last exhibitions at the city's Palace of the Popes; and it was here that his ultimate works were unveiled, in accordance with his will, after his death in 1973.

It is a visceral, disconcerting experience to suddenly "get" a Picasso: to see and feel the full reality of things, as a rush of new perceptions floods in and shakes you. I first felt this on a later holiday, camping with my family near Nîmes. There happened to be a Picasso exhibition on. It was one of the first art shows I ever saw. What most rocked me was a black-and-white bullfight painting. At first, it seemed an abstract jagged pattern. Then I saw the horrified head of a horse framed against the arches of an arena. A black shadow was engulfing the pale creature: it was the heaving form of a bull. Suddenly, I saw how the bull's horns were tearing out the horse's guts. But this was not simply gory. The complex, multifaceted way Picasso delivered the truth made me feel the horror from the inside. My own stomach tightened.

My dad and I were so excited about Picasso that we went to see a bullfight in Nîmes. This was where Picasso used to watch the corrida de toros (which he enjoyed even more than wrestling). We somehow convinced ourselves it was a "friendly" fight, an illusion that turned to nausea as the bull's blood spilled on to the sand.

And finally I saw Guernica. Picasso painted it in 1937 as a protest against the fascist bombing of the Basque town during the Spanish civil war and decreed it could never be shown in Spain while the war's victor, General Franco, was alive. Franco died in 1975. In 1981, in accordance with Picasso's will, Guernica was sent home from New York to a now democratic Spain. At first, it was hung in the Prado museum, which is where my girlfriend and I saw it.

In Guernica, he devotes his visionary power to making you feel the suffering of war's victims. You are there in the fire and the chaos. What other artist has ever been so intimate and so unfaked – and yet so utterly engaged with the world around him? Picasso makes us see the full beauty, and the full terror, of life.

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Michael Gove left in no man's land by first world war's artistic artillery

The education secretary can dig his trench as deep as he likes – the great war's artists were adamant the conflict marked the birth of a terrible, twisted modernity, not some national miracle

The centenary of the outbreak of the first world war has kicked off with a fight. Self-styled patriots and provocative military historians claim that our image of the war that killed eight million men between 1914 and 1918, and left 22 million wounded, has been distorted by poets and TV comedy writers. Wilfred Owen and Blackadder have apparently conned us into thinking the great war was futile, when in reality it was a "just" war provoked by German aggression.

The pettiness of this rightwing revisionists' saloon-bar view of modern history is so tragicomic it is tempting to just go and watch Blackadder to calm down. But clearly it needs refuting. How about logic?

If the first world war was a comforting patriotic exemplar, we would not be marking it on the scale we are going to a century on. In 1905, there was no deep need to fuss over the centenary of the battle of Trafalgar. It was a fight that had happened a hundred years before in a colourful age, a heroic episode but not a matter for contemporary heartsearching. Yet the first world war is different. We mark it, we wear poppies, because it has been seen, ever since the armies got trapped in that nightmare of trench warfare, as the birth of something new and terrible: the start of a uniquely murderous age. Amid such darkness, nationalism should hang its head.

As the historian John Keegan – no lefty – pointed out, the first world war matters because it led directly to the rise of Hitler, the second world war and the Holocaust. By pushing tsarist Russia over the revolutionary edge, it also led to Stalin and the gulag. In 1914, the optimism of the modern world was twisted into a monstrous machinery of death.

Even without that foreknowledge, the people who defined the war as inhuman and beyond any meaningful justification were not Blackadder and Baldrick – they were the soldiers and civilians who endured it. If the eloquence of the war poets is now to be discounted as sentimental, will art be accepted as evidence?

Michael Gove needs to get to Tate Britain quick and censor its pictures. What if children were to take their view of the first world war from William Orpen's painting Zonnebeke? They might think that its despairing image of muddy, meaningless battlefield devastation is somehow the truth of the war. Instead, kids should be looking at propaganda posters I suppose.

Orpen painted this dismal view of war's landscape in 1918. Two years later, Charles Sargeant Jagger cast a bronze image of soldiers suffering in No Man's Land. They hang on the wire as if crucified. Jagger was no pacifist. His memorial, on view at Tate Britain, reflects how everyone involved, left and right, saw this war – as an inexplicable tragedy.

