Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 248
October 4, 2013
From Banksy to Frank Zappa – the week in art
The king of street art starts a month-long takeover of New York city and Geoffrey Farmer reimagines Zappa's life. Plus Sarah Lucas, Freud's Vienna and samurai Japan – in your art dispatch
Exhibition of the weekElizabeth I & Her People
The vibrant world of the Tudors is a half-timbered gallery of strange and haunting portraits. British art in the 16th century was, mostly, clumsy and naive compared with that of Italy, Germany or France. But Elizabethan art often has a raw human quality that makes the people of that age come eerily to life. And there were some very special homegrown Renaissance arts – above all the portrait miniature, which rose to heights of romantic and erotic brilliance.
• National Portrait Gallery, London WC2H from 10 October until 5 January 2014
Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900
Klimt and Schiele star in a trip to Freud's Vienna – the alternative birthplace of modern art.
• National Gallery, London WC2N from 9 October until 12 January 2014
George Grosz
The mad world of Weimar Berlin leaps out of these fierce pictures.
• Richard Nagy, London W1S until 2 November
Chiharu Shiota
This Japanese artist has filled the gallery with an installation made of thread.
• Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne BN21 from 11 October until 5 January 2014
Geoffrey Farmer
An imaginary biography of Frank Zappa told through a kinetic mechanical installation.
• Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham NG1 from 12 October until 5 January 2014
The Wilton Diptych, English or French, c1395-99
Here is a portrait of a king who was to become a Shakespearean character. Actors still play Richard II on stage. The tragic monarch is portrayed at prayer in a work he owned.
• National Gallery, London WC2N
That Sarah Lucas's new art show is an absolute riot of body parts
That Banksy's doing a month-long Big Apple takeover
That everyone was erotically satisfied in samurai Japan
That the original of Las Meninas, Velázquez's most famous painting, may be hiding in Dorset
That abandoned roadside Americana looks great by moonlight
How an artist has made a house in Margate slide into the ground
Why a transgender bodybuilder sculptor has taken to attacking blocks of clay
Why Oslo is now the perfect city for 24-hour arty people
And finally …ArtSarah LucasBanksyNational Portrait GalleryNational GallerySculptureJonathan Jonestheguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
October 3, 2013
George Grosz's dada drawings show how the first world war upended art
A remarkable, rage-filled exhibition called Prostitutes, Politicians, Profiteers shows the German artist – and Berlin itself – becoming radically disillusioned as war was waged
• George Grosz's Prostitutes, Politicians, Profiteers – in pictures
Art changed for ever in August 1914. We will soon be hearing a lot about the first world war as we hit the centenary of its start: the folly that led a peaceful world to destruction, the devastating descent into the quagmire of the trenches, the horrors of gas and barbed wire. The impact on art is less likely to fill anniversary commemorations.
A remarkable exhibition at the Richard Nagy gallery on Old Bond Street, London, George Grosz's Berlin: Prostitutes, Politicians, Profiteers, reveals how brutalising and yet horribly energising that artistic impact was. Wounded veterans, maimed and disfigured, mingle with prostitutes, fat-cat capitalists, wicked old generals and decadent bohemians in Grosz's radically disillusioned art.
Born Georg Ehrenfried Gross in 1893, he anglicised his name as a protest against German nationalism in the first world war, in which he briefly served. His friend Helmut Herzfeld became, in similar fashion, John Heartfield. Both were turned into Marxist revolutionaries by the monstrosity of the war. Grosz was arrested in 1919 for participating in the Spartacist revolt led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
One quick way to see how the first world war changed art is to compare two of the most renowned works of the 20th century. The Dance by Henri Matisse was painted in the prosperous years before the war, in 1909-10. It is a thrilling, liberating, sensual masterpiece – yet deeply civilised, even in its primitivism.
By contrast, in 1917 Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal in an art gallery. This "readymade" called Fountain contemptuously urinates on the great tradition of western art. It reduces civilisation to a public toilet. It is no coincidence that it was first exhibited while so-called civilised nations were sacrificing their youth on the killing fields of the first world war.
Grosz and Duchamp were both, in their way, dadaists. This nihilistic art movement started in Zurich in 1916. It spat on war-torn Europe's claim to be civilised. Its angriest wing was Berlin dada. Cut-up newspapers and grotesque caricatures were hurled by the young Berlin dadaists at a social order they saw as murderous and cynical.
Grosz made some furious collages. But as his drawings at the Richard Nagy gallery attest, he was a hugely gifted draughtsman.
He can express his dada rage and hilarity in pen and paint alone. His pictures mash up the world of Berlin during and just after the first world war into a dazzling, comic, terrifying frenzy of flesh and faces.
