Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 67
November 20, 2020
What if Hitchcock directed lockdown? – the week in art
With its online Rear Window show, the White Cube is letting you ‘spy’ on works by Jeff Wall, while Cardiff celebrates Welsh national treasure Richard Burton, and Mary Quant goes back to the 60s – all in your weekly dispatch
Rear Window
Stuck indoors for lockdown? This witty online show suggests it’s a bit like being James Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. In this cinema classic, Stewart plays an ace photographer trapped in his apartment with a broken leg. Like Stewart’s curious voyeur watching his neighbours, you are tempted here to “spy” on seductive artworks by Jeff Wall, Ellen Altfest, Gillian Carnegie and more. Good fun.
• White Cube online.
November 18, 2020
One Caravaggio coming right up! Adam Lowe, the art world's master faker
From the tomb of Tutankhamun to Raphael’s Sistine masterpieces, Adam Lowe makes perfect copies for governments and galleries the world over. But he’s not a forger – he’s a liberator
The grandest spaces in the whole of the mighty Victoria and Albert Museum are the Cast Courts, built high enough to hold a full-scale replica of Trajan’s Column in Rome, which is colossal even in two pieces. No less imposing are the London museum’s 19th-century copies of Michelangelo’s David, not to mention its duplicates of Viking carvings and even the entire front of a Spanish cathedral. All these casts, which were recently cleaned, are a curious spectacle. Why did the Victorians create such a comprehensive “virtual art” collection? To make a clever point about a copy being just as good as the real thing – or simply to bring great work to the people?
But there’s one exhibit here that brings the world of the fake, and all the questions the subject provokes, up to date: an eerily precise 3D print of a nude statue of Pauline Bonaparte, sister of French military leader Napoleon, by the neo-classical artist Canova. This lovely replica is the work of British-born, Madrid-based artist and tech pioneer Adam Lowe. By placing it here, the V&A is recognising that Lowe is reinventing the much misunderstood practice of copying. Indeed, Lowe takes the fine art remake to such heights of accuracy, sensitivity and detail that even experts are fooled. Far from being derided as cynical forgeries, though, his copies are hailed by this and other museums as opening up new ways of understanding and enjoying masterpieces.
Caravaggio's Nativity was stolen by the Mafia in 1969. Lowe's copy has given Palermo a piece of its heart back
Continue reading...November 13, 2020
Abstract fantasies and a naked everywoman – the week in art
Walter Price will have you trying to fill in the blanks while Maggi Hambling’s tribute to Mary Wollstonecraft caused a furore – all in your weekly dispatch
Walter Price
New York painter Walter Price unveils warmly coloured, apparently abstract fantasies that on closer inspection are full of horses, people and places that have you trying to fill in the blanks and interpret his stories.
• The Modern Institute, Glasgow, until 16 January.
November 9, 2020
Joe Biden's love for Seamus Heaney is evidence of a soul you can trust | Jonathan Jones
The president-elect has often quoted Heaney’s poetry, with his reading of The Cure at Troy going viral after his election victory
I didn’t fall for Joe Biden until I learned that he loves the poetry of Seamus Heaney. Anyone who responds to the steady, humane voice of Heaney has the timbre of soul you can trust. It’s not like a politician rattling off a quotation from Shelley or St Francis of Assisi. You can’t pretend to love Heaney, for he’s too subtle for that; a slow-speaking country man giving up his secrets gradually, like a farmer revealing the land’s hidden knowledge – and its graves.
Related: Joe Biden picks Seamus Heaney to add to his appeal
“two soldered in a frozen hole
On top of other, one’s skull capping the other’s,
Gnawing at him where the neck and head
Are grafted to the sweet fruit of the brain,
Like a famine victim on a loaf of bread.”
“How culpable was he
That last night when he broke
Our tribe’s complicity?”
November 6, 2020
Cinema's finest dream-maker and sacks appeal in Ghana – the week in art
Special effects master Ray Harryhausen’s poetic visions come into focus as Ibrahim Mahama takes a suggestive view of the cocoa bean industry – all in your weekly dispatch
Ray Harryhausen
The fantastic visions of the most poetic of all special effects designers get a fine art retrospective. Relive your childhood dreams.
• Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two), Edinburgh, until September 2021.