Even the metaphor of the war as a mad seaside show goes back to the war itself – it was not invented by the later satire Oh! What a Lovely War, attacked by Gove, but can be seen in the monstrous military and mannequins riding their futile horses in Mark Gertler's 1916 painting Merry-Go-Round. The same eerie futility creeps up on the entertainers in WR Sickert's 1915 work Brighton Pierrots.

In CRW Nevinson's painting La Mitrailleuse, men are becoming machines as they fight numbly, mechanically in the trenches. What this chilling image suggests is that Blackadder sentimentalised the war: after all, its characters have space and time to joke. The reality that the art of the time unveils is far more brutal.

"We are making a new world," as the artist Paul Nash called a painting of the war's unrecognisable landscape. The first world war was experienced by its participants and witnesses as the birth of some terrible disfigured era. It took joy out of the world and ended Europe's golden age.

Oh, but I suppose these artists are all liars. What a horrible piece of sophistry, to deny the truth so visible to people who suffered that black time.

PaintingArtSculptureFirst world warMichael GoveJonathan Jones
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Why cooking was the original artform – and is still the most universal

Celebrity chefs take dining to conceptual levels but cookery and art have always fed off each other

Can food be art? Can art be food? These are fun questions to ask in the season of overeating. Maybe if we can see all that turkey and stuffing and pudding and cheese as in some way a work of art, it won't seem so gluttonous.

This is what celebrity chefs offer. They show us how to be "creative" in the kitchen so we don't just feel like greedy pigs. If I can get that Heston Blumenthal recipe right, maybe my meal will possess an ethereal grace that transcends mere gorging.

The story of art and the story of food are in fact intertwined. Both became sophisticated at the same time. In the middle ages feasting was rich, riotous and crude. Pies shaped like swans disgorged dozens of smaller birds. People ate with their fingers. Art too was simple and when painters showed food there was little subtlety.

In the Renaissance, art became more self-conscious – and so did eating. In 16th-century Italy feasts were stylish and polite. Wine was served in elegant glasses. Plates were used and cutlery was coming into fashion. The same bright ideas being applied to art led to the popularisation of salads, bruschetta and tablecloths (all of which are praised by the 16th-century writer Aretino).

Artists portrayed the new feasting in pictures such as Veronese's Wedding Feast at Cana. They showed country picnics and even peasant meals. But could art reinvent food itself?

Leonardo da Vinci thought so. His notebooks contain thoughts on food as well as foodie shopping lists and recipes. He believed inventive cooking could replace the flavours of meat – for he was a vegetarian.

Leonardo was the first conceptual artist. In the same tradition, Rirkrit Tiravanija serves up food as art. Yet it is chefs who are best at making food feel like a creative game. Cooking and conceptual art go together like sprouts and anchovies (really well: sprouts and anchovies go together brilliantly).

Everyone has to eat. All cooking that aims higher than a boiled egg is an attempt to make an art of a necessity. In this sense it is surely the first art that human beings ever attempted. And it's still the most universal.

Brussels sprouts in anchovy sauce

Cut sprouts in half; fry with garlic in olive oil. Add a jar of anchovies and continue frying. When the anchovies have gone gooey, add sun-dried tomato puree, herbs and chilli powder.

ArtFood & drinkChefsPaintingJonathan Jones
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Need an extra dose of Sherlock? Head to the art shrine where he fell

Graffiti near Bart's hospital inspired by the BBC's Sherlock adds a new dimension to Arthur Conan Doyle's vision of London

Sherlock has created its own strange world of street art. Like clues left by Moriarty, or an enigmatic code inscribed by the supposedly dead detective himself, a variety of messages mark a London street at a particularly poignant place.

I was walking past Bart's hospital, thinking about anything but Sherlock, when I suddenly noticed the scribbles all around me, in a phone box, on the pavement, even on the hospital windows (written from inside).

Then I realised: this is where Sherlock fell at the end of the second series of the BBC reimagining of Arthur Conan Doyle's great Victorian detective.

Perhaps it's no surprise, given how long we've had to wait to find out how Sherlock survived the Reichenbach Fall, that so many fans have felt moved to visit the site of his "death" and leave declarations of faith such as "I believe in Sherlock" or "I still believe in Sherlock". There's also one message from Moriarty.

These Holmesian graffiti resemble the arcane cryptology that is so much part of Conan Doyle's original tales. In the Sherlock Holmes stories, London is a city of signs waiting to be read. A man is invited to join a Redheaded League. What can be the significance of these redheaded men banding together? Why is a man in another story terrified of receiving an orange pip in the post? And why did a murdered woman speak with her last breath of a sinister "speckled band"?

