Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 251

Pitting Francis Bacon against Henry Moore is a cruel, one-sided brawl

A new exhibition in Oxford shows that while Moore may have been the better man, Bacon overpowers him every time

Comparing two artists is never pretty. On paper it may make sombre academic sense to set two famous creators beside one another, to examine how they bounced ideas like tennis pros playing a friendly. But if that's how curators imagine such encounters, the reality is that we get into passionate arguments about the crudely obvious question – who's best?

It can get bloody.

At the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, a decent man is being beaten to a pulp. Henry Moore does not know what has hit him. Francis Bacon, drunk and shrieking foul-mouthed insults, won't leave poor old Moore alone. For every idealistic figure Moore creates, Bacon counters with a violent assault on the human form that draws the eye and transfixes the mind.

Francis Bacon/Henry Moore: Flesh and Bone, which opens at the Ashmolean on 12 September, darkly illuminates the nature of genius, for it proves the devil really does have all the best tunes. Bacon's paintings are rich worlds of colour in which terrible things are going on. A pope fades in his throne to collisions of gore and spectral traces of flimsy lace, a man's spectacles become black pools of nothingness, a bestial head rots in the dark.

Painting, for Bacon, is a terrible luxury. His purples and crimsons pay homage to the grandeur of baroque art – his popes are all versions of Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X. Amid the glory of ripe, painterly magnificence he reveals glimpses of a cruelty too terrible to be fully seen. His canvases are disclosures of horror within a velvet palace.

I have not said much about Moore. What's to say? Next to Bacon he looks colossally mediocre. A bronze king and queen sit inertly between two riotous Bacon canvases. The paintings swallow the sculpture whole. I can barely see it, it's vanishing, it's gone.

Clearly, this is not what a visitor to the exhibition is supposed to think. In recent years, Moore's reputation has soared. He is revered as a leftwing modernist hero whose works are defended by the great and good as national treasures.

This exhibition reveals how absurdly inflated and unjustified this cult of Moore is. It is disastrous, for Moore, to show his dutiful sculptures alongside Bacon's exuberantly vital paintings. Sure, they both portrayed the human figure. But Moore's bodies are so academic and sexless and painless beside Bacon's sublime contortions.

Moore may have been the better man – a socialist and a public figure – but he was not the better artist. And even that sense of virtue starts to fade, here. In the end, Bacon seems not only the more brilliant artist but the more truly compassionate and tragic recorder of the human condition. He looks into the violent heart of the 20th century and sees the pity of it.

Both artists depicted crucifixions, but in a Christian scheme of things, Bacon would be the soul saved – the prodigal son of European art.

Francis BaconHenry MooreSculpturePaintingArtExhibitionsJonathan Jones
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Martin Creed's light goes on and off for me

Tate has made its verdict on Martin Creed clear by buying his most notorious artwork – but is he a really convincing artist?

So what do you get when you buy Martin Creed's Work No 227: The Lights Going On and Off, which has just been acquired by the Tate? A light bulb and a switch?

No, stupid, you get an instruction. Creed's numbered works all come in the form of laconic scripts, recipes for works of art that can then be created in different places and times by following his simple proposals.

It's hardly surprising that his most notorious work – to borrow the words of Homer Simpson, it can be described as "Light goes on. Light goes off" – has been bought by the Tate. It won him the Turner prize at Tate Britain in 2001. Creed flicks all the right switches at Tate, a museum with a history of championing minimalism that goes back to its controversial puchase of Carl Andre's bricks in 1976. A display at Tate Modern once juxtaposed Creed's works with those of Andre, making the connection explicit.

But is Creed a minimalist? Only in the same sense that he is a fluxus artist, a conceptual artist and a dadaist. His instructions harp on all these themes of the 20th-century avant garde. Creed is a fastidious re-enacter of the avant garde's history, a stylish retro-provocateur.

Myself, I find him a bit too stylish and a bit too consciously clever to be an absolutely convincing artist. In fact, the lights go on and off when I think about him. One moment I am entranced by a simple, eloquent Creed gesture, the next I am wondering if this is not all a bit … pretentious?

The lights go on: I find his permanent installation of a coloured marble staircase in Edinburgh's Scotsman Steps a generous, modest masterpiece of contemporary public art. I am similarly moved by his eerily optimistic neon statement Everything Is Going to Be Alright. When Creed makes public art, he avoids pomposity, and expresses universal hopes and fears.

