Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 66
December 11, 2020
Monstrous lemons, sea serpents and expressive Emin – the week in art
An unusual exhibition in Dulwich digs into photography’s roots through pictures of plants, while tech wizardry is on show at the National Gallery – all in your weekly dispatch
Unearthed: Photography’s Roots
This unusual exhibition tells the history of photography entirely through botanical and landscape images, from Henry Fox Talbot’s beautiful experiments with what he called “the pencil of nature” to Robert Mapplethorpe’s fleurs du mal.
• Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, until 9 May.
December 9, 2020
'Makes the JK Rowling films look tame' – Fantastic Beasts: The Wonder of Nature review
Natural History Museum, London
This is way more than a celebration of the film series, showcasing the oddest things in the museum collection, from a horrific mermaid ‘fossil’ to the skull of a Dracorex Hogwartsia
Although his nickname was Sea Serpent Killer, Richard Owen is best known today as the founder of the Natural History Museum, and as an all-round rival-crushing anti-Darwinian scoundrel. This Victorian scientist didn’t actually sail the oceans massacring monsters, but he did set out to prove such creatures were tall tales told by sailors, collecting reports in an album so he could expose them. It’s in the museum’s new show about natural mysteries, open at a story from The Illustrated Police News – usually full of true crimes – about the latest sea monster sighting. The picture of a colossal serpent with staring eyes menacing a modern ship is a surreal slice of steampunk.
Fantastic Beasts is much more than a celebration of JK Rowling’s film series about magic animal expert Newt Scamander and his cute pets, although Newt does feature heavily, along with recreations of Nifflers and the like. As well as being family fun, the show delightfully reveals some of the oddest things in this museum’s vast collections.
Continue reading...December 8, 2020
Mystery of the monoliths: if only it were aliens
The strange, reflective objects that have appeared in wildernesses worldwide were an inspiring stunt but are now just a tedious prank
Someone had to spoil it. That could be the motto of the social media age when things that begin as wonders become mere memes. Now our inability to let well alone is turning the most mysterious art happening of 2020 into another tedious prank.
Related: New mystery metal monolith appears on a California mountaintop
there’s something tacky about placing a synthetic metal or plastic object in a wild location. It’s not an alien mystery, just human pollution
Continue reading...December 7, 2020
Marina Abramović Takes Over TV review – 'A sorely testing five hours'
They sorted lentils from rice and then went off to embrace a tree while everyone told us how important performance art is. As TV viewing, this was embarrassing, boring and oddly low-brow
There is a Pied Piper quality to the world’s most famous performance artist Marina Abramović. She holds audiences spellbound and seems to deliver some purgative transformational electricity. I can’t feel it myself and was constantly itching to switch over throughout her heroically egotistical “takeover” of Sky Arts. I refocused, though, when a participant offered a couple of surprising comparisons.
“Mussolini was a performance artist,” said artist Franko B in a documentary segment of the long, long evening, adding: “Hitler was a performance artist”. There was no comeback to this apparent acclaim for the Great Dictators. All we got by way of contextualisation was a clip of Hitler speaking.
When she actually did her staring – straight out of the screen, for up to half an hour at a time – it was unnerving.
Continue reading...December 4, 2020
Tracey goes Munching and fantastic beasts go roaming – the week in art
Emin teams up with her hero Munch, Richard Hamilton proves a prophet, Henry Moore goes underground in the blitz, and JK Rowling fans get a treat – all in your weekly dispatch
Richard Hamilton
The most icily ironic of pop artists, a Duchampian and a history painter – this great British modern was a complex visionary and a prophet of our time.
• Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, 5 December to 18 April.
December 2, 2020
The Queen's found a Caravaggio in her loft! Masterpieces from Buckingham Palace – review
Queen’s Gallery, London
There’s an entire wall of Rembrandts in here, not to mention magnificent works by Vermeer and Rubens. But these treasures should be on show to everyone all the time
Some of the greatest paintings in Britain – and I mean works by the likes of Rembrandt, Vermeer and Rubens – all hang in a single room, namely the Picture Gallery of Buckingham Palace. It must be quite something to visit, the kind of royal sanctum many of us only see via The Crown on Netflix. Except we don’t – because, obviously, they weren’t allowed to film there. (Everyone notices their own clangers on the show: I stopped watching when Anthony Blunt, surveyor of the Queen’s pictures and a Soviet spy, explained art – and this collection – to HM using the term “early modern”. This old school art snob would no more have said “early modern” than he’d have said “taken to Twitter”. He’d have said “renaissance” or “baroque”.)