It is by decoding these bizarre symbols that Holmes deciphers the criminal secrets of 19th-century London. In their witty update of Sherlock, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss turned to graffiti art as a 21st-century urban arcanum. In one episode, Sherlock consults a street artist who is painting outside the National Gallery – and when the police come Watson is left holding the can.

Cities are forests of meaning. Urban underworlds can be found through the strange clues they leave. This is one of the insights of Conan Doyle that makes his tales of London's cerebral superhero so timeless they can be transposed to a world of smartphones without losing their atmosphere. It's fitting that Sherlock has now added its own mysterious inscriptions to the mysterious streets of London.

ArtSherlockTelevisionCrime dramaSteven MoffatMark GatissBenedict CumberbatchMartin FreemanArthur Conan DoyleJonathan Jones
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Arts preview 2014: blockbusters

From the world's tallest building to Adele's 'modern jazz'-inspired third album, the big events of 2014 are lining up

Television

True Detective
Crime drama is always looking for new ways of dramatising a murder investigation: one killing investigated over 10 episodes; alternating viewpoints of cops, killer, victims and so on. However, in this ambitious series from HBO, multiple seasons will follow the search for a serial killer in Louisiana over 17 years, with each year introducing a new cast. Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey are in the first group. Either magnificent or mad. Mark Lawson HBO.

Penny Dreadful
This has a remarkable lineage: it is produced by film and stage director Sam Mendes and John Logan, who wrote Skyfall for Mendes as well as Hugo, The Aviator and Gladiator. Its disadvantage may be the daring concept, in which a number of fictional horror story characters – Dracula, Frankenstein's monster and Dorian Gray – are living in Victorian London. ML Sky Atlantic.

Film

Pompeii
This big-budget account of the eruption of Vesuvius is directed by Resident Evil's Paul WS Anderson – not the most subtle hand on the tiller, perhaps – but the ever-so-literate Julian Fellowes has contributed to the screenplay. Still, we're talking blood, guts and death from above. Kit "Game of Thrones" Harington stars. Andrew Pulver 21 February.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Marvel Films just keep churning them out. This is the ninth recent derivation from The Avengers family, a follow-up to 2011's Captain America: The First Avenger, and a side-project of all those Iron Man and Thor movies. If the title is anything to go by, this one features the Cap's former sidekick Bucky, revived and transformed into a Soviet-era assassin. The usual Marvel crew are due to put in an appearance, led by Chris Evans and Scarlett Johannson (as Black Widow). We'll also get to see Robert Redford in his first superhero movie, as a senior Shield operative. AP 28 March.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2
Hands up if you think there's been too many Spider-Man films? Well, it doesn't matter: here's another, courtesy of studio Sony's desire to keep hold of its rights to the material. Admittedly, the new series of Marc Webb-directed webslingery infuses the Spidey story with a roughhouse, skater-chic charm, with Andrew Garfield one of the classiest performers to ever don Spandex. Not too much has yet emerged of this one's plot, except that the Rhino (Paul Giamatti) and Electro (Jamie Foxx) appear to be the big villains. AP April.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Tim Burton's 2001 Planet of the Apes remake encouraged studio 20th Century Fox to punt a hopeful new series of the simian-bothering sci-fi. Now Cloverfield director Matt Reeves is in charge, filling in events well before the classic Charlton Heston story. Gary Oldman is the human talent, facing off against the apes. AP 17 July.

Sin City: A Dame to Die For
Almost a decade after the first instalment, here's a second collection of Frank Miller's sicko noir stories, with Miller again sharing directorial duties with Robert Rodriguez. Many of the same characters (and actors) are returning, including Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen and Bruce Willis; expect another dose of highly stylised comic-panel noir, with stunning visuals doing their best to compensate for the rampantly creepy sexism. AP 29 August.

The Hobbit: There and Back Again
Critical opinion has held that things have picked up with Smaug, after the bloat of the first film, An Unexpected Journey, so here's hoping Peter Jackson can keep the standard up. Presumably There and Back Again will take in the aftermath of the dwarves' takeover of the Lonely Mountain, their confrontation with the Wood-Elves and humans of Lake-town, and the climactic Battle of the Five Armies. After that, we'll all need a rest. AP 19 December.

