Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 258

Paul Gauguin in London and the discovery of Paris – the week in art

The French capital as seen through the eyes of Britain's 19th-century painters, plus subversive graphic art and a celebration of camp – all in your favourite weekly artistic roundup

Exhibition of the week: Collecting Gauguin

Is Paul Gauguin a great artist? His paintings can seem brittle, cold, histrionic. He was not as intense or as suffering as his friend Vincent van Gogh. Side by side, their works look very different and it is Van Gogh who usually looks more profound. But Gauguin has a special quality of ironic romanticism. Like the novels of Joseph Conrad, his pieces subtly take apart the mind of European 19th-century imperialism. They are haunting in the way early photographs are haunting. They take you to where he was, in an unsettling rhapsody. They strongly appealed to the collector Samuel Courtauld, which is why some of his best works are in London – as this show explains.
• Courtauld Gallery, London WC2R, from 20 June until 8 September

Other exhibitions this week

Keep Your Timber Limber
Saucy drawings galore in this show, which celebrates graphic art as a personal and subversive activity. Tom of Finland is in it – say no more.
• ICA, London SW1Y, from 19 June until 8 September

The Discovery of Paris
Paris is revealed here as it was seen by British artists who went there in the early 19th century.
• Wallace Collection, London W1U, from 20 June until 15 September

Notes on Neo-Camp
A group of 21st-century artists, including the excellent Pablo Bronstein, who are influenced by 20th-century camp.
• Studio Voltaire, London SW4, until 20 July

Through American Eyes
The landscape art and sea scenes of Frederic Church bring American romanticism to Edinburgh.
• Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, until 8th September

Masterpiece of the week

Henri Rousseau's Surprised!, or Tiger in a Tropical Storm (1891)
This painting is a joyful fantasy of wild nature by an artist who never visited the jungles that filled his dreams. Rousseau creates a world that is totally self-enclosed and richly alive yet has no "realism" at all. It is a decoration with bite.
• National Gallery, London WC2N

Image of the weekWhat we learned this week

Why Broomberg and Chanarin were worthy winners of the Deutsche Börse prize

What Jeanette Winterson thinks of LS Lowry's rage against the machine

Red is the colour of money (when it comes to selling art)

Why Prism PowerPoint was the real horror of the NSA scandal

Defacing the Queen's portrait was a backhanded compliment

And finally …

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Defacing the Queen's portrait is a backhanded compliment | Jonathan Jones

This proxy attack on the Queen by a Fathers4Justice campaigner demonstrates the strength of the monarchy

The spray painting of a portrait of the Queen in Westminster Abbey shows why republicanism is a dead cause in Britain. The violence shown below in the best photo available – a man has apparently tried to write "Help" across the painting – is probably the most effective piece of royal iconoclasm perpetrated in Britain since the Sex Pistols had a go at the Queen in Silver Jubilee year. So is this attack on a fairly ordinary work of art a subversive act of lese majeste? No, it just reveals how much the monarchy is loved.

To see why that is, ask yourself: why did a Fathers4Justice campaigner pick this particular painting to attack? It is not exactly a national treasure. Yet the man who decided that Ralph Heimans's picture of the Queen standing on the colourful medieval pavement of the abbey where she was crowned was a good candidate for a bit of graffiti, made a wise choice. He has hurtled himself and his cause higher up in the news than he might have if he just trashed a Poussin in the National Gallery.

This is because the person in this case matters more than the painting. There's something primitive about our attitude to royal portraits; they are tokens of the ruler herself. Just like Jamie Reid, who in 1977 committed an act of dada on the Queen's portrait for the cover of the Pistols' God Save the Queen, this protester has chosen to defile something the nation holds sacred. In Britain, there is nothing more sacred than Her Majesty. That's why this iconoclasm is a shock: not because the royal image is vulnerable, but because it really does feel outrageous to desecrate the Queen's image.

Accidentally, this assault reveals an underlying truth about Britain and the monarchy. Iconoclasm only works when the image you attack means something. It meant something for 17th-century Puritans to smash the windows of Westminster Abbey with their religious scenes, because these stained glass windows carried a powerful charge of the sacred. In breaking them, radical Protestants made a statement about the revolutionary nature of their faith and their repudiation of "popery". But if someone walked into Westminster Abbey today and attacked a religious image, the act would have little meaning: it would be classed as straightforward criminal damage. Instead, the frustrated father went to the Chapter House, where this painting has recently been hung, and attacked the Queen by proxy.

That got him noticed. As an art lover, I welcome the fact that he didn't damage a great painting in a museum. Perhaps here is a new function for royal portraits – to provide a safety valve for rage and save more important works of art from destruction.

Yet the reason this painting, its attacker and Fathers4Justice have hurtled into the headlines is that 60 years ago a young woman was crowned Queen in the very abbey where the damage has been done. As she approaches the end of her reign, the Queen is handing on a monarchy that has never looked so strong. This bit of political theatre is a backhanded compliment to that regal achievement.

The QueenMonarchyArtProtestJonathan Jones
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