Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 64
February 18, 2021
‘You can smell the sweat and hair gel’: the best nightclub scenes from culture
Writers and artists including Róisín Murphy, Tiffany Calver and Sigala on the art that transports them to the dancefloor during lockdown
There have been many notable nightclubs in film history. The Blue Angel in the Marlene Dietrich movie; the Copacabana in Goodfellas, accessible to privileged wiseguys via the kitchen; the Slow Club in Blue Velvet, with the emotionally damaged star turn Isabella Rossellini singing the song of the same name.
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February 17, 2021
Damien Hirst: 'I flirted with the idea of pickling people'
As a survey of his work opens amid the snow of St Moritz, the artist talks about his obsession with blood, his disconnection from the art world, and why he misses banter with his army of assistants
If anyone should have been ready for this it was Damien Hirst. Thirty years before the pandemic that has made the modern world feel mortal, a young artist from Leeds was putting dead animals in glass tanks and arranging drugs in medicine cabinets to ram home the fragility of life.
Now Hirst is in lockdown like all of us, and as he chats via Zoom from what must be the least impressive room in his house, a small, spartan space with a blue and white cloth over a tiny window, he agrees that that early work suddenly feels very current.
I like it when people love my art. I like it when they hate it. I don’t want them to ignore it
Related: Damien Hirst review – just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water
Continue reading...February 15, 2021
'A great cover for their first album': Harry and Meghan's romantic rebellion against royal portraiture
The Sussexes’ baby announcement shared on Valentine’s Day is a confident image of defiance that seems to take us inside their love – granny must find it utterly baffling
The Duke of Sussex’s left foot steals the show. His knobbly toes shove themselves into the foreground, bulging out to rhyme with his wife’s baby bump. Misan Harriman, the Nigerian-born photographer and friend of Meghan who took the picture remotely from his home in Woking, has created an unbuttoned romantic pastoral that doesn’t so much rebel against royal portraiture as bring it to an end.
Producing babies has been the primary business of royalty since time immemorial. Harry and Meghan’s new child will be eighth in line to the British throne, but the picture tells us quite flamboyantly the Sussexes are not in Britain and have no desire to be. It is a confident image of defiance. A cup of California dreamin’. The garden looks semi-tropical. Harriman’s preference for black and white gives the sun-kissed lawn a lovely silvery glow that sets the couple almost in a vision of paradise. But at the same time, their intimate casualness – those toes again – is intended to show us they are anchored to the reality that matters.
It would make a great cover for their first album
Related: Harry and Meghan's second child could be US citizen
Continue reading...February 12, 2021
Lust, heartbreak and suggestive sculpture: was this art's greatest love triangle?
For Valentine’s Day, we look at how the interweaving passions of three American greats – Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg – were as mesmerising as their art
The sensual American graffitist Cy Twombly, who lived in Italy from the late 1950s until his death in 2011, lushly inscribed his epic canvases with love poetry – Shelley and Keats, Cavafy and Catullus. The work was like an abstract expressionist Valentine’s card. He even used hearts and roses in his work, as well as penises, breasts, anuses and vaginas. But who was his Valentine?
The answer is as epic and enigmatic as Twombly’s art. In the early 1950s he met a young artist called Robert Rauschenberg and they became lovers. On one occasion while they were studying at the avant-garde art school Black Mountain College, he saved Rauschenberg from drowning in a lake. It was no accident: Rauschenberg had attempted suicide. Twombly followed him into the water unhesitatingly. How’s that for romantic?
I have photos of Jasper Johns that would break your heart
Related: The Capote Tapes: inside the scandal ignited by Truman's explosive final novel
Continue reading...Magic in Manhattan and an evil soundscape – the week in art
Photography behind bars, an apocalyptic masterwork and the prize at the forefront of modern art – all in your weekly dispatch
John Moores Painting prize
This prize has been keeping painting in the picture of modern art since the 1960s, with David Hockney and Peter Doig among previous winners. The shortlisted artists this year are Kathryn Maple, Michele Fletcher, Robbie Bushe, Steph Goodger and Stephen Lee.
• Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, available online
February 8, 2021
Rembrandt and slavery: did the great painter have links to this abhorrent trade?
No artist is more celebrated for their compassion and empathy. So why has the Dutch master’s work been included in a shocking new show linking art and the slave trade?
The title of the show is simple and stark: Slavery. Due to open this spring at the mighty Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, this bold exhibition documents the importance of this abhorrent trade in the rise and wealth of the Netherlands, by juxtaposing shackles and slave inventories with works of art. There is a metal ring that has been in the Rijksmuseum since the 19th century. Previously catalogued as a dog collar, it is now thought to have been used on a human. There are other similarly chilling exhibits in this disturbing show – and at the heart of them all hang two renowned paintings by Rembrandt.
Their inclusion is shocking. After all, there is no artist more overflowing with compassion and empathy than Rembrandt. Yet this exhibition at the Rijksmuseum, home to so many of his masterpieces, reveals a side of the painter’s career that sits badly with our view of him as an artist with an expansive vision of what it means to be human.
Forget their pasty faces, Rembrandt seems to be saying – get a load of the bling
Related: My Rembrandt review – Old Master fanciers in the frame
Continue reading...February 5, 2021
Rodin meets the Chapman Brothers and we go inside The Dig – the week in art
Rachel Kneebone’s surreal sculptures, the British Museum shows us how film-makers researched The Dig and working from home, 18th century style – all in your weekly dispatch
Rachel Kneebone
Sensual and surreal sculptures that look like the outcome of an unholy marriage between Rodin and the Chapman brothers.
• White Cube online until 14 March.
The more satirical street murals are, the less they resemble great art
Street art that we share online tends to be inspiring – not strange, enigmatic or challenging
Whatever you think of street art, there’s no denying its pedigree. The paintings done on cave walls 30,000 years ago are today acknowledged as the first creative triumph of the human mind. But before their modern recognition as prehistoric wonders, these pictures of mammoths and bison were dismissed by Renaissance cavers who came across them as crude contemporary graffiti. That’s because graffiti were as universal 400 years ago as they are today, and just as disreputable.
Today we veer between seeing graffiti as visual noise and genius coming up from the streets. That’s the fascinating ambiguity of those marks and images. They can be dismissed as a public nuisance or hailed as works of witty artistic genius. Banksy in Britain and JR in France have followed in the footsteps of the 1980s New York street and subway art stars Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring to become respected and marketable. Basquiat and Haring were proteges of Andy Warhol, whose embrace of high and pop art, the beautiful and mundane, set the stage for today’s street art. Warhol himself responded to the graffiti craze with a series of abstract paintings he made by covering the canvases with copper, then urinating on them to oxidise the pigment and produce lovely mineral blues and greens. It was literally the lowest of street activities, peeing against a wall, become Art.
Related: When does street art become ‘art’ art?
Continue reading...January 29, 2021
Renaissance cartoons and Turner's watercolours online – the week in art
The Serpentine and WeTransfer go immersive with a new online series, the Scottish National Gallery takes Turner digital and Jo Spence’s powerful photographs are part of a streaming tour – all in your weekly dispatch
The Raphael Cartoons
A cartoon in the Renaissance meant a full-size design and came from cartone, the largest size paper you could buy. Raphael’s huge coloured drawings for tapestries to hang in the Sistine Chapel have been in Britain since the 17th century and at the V&A since the 19th. Now you can explore them in intimate, unprecedented visual detail using images recorded by Factum Foundation.
• Victoria and Albert Museum online.
January 22, 2021
Shonibare rewinds time and Emin gets her teeth into Munch – the week in art
Modern-day masters fill a mansion, Mike Dibb meets Miles Davis and a haunted Palace flings open its virtual doors – all in your weekly dispatch
Stephen Friedman Gallery
Yinka Shonibare’s art is full of 18th-century echoes, so this exhibition in a Georgian mansion shows off his wit nicely. Claire Barclay, Rivane Neuenschwander and Ilona Keserü are also among the artists occupying grand old neoclassical rooms and there’s a lovely book of the show to leaf through online.
• At London House of Modernity (online) until 2 April
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