The lights go off: but what are those paintings of ziggurats that look like Italian art-movie posters from the 1970s? And are we supposed to admire his music as genuine art-rock fluxus experiement, or smile at the big joke? In the end, what is so profound about his fascination with numbers and lists?

Creed is not a minimalist, he's a pasticheur of that and other modern movements. This can be wearisome. But then suddenly he speaks clearly, and the light is good.

Martin CreedInstallationArtTate BritainTate ModernJonathan Jones
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The best visual arts of 2013: from Paul Klee at Tate Modern to Vienna at the National Gallery

From a scintillating encounter with a true great, to a portrait of a city inextricably linked with modern art – and a coming of age for our appreciation of Chinese art

Paul Klee

In his own eyes, Paul Klee (1879–1940) was a logical thinker whose art was built by rational processes. His 1933 painting Fire at Full Moon, with its skewed grid of bright, pure colours, expresses his deep sense of harmony and beauty. But Klee's abstract methods led him to create poetic images that have a special kind of childlike intensity, their bold lines describing angels and demons, innocence and experience, like a 20th-century William Blake. As the Nazis rose to power his art became primitive and brutal; perhaps only the savagery of cave art could do justice to a darkening world. Klee is one of the true modern greats, and this generous encounter with his work ought to be scintillating. Tate Modern, London, 16 October to 9 March, tate.org.uk

Australia

The complex art traditions of this remarkable continent – from Aboriginal dreamings and immigrant Romantic painters to the visionary Sidney Nolan – interweave in what promises to be a compelling epic spanning centuries of landscape and myth. Royal Academy, London, 21 September to 8 December, royalacademy.org.uk

Turner prize

The world's leading art prize has an intriguing shortlist and a fresh location in Northern Ireland. Laure Prouvost, Tino Sehgal, David Shrigley and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye offer provocative takes on what art is, and how it can be judged. Ebrington, Derry-Londonderry, 23 October to 5 January, cityofculture2013.com/event/the-turner-prize

Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna, 1900

Powerful portraits by such giants as Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka should make this a haunting encounter with a city where modern art and life in 1900 meant sex and death and uneasy dreams. National Gallery, 9 October to 12 January, nationalgallery.org.uk

Sarah Lucas

From her sensational early scatologies to the confident, contemptuous surrealism of her most recent objects, Lucas is the real, rude thing – a sculptor with the ability to shape horribly fascinating forms out of the raw stuff of life. Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2 October to 15 December, whitechapelgallery.org

Chinese whispers – the volume is turned up

China has been making great art for about 7,000 years, and this autumn Britain finally wakes up to the world's longest living art tradition. Long before Leonardo da Vinci drew his first landscape, Chinese artists were painting seductive and contemplative panoramas of mountains and forests. These prodigious pictures will be shown at the V&A in its autumn blockbuster Masterpieces of Chinese Painting 700-1900 (26 October to 19 January), an encounter with some of the world's most dazzling and thoughtful art. This survey of China's ethereal paintings is fleshed out by The Chinese Art Book, published by Phaidon on 14 October, a gorgeously laid out overview in which classics like Chen Rong's Nine Dragons, painted in 1244, - the original is in the V&A show - are juxtaposed with contemporary artists from heroic Ai Weiwei to the fireworks of Cai Guo-Qiang. Britain's China autumn also includes a solo show by Shanghai artist Zhang Enli, who is to create an ambitious painted installation at the ICA (16 October to 22 December). It's one thing for critics and curators to single out the next rising star from China, expecting hushed reverence from the general public, but quite another for us to genuinely engage with the art of China past and present. That's why China's moment this autumn matters. We can see at the V&A, or in The Chinese Art Book, how Ai Weiwei comments on millennia of creativity when he exhibits porcelain replicas of sesame seeds: back in 940 AD, when dark ages Britain was hunkering down against Viking raids, Chinese artist Huang Quan was painting profoundly realistic studies of birds and animals. If China is indeed at the forefront of modern art in the 21st century, this is no surprise. It has form on being ahead.