November 5, 2020
Culture to cheer you up during the second lockdown: part one
As the UK enters another month – at least – of being stuck indoors, our critics pick out top music, games, books, TV, dance and art fixes to lift your spirits. Return tomorrow for film, comedy, theatre, classical music and podcasts
Khruangbin – Mordechai
Because sometimes what you need during lockdown is to be transported somewhere better by whatever’s in your headphones: Mordechai’s self-styled “Earth music” sounds like a warm summer breeze, a gentle drift of guitars equal parts psychedelic and west African, scattered vocals and lazy funk drums, the overall effect somewhere between Roy Ayers and Air.
November 3, 2020
Jasper Johns' Flags I is the perfect image to wave in Trump's face
Created in the Watergate era, Johns’ take on the Stars and Stripes has become the perfect symbol of a scarred nation. Its acquisition by the British Museum is inspired
From a distance, it looks bold and bright, like the very stars and stripes it is representing, an ideal as much as a flag. But come closer and you’ll notice how pockmarked and scarred its surface is, full of mysterious holes as if nibbled by cockroaches. Could there be a more fitting symbol of America right now?
The British Museum has marked the United States’ big vote by announcing its acquisition of Flags I, the screenprint by Jasper Johns that is said to be worth millions. Three years ago, the London venue put this image on the posters and catalogue for an exhibition called The American Dream. That title sounds almost quaint today. Who, at the close of Donald Trump’s first term in the White House, can now utter that phrase without irony? American Dream? Can those words really apply, given that the arrival of this election has been marked by shops and businesses being boarded up, and with Trump making bizarre remarks challenging the sanctity of the poll, threatening the entire democratic process?
Related: Jasper Johns Flags I print worth at least $1m donated to British Museum
Johns said his work might properly be considered an abuse of the printmaking medium
Continue reading...October 30, 2020
South Africa's LGBTQ+ heroes, bull sacrifices and a fearless Roman feminist – the week in art
Zanele Muholi’s monumental portraits hit the Tate, the Temple of Mithras makes a new offering, and a Renaissance woman takes inspiration from a Roman feminist icon – all in your weekly dispatch
Zanele Muholi
Moving portraits of South Africa’s LGBTQ+ community by a photographer who sees the mystery of being human. Muholi has an eye for the monumental in the personal, with images of beauty and courage that can take on heroic proportions. This retrospective contains more than 260 startling and enduring pictures of compelling ambiguity.
• Tate Modern, London, 5 November to 7 March
October 26, 2020
Turner’s Modern World review – a roaring, wondrous whirlpool of a show
Tate Britain, London
From the most devastating depiction of the slave trade ever to an erotically-charged shipwreck, JMW Turner’s heart-stopping maelstroms of sea and steam and smoke made him a true visionary of his age
It’s not standard practice for curators to draw attention to a masterpiece they failed to borrow. But right in the middle of Tate Britain’s roaring whirlpool of a Turner exhibition is a reproduction of his 1840 painting Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On). Apparently, it has become too frail to make the transatlantic journey from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts – another twist in the story of the most devastating work of art ever made about the British slave trade. So, instead of passing over its no-show, the exhibition demands you pause to mourn it – and what it depicts.
This painting belongs at the heart of Turner’s Modern World even though it’s just here as an idea, a concept, with an excerpt from David Dabydeen’s poem Turner next to the repro. That’s because this exhibition presents Turner as a passionate and engaged painter of modern life. It shows how alive he was to the liberations and oppressions of his revolutionary age. Born in London in 1775, into a world ruled by aristocrats and monarchs where the horse was the fastest thing on earth, Turner lived to see the coming of trains, steamships, political reform and photography – and the abolition of the slave trade.
Continue reading...October 23, 2020
Electric Turner, a giant octopus and quantum photogravure – the week in art
Ray Harryhausen’s epic monsters, Cornelia Parker’s surreally beautiful afterimages and JMW Turner’s energy-infused observations of his contemporary life – all in your weekly dispatch
Turner’s Modern World
The energy and vertigo of a new world of steam and science electrifies the luminous mists of JMW Turner’s art. This exhibition follows his observation of contemporary life from harrowing depictions of the Napoleonic wars to his elegiac painting of a ship of the line at the end of its days, The Fighting Temeraire.
• Tate Britain from 28 October until 7 March
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