The works here add up to a unique portrait of a city on the edge of revolution, as Berlin succumbs to the bitterness of defeat in 1918. You know, looking at these transfixing pictures of a great but tragic city, that nothing will ever be the same again. Not for Germany, not for the world, not for art.
ArtFirst world warJonathan Jonestheguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
October 2, 2013
Portrait of an enigma: Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas
The profound painting swaps the role of viewer and canvas, showing us the world a monarch sees
Las Meninas is one of the most profound and enigmatic paintings in the world.
You are the king. You stand patiently posing for your portrait, while the royal painter looks sombrely back at you from behind his canvas. This is the position into which Velázquez puts the viewer of Las Meninas. It's a big and paradoxical picture, a portrait not of the king and queen – who are only reflected in the painting in a bright mirror at the back of a high, deep room – but of the anxious court mirrored in their – our – eyes. Velázquez shows us the world a monarch sees.
The "meninas" are identically-dressed maids who fuss over the Infanta Margaret Theresa, an expensively dressed little girl who even as she plays in front of her royal parents appears on her mettle, under scrutiny. She looks nervously at them while two court dwarfs and a dog are on hand to provide entertainment. One dwarf kicks the dog.
It's a grave, chilly little world. No one (except the dog-kicker) seems relaxed and no one looks emotionally close to the monarchs – to us, who stand where they stand. The scene is intensely theatrical, everyone in their costumes and everyone on best behaviour. But at a door in the background a man is coming with news from Spain's vast and, when Velázquez was at work, decaying empire.
Presumably Philip IV of Spain was happy with this ingenious conceptual portrait. As painter to the king, Velázquez was showered with honours. But this painting menaces the fabric of reality and the illusion of identity with its consummate game of mirrors. Do kings and queens exist only in the eyes of others? And if that is true of monarchs then who on earth are you and I, transported uneasily by Velázquez into the skin of royalty, attended by a painter who looks at us, polite, exact, and utterly ruthless in his craft?
This painting is a disenchanted glass. Another Las Meninas is a shattering thought.
ArtPaintingSpainEuropeJonathan Jonestheguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
If Banksy thinks he's following in Warhol's footsteps, he's tripping
New York city is host, for a month, to Banksy's banal daubings. Just because it's urban and outside doesn't make it good
Banksy, the king of the streets, is currently holding an open-air exhibition, called Better Out Than In, for a whole month, on the streets of New York. It's a rite of passage for a street artist: he's following in the footsteps of those 1980s heroes of art-as-popular-culture, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. He may be banal and untalented, but because he stretches his limited gifts across the urban landscape, he has a much cooler reputation.
No one wants to be the elitist who denounces street art. The right to paint on other peoples' walls is a sacred totem of our age. Street art is revered and its practitioners are beyond criticism simply because they tick so many boxes, from spontaneous street-level creativity to anti-authoritarianism.
If Andy Warhol were alive today he'd probably welcome Banksy to the New York art scene just as he befriended those 80s street artists. "Gee, wow, Banksy's this English artist but nobody knows what he looks like. In the future everyone will be anonymous for 15 minutes."
That's the sort thing Warhol might say if he was still here. To quote another guru of modern culture, the medium is the message: what you do is less important than how you transmit it. If you make street art you instantly, by that act, proclaim so many hip affinities that your art becomes a symbol of widely admired associations and meanings. All graffiti is cool. The form, not the content, defines that coolness. Calling out Banksy as a bad artist is therefore impossible. If you say he's crap, he will turn out to be in on the joke. He's the perfect fraud for our time.
So it goes, to the streets of New York, and Warhol is undoubtedly amused in the great sushi bar in the sky. (As well as championing street art, he wanted to open a chain of "Andymat" restaurants that sound much like sushi outlets.) Myself, I wish Banksy would go and see Jackson Pollock's One at MoMA, look at it until he sees how dull and lifeless his own art is by comparison, and retire.
BanksyArtStreet artAndy WarholJonathan Jonestheguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
October 1, 2013
Erotic bliss shared by all at Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art
A world away from pornography, explicit Japanese shunga prints celebrate sex as a sensual act, and everyone has a good time
Opulent eroticism curves and billows in this bold exhibition of shunga prints made to entertain and arouse Japanese men and women between 1600 and 1900. Fantasy blossoms too: in a sensational picture by Hokusai, two octopuses make love to a fisherman's wife, their tentacles literally everywhere. Her face is ecstatic.
The curator of this delve into art's sensual history at the British Museum insists that pleasure is mutual in shunga. Early modern Japan was no feminist paradise, and the show does stress the harsh realities of the sex industry. But in shunga prints, which were looked at by men and women and treasured by married couples, everyone is having a good time. Lovers bask side by side in kimonos and you have to look a moment to see what they're up to under the brightly coloured folds. Or they twist into spectacular conjunctions that create wondrous patterns of white limbs and backs.