Exodus
Ridley Scott is offering up a Cecil B DeMille-ish answer to Darren Aronofsky's Noah, by retelling the Moses story with Christian Bale as the Jewish law-maker. Joel Edgerton is the Pharaoh Rameses, Sigourney Weaver the Pharaoh's mum Tuya, and Aaron Paul the Mosaic sidekick Joshua. As the founding myth of biblical Israel, this could be controversial territory, but Scott has successfully handled this type of tricky material before, in the crusades movie Kingdom of Heaven, and we expect him to be as agile here as before. AP 5 December.

Theatre

Shakespeare in Love
The film made Joseph Fiennes. And, thanks to a smartly self-aware script by Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman, wasn't too bad for Shakespeare either. Screen-to-stage musicals have become almost as predictable as traffic jams in the West End, but thanks to the involvement of adapter Lee Hall (Billy Elliot) and director Declan Donnellan (of Cheek by Jowl), hopes are high that this might not pale beside the Shakespearean glories of West Side Story and Kiss Me Kate. Andrew Dickson Noel Coward theatre, London W1 (0871 976 0072), from 1 July.

Miss Saigon
It's 25 years since this reworking of Puccini's Madame Butterfly – set in Saigon in 1975 as the Americans withdraw from Vietnam – opened in a production by the then little-known Nicholas Hytner. The Prince Edward is a smaller space for this epic love story from the writing team behind Les Misérables, so it'll be interesting to see if the reboot (and the famous helicopter scene) come off. Lyn Gardner Prince Edward theatre, London W1 (0844 482 5155), from 3 May.

I Can't Sing!
In one sense, it doesn't matter if no one can, because apparently Simon Cowell already approves of Harry Hill's and Steve Brown's irreverent take on the story behind The X Factor. With the TV programme's ratings on the slide, this tribute to the show that gives birth to talented and talentless alike arrives at an intriguing moment. LG London Palladium W1 (0844 811 0058), from 27 February.

Fatal Attraction
No announcement on casting yet, but this Trevor Nunn-directed adaptation of the 1987 thriller about a New York lawyer who discovers it wasn't so smart to end his affair will need big names to bring it (and the bunny) to the boil. LG Theatre Royal Haymarket, London SW1 (020-7930 8800), from 8 March.

Art

Matisse: The Cut-Outs
There is no more enigmatic masterpiece of modern art than Matisse's Snail, a huge paper cut-out whose revolving planes of colour have been delighting visitors to the Tate since it was bought by the museum in 1962. A toddler can enjoy this work of art – and recognise the shape of a snail – but is it an image or an abstract decoration that happens to be snail-like? This feast of colour and movement that Matisse created in 1953 exceeds any possible pictorial intention. Matisse made his cut-outs when the art world was transfixed by American abstraction. Yet the French painter asks more profound questions about the nature of meaning in art than Jackson Pollock ever did. His Snail is a sly subversive mocking all attempts to interpret it. Promises to be the most popular and beautiful artistic event of the year. Jonathan Jones Tate Modern, London SE1, 17 April to 7 September.

Vikings
The world shuddered. Monks in Lindisfarne lay awake listening for war cries. On the far side of the world, native Americans saw sails on the horizon. The Vikings were a power in the world, a demonic force of pagan mayhem that threatened to destroy the frail beginnings of Europe and even put a frostbitten toe in Newfoundland. Yet a lot of the time, these Scandinavians farmed and told stories. To be a "viking" was a seasonal occupation: it meant to go out on the summer seas looking for trouble. Destructive as these warriors were, their myths are fascinating, their art has a rugged splendour, and this show – which includes a real longship – should thunder like Thor's hammer. JJ British Museum, London WC1, 6 March to 22 June.

Mondrian and Colour
Two major shows focus on the impeccable Dutch abstractionist Piet Mondrian. Mondrian and Colour at Turner in Margate considers the significance of colour in his early career, bringing together around 40 paintings by the artist from the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag and other collections in Europe and the US. Tate Liverpool will present the concurrent show Mondrian and his Studios: Abstraction into the World. This will explore the artist's importance both as abstractionist and in his relationship with architecture and urbanism, and the spaces and places, in Amsterdam, Paris and New York, where he worked. The show will also include his wonderful 1914 series Pier and Ocean. Do that geometric boogie-woogie thing! Adrian Searle Turner Contemporary, Margate, 24 May to 21 September; Tate Liverpool, 6 June to 21 September.

