Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 25
November 29, 2023
The Isleworth Mona Lisa: have Leonardo da Vinci fans worshipped the wrong portrait for centuries?
Some argue this painting depicts the artist’s subject in her younger years and is the first version of his iconic work. Others are less convinced
Move over, Salvator Mundi. That holy image, marketed as a rediscovered masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci, sold for $450.3m (£335m) six years ago and holds the record for the most expensive painting ever sold at auction – in spite of scepticism about its authorship, quality and history. Now there is potentially an even more sellable Leonardo doing the rounds, with similarly questionable claims being made as it goes on public view in Turin. Although it is not currently for sale, it’s hard not to believe that the private owners aren’t sorely tempted. Is this painting’s exhibition in Italy the start of a campaign that will end in Leonardo beating his own world record?
Salvator Mundi became known as “the male Mona Lisa”, lending it the glamour of Leonardo’s most well-known work. But the Mona Lisa Foundation in Zurich, which is championing the painting showing in Turin on behalf of its anonymous owners, is suggesting that it is the original Mona Lisa. It argues that it’s the first version of the infamous painting, depicting a younger Lisa than the one Leonardo worked on all his life and had with him at the chateau of Amboise where he spent his last years, and which now attracts an unending selfie-snatching crowd in the Louvre.
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November 27, 2023
David Panos: Gothic Revival review – a restless walk on the dark side of … Northampton?
NN Contemporary Art, Northampton
Panos’s intoxicating film explores the spooky side of the Midlands town through a spectral montage of choirs, architecture and pub bands playing Bauhaus songs
The gothic is an unkillable vampire. The pointy, buttressed architectural style of great medieval cathedrals was named after the Ostrogoths and Visigoths, ancient Germanic peoples who migrated into the Roman empire. That style in turn was revived in the 18th century: the aesthete Horace Walpole built himself one of the first gothic revival houses, Strawberry Hill in London, which inspired him to write the first horror novel, The Castle of Otranto. It was then revived far more thoroughly by spectacular Victorian architects including Augustus Pugin and George Gilbert Scott.
And then there was Bauhaus. The pioneering goth band came together in Northampton in 1978, taking its name from Weimar Germany’s famous art and design school where Klee and Kandinsky worked. There wasn’t anything “gothic” at all about the Bauhaus school, but presumably the German term for “house of building” sounded spookily central European to the band members. Their 1979 single Bela Lugosi’s Dead hits the horror mainline, its rhythmic dirge a mesmerising tribute to the Hungarian-born star of Dracula.
Continue reading...November 24, 2023
What’s on Jeremy Hunt’s dining room wall? Art to enjoy with a cucumber sandwich
UK chancellor was pictured working on the autumn statement at home. Our art critic runs the rule over his choice of artworks
Tom Phillips, Ten Views of the Union Jack, 1976
Phillips is a quirky, literate artist – he has illustrated Dante – who balances gracefully between pop art and conceptualism. Here he analyses the British flag by printing it repeatedly with different degrees of solidity and clarity, questioning what it meant on the eve of punk in 1976 – and what it means today.
Continue reading...Bold pastels, pale impressionists and existential bodies – the week in art
Jenny Saville’s visceral new work, sketchy stuff from Renoir et al and Antony Gormley meditates some more – all in your weekly dispatch
Jenny Saville: Ekkyklema
New paintings and works on paper by this bold and visceral figurative artist.
• Gagosian Davies Street, London, from 30 November until 10 February
November 23, 2023
Heroic, short, callous, crumpled, Christlike: how artists portrayed Napoleon before Ridley Scott
From a battlefield avenger to a nude colossus, the Corsican conqueror was a rich subject for artists across Europe. But was it Turner who finally captured the truth about the fallen emperor?
So you think Napoleon was short? Well, it’s a myth. Britain’s great satirist James Gillray didn’t just caricature the French leader relentlessly, he also pulled off arguably the greatest cartoon coup of all time, convincing the world even to this day that he was pint-sized. It was all based on a mistranslation (and no doubt a little mischief). Since French inches were bigger than British ones, Napoleon’s recorded height of 5ft 2in would have worked out at around 5ft 7in on the other side of the Channel. Not a giant, but taller than the average Frenchman of the time.
The epic story of the Corsican soldier who rose to dominate Europe and then suffered a shocking downfall, only to return briefly before finally meeting his Waterloo, is now one of autumn’s big films. Ridley Scott has already been taunting historians who have criticised his Napoleon for factual inaccuracies. But how have other artists portrayed this colossal figure? In cinema alone, the leader’s extraordinary life story is a venerable theme. Can Scott and his star Joaquin Phoenix lay to rest the ghost of Abel Gance’s so-far-unsurpassed 1927 silent Napoléon? And have they lifted the curse that blighted Stanley Kubrick’s unfinished Napoleon project?
