Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 3

Edinburgh art festival review – regal lusting, sofa-surfing and the perfect painting for our times

King James’s lusty entourage, a glass-puppet kick up the Crusades and sublime recliners from Philadelphia … this year’s thrilling festival has splendour, passion and plenty of strangeness

Scotland’s queer king has a show of his own at Edinburgh and it’s as wild as any fringe event. Where else will you get explosions, witches and lacy ruffs all on the same bill? Step right up to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery for The World of James VI and I. James has become more box-office friendly lately, because of his passionate friendships with a series of male favourites, including the Duke of Buckingham, as seen on TV. You’ll find portraits of his favourite men here, the lushest by far being Rubens’ 1625 painting of Buckingham, his cheeks flushed, moustache neatly upturned, eyes flashing. There’s an astrological watch, too, in an egg-shaped silver case that James presented to another favourite, the Earl of Somerset.

This exhibition refuses, however, to pin down the exact nature of James’s sexuality, seeing it as just part of his times. When his voyage home from Elsinore Castle with his new bride was hit by storms, he blamed witches. His book Daemonologie incited Scottish witch-hunting and inspired Shakespeare to write Macbeth. The world he lived in was full of invisible magical forces. On view are relics of that universe, including a bezoar, to protect from poison, and the Charmstone of the Stewarts of Ardsheal.

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Millet: Life on the Land review – phallic forks and suggestive wheelbarrows enliven a landscape of toil

National Gallery, London
There’s a undeniably erotic charge to Millet’s paintings of gloomy hard work – reminding us that, behind the hoes, these are real people with real desires

The figures in Jean-François Millet’s 1859 painting The Angelus, a French icon that’s come to the UK on loan from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, seem extremely odd on close inspection. Their faces are obscure, their bodies intriguing under their shapeless work clothes. What age are they? How are they related? The man is quite young, his top shirt button loose, although his legs are as stiff as a doll’s, inside thick, rough-cut trousers. It’s harder to tell the woman’s age because she stands in profile, a breeze pressing her heavy skirt against her legs, as she clasps her hands. They might be a married couple or, as this painting’s unlikely fan Salvador Dalí claimed, mother and son. Their physicality is intense. The phallic prongs of a thick wooden potato fork and wheelbarrow shafts add to the feeling that, now the working day is done and they’re saying their prayers, they can finally get to bed. But if they’re mother and son? I refer you to Dr Dalí.

I think there’s a reason Millet makes The Angelus not so much a religious as an erotic landscape. It was the climax of his love affair with the French peasantry. Millet made it his life’s work to portray the rural poor – a class that had been denied full humanity. He depicts lives of backbreaking toil but wants you to see that, behind the hoe, is a human being with a mind, a body, desires.

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Deller’s Welsh visions, rollicking Rubens and an Edinburgh extravaganza – the week in art

Linder headlines the UK’s largest festival of visual art, Jeremy Deller delves into Welsh history and graffiti queen Lady Pink scares Keith Haring – all in your weekly dispatch

Edinburgh art festival
Artists from Linder to Mike Nelson provide the fun in this hugely varied city-wide extravaganza.

• Various Edinburgh venues, 7-24 August

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Pastoral play, AI portraits and a radical utopia for kids – the week in art

A countryside conceptualist takes root in Edinburgh, digital artists explore beauty in the age of AI and Monster Chetwynd takes on this summer’s Tate Play installation – all in your weekly dispatch

Andy Goldsworthy
Captivating retrospective of this countryside conceptualist who makes art with substances including sheep fleece, fern leaves, barbed wire and hare’s blood. Read the review.

• Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 26 July to 2 November

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Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years review – a wild walk between life, death and sheep-shearing

National Galleries of Scotland, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh
Using barbed wire, graveyard pebbles and prickly thorns, this retrospective plunges viewers into the raw sadness and beauty of rural life

Rural life hits you in the face like the stink of cow dung as soon as you step into the Royal Scottish Academy. Andy Goldsworthy has laid a sheepskin rug up the classical gallery’s grand staircase – very luxurious, except it’s made from the scraps thrown away after shearing, stained blue or red with farmers’ marks, all painstakingly stitched together with thorns.

This is the Clarkson’s Farm of art retrospectives, plunging today’s urbanites into the raw sadness and beauty, the violence and slow natural cycles of the British countryside. Goldsworthy may love nature but he doesn’t sentimentalise it. At the top of the stairs there’s a screen and through its gaps you glimpse the galleries beyond. It feels mystical and calming, until you realise it’s made of rusty barbed wire strung between two of the building’s columns that serve as tightly-wound wire rollers. It made me think of Magnus Mills’ darkly hilarious rural novel about hapless fencers, The Restraint of Beasts.

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Mutant seabirds, sewer secrets and a lick of art ice-cream: Folkestone Triennial review

Various venues
The salty nooks of this harbour town are the setting for a bleakly brilliant coastal festival taking in migrants’ plight, water pollution, burial urns – and some sweet relief

Folkestone doesn’t have a pier. It has an Arm. That’s what the harbour’s long walkway into the Channel is called. It is a suitably surreal, even grotesque setting for the Folkestone Triennial artworks that infest its salty nooks and crannies – or armpits and elbow crooks. Laure Prouvost has placed a mutant seabird, with three heads and an electric plug on its tail, on the adjacent concrete stump of the defunct ferry terminal. Surprising? Not really if you have just visited The Ministry of Sewers, an installation by Cooking Sections that documents and protests the poisoning of our rivers and seas.

