Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 27

Drink, lechery and fellatio by snake: was the Renaissance a sexually subversive love-in?

From Bosch’s crazed party to the homoerotic images Michelangelo smuggled into the Vatican, this was an age of taboo-busting. And, as our writer argues in a new book, it sparked its own culture wars

Hieronymus Bosch was a respectable citizen of a small Dutch city, a leading member of its Christian community, but in the central scene of his masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights, he imagines a crazed ecstatic party without taboos or guilt. Hundreds of naked people, “black and white” as a contemporary observer noted, make love and feast on giant fruits in this rock festival of a painting. One man carries a giant mussel shell, two pairs of entangled legs poking out. Bosch’s riotous masterpiece later belonged to Philip II of Spain and was given its name by moralising authorities who saw it as a warning against false pleasures. But this is a utopia. It is not Europe. The people have no technology, no metal tools, no houses, no windmills. Those everyday details of Netherlands life appear somewhere else – in the side panel that pictures hell.

So where is this? It’s a new world, perhaps even the New World. In the wake of Columbus crossing the Atlantic in 1492, tales of the so-called “naked peoples” of the Americas were popular. Bosch at the dawn of the 1500s is inspired by them to imagine what it would be like to live a totally natural life without Christian law. And God obviously loves these innocents: he gives them huge strawberries so they don’t need to toil or spin.

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Japan’s floating world, Britain’s lakes of paint and California’s sculpted light – the week in art

Also, a newly restored first world war masterpiece and a 400-year-old portrait of one of the world’s first professional female artists – all in your weekly dispatch

Japan: Myths to Manga
Something genuinely innovative – a proper art historical show for the kids, from the floating world to modern manga.
• Young V&A, London, from 14 October

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Frieze London art fair review – a graveyard of creativity for tasteless one percenters

Regent’s Park, London
This corporate gathering full of artists’ drab, desperate attempts to get bought by clueless rich collectors has domesticated contemporary art and thus killed it

There is an unutterable sadness to seeing Damien Hirst’s new paintings at Frieze. These big pictures of gardens, their blurry photorealism besmirched with Pollockesque drips in a desperate attempt to bring such duds to life, are the star turn at Gagosian, one of the mightiest of the art dealers whose chic stands fill the vast white tent of the art fair. But no one looks fooled. Few are giving Hirst’s paintings a second look at the VIP view, which is filled with moneyed collectors, articulate salespeople, my daughter and me.

I try to explain to her how exciting and dangerous Hirst once was, when he was young, when he got someone to kill a tiger shark so he could put it in an art gallery. “He had the shark killed?” “Well, you don’t just find a tiger shark on a beach. It was a different time.”

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El Anatsui/Turbine Hall review – miracles in gleaming gold made from recycled rubbish

Based in Nigeria, this colossus of contemporary art has cleverly used the natural light of Tate’s Turbine Hall to create a masterpiece poised somewhere between desolation and hope

From a distance it looks ugly and apocalyptic, like a burned-out curtain. But approach the biggest of the three hangings dropping from the heights of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and a miracle begins. What seemed to be dingy and melancholy becomes radiant and weightless, holding and treasuring light from above before releasing it as starshine. Your eyes are kissed by the onrush of colours – gold, bronze, black – all emerging from a complex dance of squares and rectangles that float in the air like spangles of glowing dust.

El Anatsui, the Nigeria-based Ghanaian giant of contemporary art, has created a redemptive masterpiece. This colossal space always had the capacity to be a modern cathedral but few artists commissioned to work here have dared to treat it in such a romantic, ecstatic way. El Anatsui does. His translucent mystical hangings finally give this grey void the stained glass windows it needs.

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Photographic enigmas, chewing gum paintings and ice-skating clergy – the week in art

Explore the large-format photographer who shot Dalí and Diana, a new Turbine Hall installation and endangered street art – all in your weekly dispatch

Hiroshi Sugimoto
Eerie, captivating photographs of a stilled and silent world by this true artist of the camera.
• Hayward Gallery, London, 11 October to 7 January

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American anxiety, Georgian fireworks and a Black British pioneer – the week in art

Philip Guston paints an unhinged States, Claudette Johnson’s haunting drawings get a big show and a magical light is shone on the 18th century – all in your weekly dispatch

Philip Guston
Cartoon Klansmen smoke and stare in Guston’s grotesque satires on American madness.
• Tate Modern, London, 5 October-25 February