ArtPaul KleeJonathan Jones
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Bob Dylan, Westminster in latex and the Carbuncle Cup – the week in art

Enigmatic portraits by the master musician come to London, while the Houses of Parliament look forward to a makeover and students wonder how to survive without natural light

Exhibition of the week

William Kentridge
This powerful South African artist has brought many heritages of modern art kicking and screaming into the 21st century, from German expressionism to the political art of Picasso. He is renowed as a film-maker but forceful graphic ability is at the heart of his creativity. This Hayward touring exhibition shows 60 prints by Kentridge that exemplify his work in this craft, from small sheets to monumental images.
University Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 until 11 October

Other exhibitions this week

Bob Dylan
Poetic portraits that make words viscerally real prove Dylan is serious about his art. 
National Portrait Gallery, London WC2H until 5 January

Six Degrees Forward
Six artists who have recently graduated – Louise Bradley, Benjamin Else, Oliver Knowles, Julia Soboleva, Andreea Stan and Matt Wardell – exhibit together.  
Solent Showcase, Southampton SO14 until 3rd October

Bosco Sodi
Heavy new works of heaped graphite by this splash-it-all-over Mexican painter. 
Pace Gallery, London WF1 from 6 September until 4 October

Lawrence Weiner
One hundred multiples by the grand old man of conceptual art.
Summerhall, Edinburgh EH9 until 27September

Masterpiece of the week

Luca Giordano
A Homage to Velázquez (about 1690 - 1700)
The rich and complex world of 17th-century art is illuminated by this Italian baroque master's touching tribute to the realism of Velázquez. It is a lovely replica of the delicate yet visceral style of the great Spanish artist.
National Gallery, London WC2N

Image of the weekWhat we learned this week

There's a "really awkward fleshy intervention between a machine or manmade object" happening in a warehouse in west Yorkshire

Birmingham's new library is a modern behemoth that encases the past. Also resembles a big pair of lacy pants

The University College London wins the Carbuncle Cup for worst building: proof that you can survive without natural light and scrape through a degree

Chameleon syringes and self-expiring packaging – it looks like designers could revolutionise the medical industry

Should the Iron Lady be immortalised in bronze? Judging by the numbers of Guardian commenters, it's a no.

Westminster covered in latex – less perversion and more preservation, Jorge Otero-Pailos has been given the green light to coat the Houses of Parliament in a rubber mix

And finally...

Take part in our This Is Your Photo series for the fourth assignment in our Mass Observation-inspired project

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on Tumblr

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Bob Dylan's portraits capture the poet's unique vision

The pastel drawings in Face Value, an exhibition at London's National Portrait Gallery, are as tough and characterful as Dylan's songs – and yet another testimony to his creative power

Recently I was walking around Rome with the words of Bob Dylan rattling around in my memory. "Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble …" sings the folk musician, rock star or poet (as you like it) in When I Paint My Masterpiece. Dylan, in Rome on tour, has "Botticelli's niece" waiting in his hotel room – she promised to be with him when he paints his masterpiece. But little did we know that Dylan really was trying to paint a masterpiece all along. I always took the words in this song as a figure of speech, yet in recent years he has started to exhibit the works of art he has been making since the 60s – pictures that clearly take up a good deal of time and effort.

At present, he is showing his pastels in London at the National Portrait Gallery. Much like his songs, they are tough and characterful and impressive. Dylan has drawn 12 heads, partly from memories of real people, partly from imagination, and given them evocative names. Each is linked to a phrase about faces. There's In Your Face: Nina Felix, who looks back at you with a sharp aggressive presence that's actually quite daunting, even though she's just a sketch on paper. Nina may or may not be a real person – these portraits are said to draw on various recollections and encounters – but Dylan gives her huge personality. More to the point, this and the other portraits make sense of why a man so steeped in language should choose to exhibit visual art. For these are words enfleshed: Nina Felix physically embodies the cliched expression "in your face". Similarly, the broken look of gangsterish Leon Leonard gives form to the expression "losing face". Red Flanagan, his eyes dark and narrow in his fleshy mask, must "face the consequences". The words – these phrases about faces, and the names attached to them – seem to inspire the people created by Dylan's hand.

What makes this more than some stale conceptual exercise, however, is the ardour and integrity with which he carries it out. His drawings are firm and passionate, done with honesty and determination. The energy with which Dylan makes his faces tangible and carnal is oddly moving. It reveals a poet's vision: this is an artist for whom words must mean something, suggest something, and here he gives weight and substance to words we say all ths time. It comes down to the human face and our endless harping on it in everyday speech.