The Picture Gallery is having works done so its paintings are being shown at the Queen’s Gallery next door. So here they are, those early modern masterpieces, in a stunning revelation of the Royal Collection’s finest canvases. There is an entire wall of Rembrandts, each astonishing, some rarely seen out and about. I’ve never before looked into the eyes of Rembrandt’s rabbi. Always curious about his Jewish neighbours when he lived on Amsterdam’s Breestraat, the artist homes in on an old scholar’s anxious expression.
Continue reading...Lynette Yiadom-Boakye review – ‘she’s turned Tate Britain on its head’
Tate Britain, London
The artist has boldly reclaimed figurative oil painting and filled the gallery with the kind of contemporary art it normally shuns
Looking at Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s painting No Such Luxury, I suddenly saw how much she has in common with the Belgian surrealist René Magritte. The work depicts a woman sitting at a table with a cup and saucer in front of her, gazing straight out. That seems simple but the longer you look, the stranger it becomes. Magritte portrayed himself in the same pose in his painting The Magician – except with four arms. Yiadom-Boakye’s canvas may seem, by comparison, a slice of real life. But it’s weirdly out of scale, a bit larger than life. The woman is a monument, her gaze mystical and far-seeing – a Buddha of suburbia.
Yet Yiadom-Boakye has a far deeper affinity with Magritte. She makes us believe in someone who does not exist. Everything about her pictures of people says “portrait”. But these are not portraits. They’re fictional creations, imagined characters. “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” Magritte wrote beneath a painting of a pipe. Yiadom-Boakye’s exhibition could have been simply called “This is not a portrait.”
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly in League With the Night is at Tate Britain, London, 2 December until 9 May.
Continue reading...November 27, 2020
Trump's furniture fail: that's not a desk, Donald – it's a table for TV dinners
The Resolute desk at the White House is made of timbers taken from a Royal Navy ship. It projects pure power. Is that why the defeated US president has switched to an occasional table?
Has Donald Trump conceded the presidency by design? Is his choice of furniture betraying a subconscious admission of defeat? When the outgoing US president gave a speech this week saying he would depart if the electoral college voted for Joe Biden, his words came as less of a shock than the desk he chose to sit at. It was tiny. It sent out a clear signal. And that signal was “loser”.
Jokes about the shrunken size of Trump’s desk – one photograph, taken from low down, captures his legs barely fitting beneath it – are easy. So let’s not. You want to see a real ruler’s desk? The Resolute desk in the Oval Office is the definition of one: a massive fortress of a working space, like an aircraft carrier with legs, sporting the US eagle at the heart of its heavy Victorian carvings. Its timbers are British in origin: they come from a Royal Navy sailing ship, HMS Resolute, that once braved the icy waters of the north pole. And in a final addition of defensive machismo, Franklin D Roosevelt had the front bulwarked so no one could see his leg braces and discover he was disabled.
Related: ‘Mini desk. Tiny hands. Small soul’: Trump mocked for giving speech at little table
Continue reading...Playful portraits and the Queen's Rembrandts on show – the week in art
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s fictitious portraiture is at Tate Britain, Buckingham Palace offers up a post-lockdown assortment of royal art and Jennifer Packer explores race in the US – all in your weekly dispatch
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
Painted portraiture meets the identity games of Cindy Sherman in Yiadom-Boakye’s playful art depicting fictitious people.
• Tate Britain, London, from 2 December until 9 May.
November 23, 2020
When Tracey was Traci: Emin's unseen early paintings published for the first time
Her daring unmade bed won her notoriety – and star status among the Young British Artists. But a hoard of formative work reveals a very different talent
Before Tracey Emin, there was Traci Emin. That was how the young woman who would go on to be a star of conceptual art signed her name on a stark black-and-white woodcut poster back in 1986. It was for her degree show at Maidstone College of Art, where she earned a first in printmaking. It caught my eye a year ago while I was exploring her studio archive.
The woodcut – showing two desperate lovers clinging together in a dark night of the soul, the woman with an anchor tattoo – is part of a previously unseen hoard of Emin’s all but forgotten early work that reveals a different side of the artist from the one most people think they know. Much of it is lost and exists only as slides, the originals having been destroyed, she thinks, by a former boyfriend. They show the sincere and skilled artist Emin was before she became a household name and an infamous figure to many. When I saw these student works, I wanted to get them published so that everyone else could encounter that intense young soul. I was thrilled when she let me include them in a new visual book about her art.
Related: Tracey Emin on her cancer: 'I will find love. I will have exhibitions. I will enjoy life'
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