There’s nothing like an exhibit on the scale of Britain’s water pollution to kick off a day at the seaside. It’s cloudy when I visit, the cliffs and sea swathed in white mist and the water under the Arm looking like a detergent soup. It all adds to the uncanny mood. And art doesn’t come much more uncanny than the sculpture by Dorothy Cross near the far end of the Arm. You have to go down soaking wet, concrete steps to a recess with a precipitous opening to the evil-looking sea. “Try not to fall in,” says the attendant, who stays up above. Here you find a massive block of blood-coloured marble, as if a giant tuna steak had been stashed here by fish smugglers. The sides are smooth, the top uneven and rough. Out of this earthy hulk Cross has carved several pairs of feet in hyperrealistic detail, nervously walking its beach-like surface. They face out to sea, as if about to make a bold leap into the blue-green water, to find a better life.

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Alien landscapes, Arctic artists and pioneers of pleasure – the week in art

Georgia O’Keeffe and David Hockney enjoy the air, the British Museum looks to the far north, and the Folkestone Triennial gets under way – all in your weekly dispatch

Folkestone Triennial: How Lies the Land?
Dorothy Cross, Katie Paterson, Cooking Sections and many more take part in a sprawling seaside summer art special.

• Various venues, Folkestone, Kent, from 19 July until 19 October

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Sculpture in the City/Bloomberg Space review – folk horror bubbles up under towering icons of cash

New commissions on this enjoyable art trail from the Wilson sisters, Ai Weiwei and Andrew Sabin remind us that this part of London is full of echoes of ancient ritual

Build anywhere in the City of London and you will have archaeologists watching every move your bulldozer makes, so best work with them. When Bloomberg planned its European headquarters it incorporated the ancient Roman Temple of Mithras in a basement, displaying finds made during the pre-construction dig in a gallery that also shows contemporary art. Now Newcastle-born twins Jane and Louise Wilson have taken a long hard look at four of those finds, wooden posts or stakes that are about 2,000 years old. It’s thought they supported an ancient crossing over the River Walbrook. Are they Roman, or even pre-Roman?

Part of their response appears as a surreal swarming world they depict under two escalators outside another City landmark, the Leadenhall Building – AKA the Cheesegrater (the rest is in a simultaneous free exhibition at Bloomberg Space). The Wilsons have plastered prints on the undersides of its entrance escalators bubbling with brews of sinister life that look like multiple eyes or frogspawn. In fact, these clouds of watery mutants are vastly enlarged images of the microscopic creatures that they saw, with the help of Danish and British archaeologists, inside the four Walbrook crossing posts.

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Humble peasants … or an odyssey of sex and death? The Millet masterpiece that electrified modern art

Van Gogh saw compassion for the rural worker; Dalí saw phalluses and a child’s grave. As The Angelus comes to the UK, our critic celebrates a painting so deep it could even induce hallucinations

It was Salvador Dalí who turned a small, intense rural scene called The Angelus, painted by Jean-François Millet in 1857-59 and hugely popular in its day, into a totem of modern art.

In the original, a pious peasant couple have heard the Angelus bell from a distant church, the Catholic call to prayer, and paused their work digging potatoes to lower their heads and pray. But from Dalí’s writings, we know he saw far more in the painting, from obscene sex to family tragedy. In one of his many versions of it, Atavism at Twilight, the couple sprout agricultural implements from their bodies. In his surreal drawings these good country people become mouldering, mummified husks, or are transformed into fossils by time and sadness. Now that the original painting is being lent by the Musée d’Orsay to the National Gallery as the star of its forthcoming show Millet: Life on the Land, we will all get a chance to obsess over this innocent-seeming artwork.

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Never mind the Norman bollocks: Reading’s replica Bayeux tapestry is a prudish triumph!

It may not be completely anatomically accurate, but the Victorian copy of the Bayeux tapestry is as much an emblem of its time as the 11th-century original

‘We’ve already got one,” sneers a snotty French knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. With that holy grail of British history, the Bayeux tapestry, about to be lent by France to the British Museum, we could say the same. In 1885, Elizabeth Wardle of Leek, Staffordshire, led a team of 35 women in an extraordinary campaign to embroider a meticulous, full-scale replica of the entire early medieval artwork. With Victorian energy and industry they managed it in just a year and by 1886 it was being shown around Britain and abroad.

Today that Victorian Bayeux tapestry is preserved in Reading Museum, and like the original, can be viewed online. Are there differences? Of course. The Bayeux tapestry is a time capsule of the 11th century and when you look at its stitching you get a raw sense of that remote past. The Leek Embroidery Society version is no mean feat but it is an artefact of its own, Victorian age. The colours are simplified and intensified, using worsted thread, as Wardle explains in its end credits, “dyed in permanent colours” by her husband Thomas Wardle, a leading Midlands silk dyeing industrialist.

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