Dylan draws well, with feeling and hard-won accuracy. He has a powerful imagination. He is much more of an artist than plenty of people who do it full-time will ever be. Botticelli's niece can back me up on that.

ArtNational Portrait GalleryExhibitionsBob DylanLondonJonathan Jones
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Grave new world: Kasimir Malevich's resting place tells the story of Russia

His famous Black Square painting is an icon of emptiness and death. Is the disappearance and long-delayed recognition of Malevich's grave a suitably strange fate for the artist?

The disappearance of the grave of the abstract artist Kasimir Malevich is an allegory of the violent history of modern Russia. Malevich, who was born in 1879, was buried in 1935 near an oak tree on the edge of Moscow. As the Soviet Union went through collective farming, forced industrialisation, war and cold war, his rustic grave was forgotten. The marker vanished, and so did the oak tree.

Now Malevich's resting place has been rediscovered during the building of flats in the Moscow suburb, Nemchinovka, where he was interred. A plaque is going to be put up and a local school will be named after him.

The disappearance and long-delayed recognition of Malevich's grave is a suitably strange and uneasy fate for the man who painted the most uncanny artwork of the 20th century.

If black is the colour of death, Malevich painted modern art's most morbid vision: his Black Square is, as its title may suggest, a solid square of blackness painted within a white border on a square canvas. Malevich painted the original Black Square in 1915 and it still survives, though cracked and decayed and with white peeping through the splintering darkness. With this piece, Malevich intended to paint "the face of the new art". The Black Square is one of modern art's most extreme statements, a reduction of art to an absolute zero from which a new art will be born. We can't help looking at it with the knowledge that Russia was on the verge of revolution when this eerie object was created. It is an image full of foreboding and menace, as if something mighty is about to happen – as if world is about to end.

It turned out that world after world would end in 20th-century Russia. It is curiously poignant that Malevich, who tried to persuade the Soviet Union to adopt his apocalyptic "suprematist" style as an official art, was so brutally erased after his death. His fate seems to be prophesied by his most famous painting.

The black square looks back bleakly at life. It seems to suck out energy and create an uncanny stillness. In Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot, a character gazes at Hans Holbein's painting The Dead Christ and comments that it could destroy someone's religious faith. Malevich painted an icon of emptiness that can destroy your faith in history, progress, art.

He certainly deserves his memorial, but perhaps naming a school after him is a bit hard on Moscow kids.

PaintingArtRussiaCommunismJonathan Jones
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This daft Gibraltar mock-up reveals sabre rattling for what it is | Jonathan Jones

A surreal image of Spain invading the Rock shows that, despite the rhetoric, the idea of Spain and Britain at war is laughable

Is this picture ridiculous or frightening, stupid or sinister? The answer is obvious: it is daft. The reasons why it is silly rather than scary reveals a lot about images, reality, and violence.

It was posted by Francisco Javier Pérez Trigueros, the mayor of Callosa de Segura in southern Spain, on his Facebook page, and has angered Gibraltarians with its mocked-up image of a Spanish invasion. For this is a gaudy Photoshop dream of Spain seizing the British territory of the Rock of Gibraltar. The Rock looms up in the middle of the montage, while Spanish troops parade in the foreground, fighter jets stream by and the Spanish flag flutters on high. A metal silhouette of a bull, a popular image of Spain, has been planted on the formerly British territory.

Imagine if Gibraltar was forced to drink Spanish sherry and snack on tapas into the small hours. Evening meals would not be allowed to start until 10pm and fish and chips would be banned. Yes, the prospect of Spain invading Gibraltar is truly chilling.

Yet in reality this summer's tensions between Gilbraltar and Spain are a will o' the wisp affair of taunts and insults, of which this picture is the latest surreal example. The unreality of this fantasia robs it of real bite. Defenders of Gibraltar and its right to lay down an artificial reef – the supposed provocation that has unleashed Spanish nationalism against one of Britain's lingering outposts – have expressed their rage at the mayor's Photoshopping. It follows a stunt by Spanish police divers who were photographed showing the flag while inspecting the controversial concrete reef.

This picture's hyperbolic collage of nationalist imagery illustrates how both sides are ramping up the rhetoric. The Gilbraltar government could have chosen to ignore the police divers, yet instead chose to protest about a serious infringement of sovereignty. Francisco Javier Pérez Trigueros has perhaps helped to defuse such rhetoric by the sheer extremism of this picture. For his image cuts through various levels of threat and counter-threat to imagine the worst: a war between Britain and Spain over Gibraltar.