Colour
Colour in painting is as much the product of chemistry and the availability of pigments as it is of an artist's perceptions. Colour can be symbolic, it can imitate nature, it can be as earthy, ethereal and fugitive as it can be poisonous and exorbitantly expensive and rare. The history of painting is, in part, a history of materials and their uses. The development of impressionism and plein-aire painting was as much related to new industrially manufactured pigments and their availability in tubes as it was to artistic theory. Trade routes and artistic experiment, technical innovation and an almost alchemical search for the lost secrets of the old masters changed the way paintings looked and were made in radical and far-reaching ways. Each room will be devoted to a different colour, and will look at the National's own collection in relation to minerals, textiles, ceramics and glass on loan from major national and international cultural institutions. AS National Gallery, London WC2, 18 June to 7 September.

Rembrandt: The Final Years
Forty paintings, 20 drawings and 30 prints by an artist doesn't sound a lot, but when the person we're talking about is Rembrandt and the focus is on the works he created in the last two decades of his life, expect something magisterial. Like late Titian, Rembrandt's style towards the end of his life became ever more frank and unconcerned with the kind of painterly decorum and detail expected by his patrons. With his churned-up surfaces, harsh lighting and dramatic settings, his manner achieved more than an illusion of directness. Nowhere is this clearer than in his drawings and etchings. And when we look at Rembrandt looking at himself, in his late self-portraits, we get the feeling that he just doesn't care what we think. Which is exactly what makes us care as much as we do. AS National Gallery, London WC2, 15 October to 18 January 2015.

Architecture

Shanghai Tower, by Gensler
As America bickers over which of its towers is tallest, the new World Trade Center or the Sears Tower, China is busy building soaring totems that will outshine them all. Next year will see the completion of the gargantuan Shanghai Tower, the second tallest building in the world after the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, at 632 metres. Designed by anonymous corporate giant Gensler, it climbs in a spiral like a frozen whirlwind, captured in glass, housing a stack of offices, shops and vertical gardens, and accommodating up to 16,000 people. Oliver Wainwright

Music

Mariss Jansons/Concertgebouw
The titan of the podium brings one of his ensembles – Amsterdam's Concertgebouw – to celebrate Bruckner's symphonies. An orchestra steeped in Bruckner's existential symphonic experiences with a conductor who's never been bolder. Tom Service Barbican, London EC2, 3-5 April.

Antonio Pappano: Verdi Requiem
Few conductors today bring out the drama of Verdi better than Pappano. His 2009 recording of the Requiem with his Rome-based Orchestra of Santa Cecilia won rave reviews, not only for its moments of blazing theatricality, but also for its finely crafted details and quality of intense inwardness. For these two UK concerts he's joined by top-notch soloists, including tenor Joseph Calleja, in what promises to be an unbeatable live experience. Imogen Tilden Symphony Hall, Birmingham, 16 May; Royal Festival Hall, London SE1, 18 May.

John Eliot Gardiner: Monteverdi
Fifty years ago a Cambridge undergraduate assembled a group of singers to perform what was then still an extreme rarity, Monteverdi's great 1611 setting of the Vespers, in King's College Chapel. Those singers formed the nucleus of what became the Monteverdi Choir and have continued their close association with that concert's conductor, John Eliot Gardiner, ever since. On the exact anniversary Gardiner and his choir and orchestra, the English Baroque Soloists, return to King's to recreate that debut; even though Monteverdi's Vespers is much more familiar now than it was in 1964, it is always thrilling to hear it live. AC King's College Chapel, Cambridge (01223 769342), 5 March.

Adele
Will Adele's third album really be inspired by "modern jazz"? That's just one of the rumours doing the rounds, although nothing has been made official just yet. Tim Jonze

Coldplay
When it comes to Coldplay's sixth album, there's nothing official out there. But rumours suggest the wheels are in motion for a 2014 comeback of some description: what with them playing small gigs in Somerset pubs and releasing music for the Hunger Games soundtrack. According to rumour, it'll be a May/June release, although we were particularly amused by the one that went out on a limb to predict that it might sound like "a mixture of new and old Coldplay". TJ

ArtArchitectureTelevisionTheatrePop and rockMark LawsonAndrew PulverAndrew DicksonLyn GardnerJonathan JonesAdrian SearleOliver WainwrightTom ServiceImogen TildenAndrew ClementsTim Jonze
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