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Claudette Johnson: Presence review – subtle swipes at the exploitative modern masters

Courtauld Gallery, London
The artist brilliantly questions depictions of non-white figures by such revered painters as Gauguin and Picasso – but there’s a quiet power to her new work that leaves theory behind

In Claudette Johnson’s large drawings of Black women and men, faces and bodies hold you, frozen in poses that seem more significant than words can say, as if each spontaneous expression or gesture were at the same time a studied symbolic act. Reclining Figure, which is around two and a half metres long, depicts a woman lying down, her face supported by her arms, brooding melancholically or perhaps just daydreaming. Her entire body is swathed in white, against patches of blue and red. The drawing insists on the privacy of her selfhood, and defies you to exploit or possess her with your eyes.

You literally cannot. She slips away from the gaze. In case you miss what Johnson is kicking against in this haunting work, Paul Gauguin’s 1897 painting Nevermore, a treasure of the Courtauld collection, hangs just outside her exhibition. Painted in Tahiti, it gives the eye everything that Johnson’s Reclining Figure refuses. Gauguin depicts a young Tahitian woman lying nude, lost in her own thoughts just like Johnson’s subject – but as she ponders, Gauguin relishes her hips and breasts.

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Rubens & Women review – ‘Naked breasts moved him religiously’

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London
From nuns to nobles, the Flemish artist loved painting unclothed women. But, as this staggering exhibition reveals, there’s so much more to him than frolicking nudes

Maria Serra Pallavicino is a queen. Technically she’s a Marchesa. But no one could look more monarchical here, in the painting by Peter Paul Rubens. She looks down imperiously from the throne where she sits swathed in silver, with an impossibly huge ruff collar of floating filigree lace tinged with gold. But it’s her intense face and dark eyes that hold you. Amid her finery, she’s engaging and mysterious, her personality more precious than her pearls.

Rubens is a painter’s painter. No great artist communicates the sheer fun of holding a paintbrush like he does. He’s an ebullient chef, laying on thick sauces of glinting, creamy colour. And women were his favourite ingredients. He lavished his attentions on them clothed and naked, at prayer and in bed. The intimacy and warmth of the results make Dulwich Picture Gallery’s show Rubens & Women a riotous feast.

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Frans Hals review – boring, lifeless portraits with flamboyant facial hair

National Gallery, London
Comprehensive collection of the 17th-century painter’s work aims to place him alongside Rembrandt and Vermeer, but his technically brilliant paintings are weirdly soulless

The National Gallery has put together what must be the most comprehensive array of the portraits of the 17th-century painter Frans Hals ever assembled, filling eight rooms on the museum’s main floor with a subtly lit splendour of black silk, white ruffs and orange flags. I was bored rigid.

Right from the start, something is off. In the first room, an unknown man and woman hang side by side. He’s holding a skull and looks grave. She’s inscrutable. Encountering these people I felt nothing, and it only got worse. I found myself walking back and forth increasingly adrift and unhappy, past one technically brilliant painting of a flushed face after another.

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Glasgow to the rescue as blast of realism brings punch to the new Scottish galleries – review

The National, Edinburgh
The mountains, lochs and rivers are ravishing. But it’s the artists from Glasgow – that one-time hotbed of modernism – who bring a rawness to these lavish new galleries celebrating Scotland’s art

One thing rapidly becomes clear in these lavish new purpose-built galleries of Scottish art: Scotland likes itself. Or at least, Scottish curators are far fonder of their country than their opposite numbers at Tate Britain and the National Portrait Gallery are of the UK as a whole. Whereas these London museums have recently opened rehangs that call out past injustices and national guilt, Edinburgh’s new look at Scotland’s artistic story is a celebration. It’s also ravishing. The spacious new gallery has big windows that give views of the Scott Monument, Princes Gardens and up towards the Old Town. Before you enjoy Scotland’s art you are invited to admire the capital city itself.

A text on the wall praises the beauty of Edinburgh, in case you hadn’t noticed. And in between the picture windows hang paintings that show the same scene 200 years ago. Alexander Nasmyth’s painting, Princes Street with the Commencement of the Building of the Royal Institution, shows a view very close to the one from the windows, under a spacious Romantic sky. But Nasmyth’s view is no tourist postcard. Bleak tenements cling to the side of the Old Town, plummeting to a waste ground – or is it a giant cesspit? – in the dip between the city’s two halves. Poverty shadows the picturesque.

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