Why is it not alarming? Because such a possibility seems so remote as to be comic. By winning an imaginary war, the picture reveals sabre-rattling for what it is.

Images are only meaningful when you know their context. If a picture like this came from 1930s Europe it would be disturbing, because invasions were a reality in 1930s Europe. It would also be genuinely worrying to see such a picture from the contemporary Middle East, where violence is an everyday reality.

Yet this picture explodes, through exaggeration, the Gibraltar "crisis" and points to the joyous fact (for Europeans): that Europe in the 21st century is a peaceful continent. Spain and Britain are no more likely to go to war than Virginia and Illinois. It's strange to see this fantasy of war at a time when real war is once again pulling European states towards action beyond their borders: what is the elusive difference between stability and chaos that makes Syria so bloody while Spain and Britain can throw mutual insults without it adding up to anything in particular?

It is a barrier that western Europe only crossed after 1945 and parts of the continent, like Northern Ireland, much more recently. Maybe we could sink back into being a "dark continent" in the words of historian Mark Mazower. But for now, as a European, I look at this picture with relief and gratitude. It's sheer good fortune to live so far from the house of war that you can make jokes about it.

GibraltarEuropeSpainForeign policyPhotographyJonathan Jones
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Are Andy Warhol's 15 minutes over?

A selection of Warhol's photographs of celebrities are to go on sale online, but he wouldn't have categorised them as art

Has our ever-changing world at last out-Warholed Andy Warhol? A set of previously unseen photographs taken by the visionary pop artist late in his life is about to be offered for sale by an online art and antique dealer for up to £5,000 for a print. However, aspects of this latest commercialisation of Warhol's name suggest that contemporary culture has now exceeded his prophecies in its celebrity worship and aesthetic indifference.

Warhol was a prophet of our time. Long before reality television was invented, he said that in the future everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. Long before today's celebrity culture, Warhol saw famous people as inherently fascinating, and many of the black and white photographs that are about to go on sale are slick snapshots of famous friends including John Lennon, Mick Jagger and Debbie Harry.

And yet in many ways, this artist, who made it big with paintings of soup cans in the early 1960s and died in 1987, was a cultural conservative. He believed that talent existed. As the aforementioned celebrity names suggest, the people whose fame interested Warhol were genuine stars with style and ability, even genius – William Burroughs is another of his camera subjects. While Warhol playfully suggested that one day everyone would have a taste of fame, regardless of ability, he did not seek out just anyone to photograph.

He was elitist too about the art market – careful to be represented by top class New York art dealers. In his book POPism, he explains the importance of such tactics in creating a blue chip reputation – so he might be genuinely shocked to see that his art will be auctioned on a website called 1stdibs. If, that is, he even considered it to be art.

Did Warhol really think his photographs of the famous, or of urinals, were art in the same way that his Death and Disaster paintings are art? Today, artists happily claim everything they do is art, and Warhol's works are routinely exhibited as if he too believed this. He tried anything once, and if he tried it once he tried it a hundred times, so his corpus can be almost illimitable, from screen tests to Interview magazine to these photographs.

In reality, Warhol believed in a hierarchy of the arts. His paintings were unambiguously his most serious activity and claim on posterity. He used photographs – those he got from newspapers and those he took himself – as the basis of paintings but that doesn't make the snaps themselves Andy Warhol artworks.

It's what Warhol does with photographs that creates art. From his silkscreen paintings saturating news images in colour to his portraits based on Polaroids: he transforms the raw material and gives it significance.

Warhol never thought anything as easy or banal or self-aggrandising as the glib 21st century claim that anything an artist does is art. The art world really has gone beyond Warhol – anything can be sold as art, anywhere, for any price, as this online auction shows. In 2013, fame is at once holy and base, and Warhol turns out to be an old-fashioned artist in a world that no longer knows art from a snapshot.

Andy WarholPhotographyCelebrityPaintingArtJonathan Jones
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The empire strikes back: celebrating the Victorians, the first modern masters

Guildhall Art Gallery's nostalgia-fest is sure to prompt eye-rolling from the British left – but we should honour the age of Darwin, Marx and William Morris as the one that forged our own

The Victorian age is coming back. An exhibition opening in September at the City of London's Guildhall Art Gallery showcases contemporary art inspired by the Victorians, in what appears to be an unashamedly nostaligic spirit.