Continue reading...November 21, 2023
Impressionists on Paper review – Van Gogh sets this rambling show on fire
Royal Academy, London
Sterile sketches by Monet, Degas and Renoir make you grateful they mostly stuck to painting – but Toulouse-Lautrec and Van Gogh’s empathy and emotion steal the show
Impressionists on Paper is a bitty ramble of a show, despite some drop dead masterpieces. Its title betrays its lack of purpose. Impressionists! On paper! For as the curators assume we all know, the French artists who shocked conservative taste in the 1870s are renowned as painter’s painters. They put their easels in the open air and caught the changing light. Yet here they draw. But that’s not a revelation at all. Renoir’s drawings of women are just as bland as his paintings.
Only one drawing in the first room grips me. A sketch by Manet of people fleeing the rain in a Paris street is full of the unexpectedness of actual life: it’s a dynamic “impression”, apparently drawn from a window, of hunched pedestrians in hats making for shelter. There is also a powerful portrait by Manet’s student Eva Gonzalès. Called The Bride, this pastel in a sharp, fast style shows a young woman sunk in despond, unhappy with her allotted role, the flowers in her hair a sad joke. But where’s the flux and flow of impressionist art in other sketches? Monet contributes two dreamlike pastels of surreally shaped seaside cliffs and rocks, but they don’t change how you see his paintings.
Continue reading...November 17, 2023
Durham gets lit, the States turn sick and goddesses reign – the week in art
Also, feminist block-printers in Massachusetts and the war’s toll on Gaza’s artists – all in your weekly dispatch
Pope.L: Hospital
This visceral installation explores illness, the body, race and the US.
• South London Gallery, from 21 November until 11 February
November 14, 2023
Liotard and The Lavergne Family Breakfast review – a delicate scene of the Enlightenment good life, torpedoed
National Gallery, London
These masterly portraits of a polite morning routine conjure the beauty of ordinary moments – until this seemingly civilised ritual is obliterated by its historical context
A woman is teaching a child how to eat breakfast. They are seated at a small wooden table with a surface so polished you can see reflections of the metal coffee pot and porcelain tableware as the woman steadies the girl’s cup so she can dip a thick piece of bread into her milky coffee.
This is not just a civilised ritual but a civilising one: the child is being trained, just as her hair is disciplined with tight wrappings. This is Lyon, France, in 1754 and the pair taking their polite morning repast are enacting the new social style of the European cultural movement known as the Enlightenment. Inspired by the orderly “clockwork” universe described by Isaac Newton, this 18th-century ideology valued reason, sociability and manners. In Jean-Etienne Liotard’s masterpiece The Lavergne Family Breakfast, those values are expressed in the proper handling of fragile Japanese porcelain and the ability to dunk your bread without splashing yourself.
Continue reading...November 10, 2023
Georg Baselitz’s erotic prints and the world’s best photography portraits – the week in art
Plus, Peter Blake talks AI in art, a dynamic look for hospital architecture and a 450-year-old look at the birth of our galaxy – all in your weekly dispatch
Georg Baselitz: Belle Haleine
Witty, provocative and accomplished erotica by the great German artist.
• Cristea Roberts, London, until 22 December
November 9, 2023
Pornography or art? Outrage master Georg Baselitz’s sex prints are sublimely carnal
Cristea Roberts Gallery, London
These huge upside-down linocuts showing clothed couples having sex, with a white circle at the pivotal point, are ‘like Picasso on schnapps’
Are there any limits to art’s ability to transform? Not according to Georg Baselitz, the veteran German artist who has reworked the imagery from a set of 19th-century “erotic lithographs” that many might describe as pornography. For starters, he flips the pictures upside down – his habitual way of inverting reality. But that’s just the beginning. Baselitz unleashes a joyous arsenal of artistic ingenuity on these crude images of a couple making love, bringing both immense technical skill and witty conceptual brilliance to pictures that, through his eyes, become oddly moving.
This year Baselitz turned 85 and his birthday is being celebrated with exhibitions all over the world, from a show of his rough-hewn wooden sculptures at London’s Serpentine to new paintings of shamanistic half-stag, half-human figures that’s just opened in New York. He also took over Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum to celebrate its paintings of nudes. But if you still need converting to this unique artist’s humour and intensity (he proves they can go together), this provocative little show might be the best introduction of all.
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