This art is sexy. It's intended to promote what it portrays. But it has very little in common with modern "pornography": it would be absurd to see these pictures as objectifying anyone. Men and women alike are shown with a sensual imagination that is disarmingly loving. There's no violence or cruelty and above all, no sense of sin.
Shunga was the underground art of samurai Japan. While official culture praised Chinese Confucian values of strict morality, authority and hierarchy, shunga prints laugh at all that and turn the official worldview upside down. A travesty of an advice book for women mocks conventional tips to obey your in-laws and advocates sex as the way to a happy marriage. But beyond jokes and titillation, there is in fact an ideal that blazes through these images: peace and concord are born out of sexual bliss.
No wonder this art appealed to westerners like Toulouse-Lautrec and Aubrey Beardsley, one or two of whose shunga-influenced images are here. Its lush lines and fiery colours are truly the door to alternative wisdom.
Rating: 4/5
ArtExhibitionsSexPornographyJonathan Jonestheguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
September 30, 2013
Art attacked: can you get a handle on the vandals? – quiz
Do you know your rampant Reformists from your 'refurbished' Rothkos? And who used works by Matisse as a dartboard? Pit your wits against our quizmaster's questions
Jonathan JonesArt Under Attack at Tate: the exhibition that risks desecrating itself
Showing the Chapmans' glib works alongside the unforgettably moving Dead Christ is bad enough, but the Tate can't champion art vandals as artists without risking massive hypocrisy
• Interactive: a history of vandalised art
Two images haunt me from Tate Britain's survey of attacks on art in Britain since the Reformation. One is a painfully realistic, lifesize stone figure of the dead Christ, eyes closed, chest emaciated, body taut. This terrifying portrait of death is a radical and dangerous work of art. It was carved by an unknown sculptor in the early 16th century then apparently buried, as an idolatrous object, just a few years later when Henry VIII rejected the Pope and dissolved Britain's monasteries.
The other is a portrait that was bought by the artists Jake and Dinos Chapman just so they could deface it. They've added bloody marks, made the mouth ugly and the eyes mad. We're supposed to think this is hilarious.
Art Under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm wants to make us think, but I found myself asking the wrong questions and drawing the wrong conclusions. The exhibition fumbles with ideas about "iconoclasm", or the deliberate destruction of art: can art vandalism be art? Is there a perverse humour or truth or beauty in a suffragette slashing Velázquez's Venus or the IRA blowing up Nelson's Pillar in Dublin?
But seeing the Chapmans' glib attacks on old art in the same show as that unforgettably moving Dead Christ, which resurfaced under the Mercers' Chapel in London in 1954, invites grim thoughts about what art is now. The Chapmans' disfiguring of portraits could only happen in a cynical moneyed art world that has no soul. They have the cash to buy oil paintings in order to trash them. Their clients find that kind of thing amusing.
I go back to the Dead Christ: a passionate work of art made to help ordinary people contemplate the biggest realities of life and death. The contrast damns the Chapmans to hell.
Tender depictions of the Virgin Mary and harrowing visions of the sufferings of Christ abound in the first few galleries of this show, in stone and wood and stained glass. All have been damaged, many almost beyond recognition. There are illuminated manuscripts with pages torn out. A painting of the inside of Canterbury Cathedral in 1657 looks innocuous until you see little Puritans patiently, precisely smashing out its stained glass windows.
These rooms offer a truly eye-opening revelation of how much great art was lost when the Protestant Word erased the Catholic image – sometimes literally, as when a painting of the Man of Sorrows had a Biblical text written over it.
But none of this has anything to do with the studiously ambivalent, pretentious way the rest of the show explores modern attacks on art. The casting down of Catholic art in the Reformation did not make that art more "interesting": it is loss, pure loss. Countless things have gone forever. Others survive as battered husks. Their destruction is tragic, to be mourned.
This exhibition does not add up – it puts too many things together and ends up making no sense. You can't seriously say the loss of art in the Reformation was like a post-Duchampian dadaist game. And anyway, the Tate can't champion art vandals as artists without risking massive hypocrisy. A display of works in its collection that have been attacked includes Carl Andre's bricks, splashed with ink in 1976. If this kind of incident is so interesting, why does it not include Mark Rothko's Black on Maroon, attacked by self-styled "yellowist" Vladimir Umanets much more recently, in 2012?
Umanets (real name Wlodzimierz Umaniec) is serving a two-year prison sentence for his attack at Tate Modern. It seems strange for the Tate to flirt with celebrating art vandalism when in reality, if you scribble your name on any of the art here, you can be absolutely sure it will prosecute.
Unless your name is Jake and Dinos Chapman and you can afford to buy the art you plan to insult. Then, it's Art.