That's on top of a developer proposing to rebuild the most famous of all Victorian architectural triumphs, the Crystal Palace, originally created as a temporary home for the Great Exhibition of 1851.

Some radical noses may be smelling the musty odours of conservative cultural nostalgia. Victoriana in art? Even with Yinka Shonibare and Grayson Perry involved, this surely sounds backward-looking. As for the return of the Crystal Palace, that has been denounced as a "jingoistic" cultural throwback.

It's a bad summer for the British left. The Conservative-led government seems to be gathering force, and Labour is looking rattled. Now on top of all that comes an artistic mood that celebrates the Victorians, those entrepeneurial capitalists so beloved of the late Margaret Thatcher.

But this is nonsense. We should all be fascinated by the culture of the 19th century. It was when the modern world was made. It was also when criticism of modern injusitices began. Eminent Victorians included the socialist visionary designer William Morris and the German emigre revolutionary Karl Marx.

This was the age when Charles Darwin proposed the theory of evolution. Darwin's ideas can be seen as an expression of "Victorian values" – some contemporaries took an ethos of the survival of the fittest from his work. But Darwin's careful research undid millennia of religious belief and opened the door to a rational view of life on earth.

Darwin should give pause to anyone who thinks the Victorian age stuffy.

Throw in such disturbing Victorian literary creations as Mr Hyde and Dracula, and it's clear that our 19th-century ancestors had imaginative, daring, dangerous minds.

One of today's most popular Victorian revivals comes in disguise. The TV series Sherlock reincarnates the 19th-century detective in contemporary London. Sherlock appears to get rid of all those stuffy Victorian touches – but in reality it respects the plots and language of Arthur Conan Doyle's stories, which began to appear in 1887. By showing how naturally Holmes and Watson can be transplanted into the 21st century, Sherlock proves how essentially modern these Victorians are.

So bring on the Victoriana – it is the art of the modern world.

ExhibitionsArchitectureLondonJonathan Jones
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Witches & Wicked Bodies show keeps sex under wraps

Sexuality is key to our fascination with witchcraft, but this rather genteel exhibition denies us a wild ride with the temptresses

The historian Norman Cohn in his book Europe's Inner Demons called witches "the strange mythic followers of Satan who supposedly held black masses and flew through the night" – meaning that they are imaginary, nightmare terrors. But why did these fantastic women so grip Europe's dreams in the 16th and 17th centuries? And why should a modern art gallery care?

Witches & Wicked Bodies at the Modern Two in Edinburgh delves into the darkness of the collective European imagination. In its publicity, the gallery offered a fig leaf for the fact that it was staging a show of premodern art. The press release stressed the involvement of artists from today such as Paula Rego and Kiki Smith. Yeah, well. They are in it, with one or two small works. But in reality this is, overwhelmingly, a historical investigation into images of witchcraft from around 1500 to 1700, when many people were tried and killed for supposedly being witches.

It is all the better for being historical, though – and the connections between then and now, the archaic and the modern, need no explaining, for these images anticipate the most uncanny strains of modern art. What could be more surreal than Francisco Goya's depictions of emaciated witches in his Caprichos prints? Or Hans Baldung Grien's print The Bewitched Groom, in which a man lies supine under the power of a sinister spell? This is an exploration of the primitive at the very heart of high European culture. Paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder and Salvator Rosa darkly depict the midnight sabbaths and phantom rides that once held the imaginations of learned people. It also shows how terror turned to humour as 18th-century satirists mocked the superstitions of their grandparents.

There are two flaws, though, that make it all a bit too genteel.
The show sticks too rigorously to a theme it illuminates primarily through graphic art. Why not be a bit more imaginative in following the wild ride of the witches? Paintings of Judith and Salome are full of witch-like qualities, not to mention Cranach's sinful Venuses. More might have been made of such metamorphoses.

But sex is kept under wraps in this exhibition. In reformation Germany, "witches" were prosecuted for a crime called Teufelbuhlschaft – having sex with the devil. Sexuality was central to the image of witchcraft. This is not concealed by the exhibition, but it is not stressed either.

It could be darker, then, and considerably more demonic – but this is an intriguing journey through the night side of the mind.

ExhibitionsArtEdinburgh festival 2013Edinburgh festivalPaula RegoPaintingSculptureEdinburghScotlandJonathan Jones
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