Like I say: plenty of questions, but probably not the ones the curators meant to ask.
Rating: 3/5
Tate BritainJake and Dinos ChapmanPaintingSculptureExhibitionsArtJonathan Jonestheguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Under the hammer: a history of attacks on art – interactive
Here are 26 examples of assaults on art, from a statue of Christ beheaded by Reformation zealots to a Leonardo drawing blasted with a shotgun
Paddy AllenJonathan JonesKarin AndreassonSeptember 27, 2013
Grand Theft Auto: meet the grand masters of digital art
Developers of the latest GTA game have created such eye-popping backdrops that players are bypassing the violence to stop and stare
Creativity is elusive in online "art". That is the message of the latest digital art craze – taking landscape photographs inside the world of Grand Theft Auto.
A group of gamers plunging into the spectacular spaces and dramas of Grand Theft Auto V have created some eye-catching images. They pool their works under the group name Landscape Photographers of Los Santos and Blaine County, the fictional places where GTA's adventures are set.
An app in the game called iFruit allows players to take screen shots – and instead of grabbing violent or ludicrous images, the Landscape Photographers of Los Santos and Blaine County use it to take sublime pictures of the game's vistas.
The pictures are undeniably eye-fooling. They look like grand views of the American west, with a romantic sensibility that goes back to 19th-century American landscape artists such as Frederic Church. Atmospheric and poetical, these entrancing California-like landscapes might be stills from Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo or pictures by a latter-day Ansel Adams.
The joke is that in taking sensitive screenshots, the GTA photographers are transferring the art of landscape from the real world to the virtual. Where others play the game for thrills and violence, they seek out its pastoral moments.
This is all very witty and clever, until you cast your eyes about and find there are already sublime landscapes from GTAV in circulation – and they were released by the game's creators as publicity images.
Back in the summer, as excitement about the new edition of the game built up among fans, Rockstar, its creator, released some awe-inspiring stills from the game. One of these official pictures shows a dazzling American landscape of sunlit water, massive rocks, evergreen forests and a steel-frame railway bridge. Another shows two digital characters at a viewpoint above a breathtaking city.
So the Landscape Photographers of Los Santos and Blaine County are not doing anything fresh – they are just recycling images the game itself creates, and which the makers already published as promotional material.
There is creativity, wit and art in Grand Theft Auto V – but it's from the game's makers. In the digital world, the real creative work is confined to a tiny minority of designers who work for games companies and software giants. This just confirms what has always been true, from the Sistine Chapel to Hollywood: art is made by the few, for the many. It takes rare gifts, disciplined skills and an original mind. Artists are developers, not players.
ArtGrand Theft Auto 5Grand Theft AutoGamesGame cultureJonathan Jonestheguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Marvin Gaye, a giant thumbs up and a transgender icon – the week in art
Spartacus Chetwynd has changed her name to Marvin Gaye. Find out what's going on, plus check out the fourth plinth contenders and a new April Ashley show – in your art dispatch
Exhibition of the weekAuerbach – Rembrandt
Frank Auerbach is a painter of meaty, mulchy, wintry power. His expressionist eye for London landscapes and the human face clearly has an affinity with Rembrandt, and here his paintings come face to face with the works of the most emotionally eloquent artist in history.
• Ordovas, London W1S from 4 October until 1 December
Adrián Villar Rojas
This brilliant young artist steals the show at London's newest art gallery. Beware the elephant.
• Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London W2 from 28 September until 10 November
Shunga: sex and pleasure in Japanese art
A profoundly erotic encounter with great art from early modern Japan.
• British Museum, London WC1B from 3 October until 5 January
April Ashley: portrait of a lady
A homage to Liverpool's transgender icon.
• Museum of Liverpool, Liverpool L3 from 27 September until 21September 2014
Sarah Lucas
One of the most compelling artists of her generation struts her stuff.
• Whitechapel Art Gallery, London E1 from 2 October until 15 December
Anna and the Blind Tobit by Rembrandt, 1630
Rembrandt is fascinated by blindness – and the possibility of expressing sightlessness in art. In this painting he lures the eye into a crepuscular vortex of shadow, enfolding the onlooker in a felt hood of the imagination, as if you were seeing with Tobit's blind gaze.
• National Gallery, London WC2N
That the Stirling prize winner is a luxurious holiday home available to rent for up to £2,500 a week
What the world's most iconic photos look like in Play-Doh form
That the new Serpentine Sackler gallery in London looks like a giant space-age urinal
That a new book of vintage American gas station photography is worth a pit stop
How many listed and living architects there are
That the first (and only) lady of arte povera is still going strong
And finally …RembrandtFrank AuerbachSculptureArtPaintingArchitectureStirling prizeAwards and prizesJonathan Jonestheguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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