Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 74
April 24, 2020
Mind-boggling Beardsley and Helmut Newton's sexy century – the week in art
The painter who delighted in depravity, the photographer who revelled in reality, plus Rembrandt in his youth – all in your weekly dispatch
Helmut Newton 100
The photographs of Helmut Newton are some of the most real-seeming ever taken. His powerful black and white contrasts give depth and form to bodies in space, however you see them – in a gallery, book or online. Oh and some might find them sexy. Launches digitally on Thursday on IGTV.
• Newlands House gallery, Petworth.
April 17, 2020
Fake art, a fastidious psychopath and Banksy's rodent rampage – the week in art
Patricia Highsmith’s manipulative murderer, Michel Houellebecq’s bitter irony and Orhan Pamuk’s mysterious miniaturists feature in our roundup of the best art novels – all in your weekly dispatch
Ripley Under Ground by Patricia Highsmith
Fastidious psychopath Tom Ripley, a connoisseur who murders to fund the finer things, enters the art world as arch-manipulator of a forgery ring. Fake art results in real death.
April 16, 2020
Bog-standard genius: Banksy's rats show great artists shine in solitude
The street artist has kept busy by painting his toilet. But as everyone from Giorgione to Van Gogh can attest, separation from society can do wonders for the creative mind
What’s a street artist to do when the streets are locked down? Banksy’s got nothing to keep him busy except create mayhem in his own bathroom. He has released photographs of what he says is his loo decorated with stencilled rats in a trompe l’oeil rodent rampage – swinging from the towel holder, balancing on a mirror frame, perching on a toilet splashed with orangey-brown matter.
For these filthy beasts long associated with plague, coronavirus means party time. They are celebrating our decline and fall. Maybe Banksy sees the anarchic potential in a world that has decided to suspend normal business.
Continue reading...April 10, 2020
Peek into Picasso's paperwork and loiter with Leonardo – the week in art
Take an online trip through Picasso’s dizzying genius, or a virtual stroll past the National Gallery’s greatest masterpieces – all in your weekly dispatch
• The best arts and entertainment during self-isolation
Picasso and Paper
Take a video trip through the dizzying abundance of Picasso’s creativity and see how many surprising uses a genius can find for a piece of paper.
• Royal Academy, London.
April 4, 2020
David Hockney urges us to escape lockdown through a pencil
The artist, who has splashed joyous spring colours over our anxieties, is on a roll, sequestered in France
David Hockney has a little advice for anyone who fancies taking up art as a lockdown hobby: take out the pencils or brushes, and put away the camera.
“I would suggest people could draw at this time,” he said from the house in Normandy where he has been sequestered since France practically closed down last month. “Question everything and do not think about photography.”
Related: How David Hockney depicted a spring for self-isolationists
Continue reading...April 3, 2020
Digital gallery tours and Hockney's daffodils – the week in art
Galleries are throwing their doors open to the web so you can still enjoy their treasures, and posing fun quizzes too – all in your weekly dispatch
Hastings Contemporary robot tours
It’s hard for some galleries outside London to maintain the virtual presence of national museums or art dealers, but there are ingenious ideas to keep exhibitions and collections visible. Hastings Contemporary for example is offering real-time tours using a state of the art telepresence robot. Its current exhibition surveys British abstract artist Victor Pasmore.
hastingscontemporary.org
Art imitating life: five of the best artist biopics
From a terrifying Van Gogh to a visionary painter in medieval Russia, here are five films about artists to lose yourself in
Kirk Douglas is often terrifying but always lovable as Vincent van Gogh in Vincente Minnelli’s 1956 film of the Dutch painter’s struggle to find meaning in the world. Among many Van Gogh biopics, this is the greatest.
Continue reading...April 2, 2020
How David Hockney depicted a spring for self-isolationists
Artists have long been fascinated by spring, but their blossoming buds can feel like a sick joke when we’re stuck inside. Thankfully, Hockney’s new iPad paintings look to the true master of the season – Van Gogh
David Hockney, who has spent a lifetime looking on the bright side, recommends spring as the cure for our ills. The 82-year-old artist has released his latest iPad paintings – intense observations of daffodils and fruit trees in blossom in Normandy. They are, as the title of one work puts it, a reminder that even in a locked-down world “they can’t cancel the spring”. Hockney is on cracking form in these keen-eyed pictures of nature. But is he serious that spring can cheer up a world shadowed by coronavirus?
Before seeing Hockney’s floral postcards of hope, the image of spring 2020 running through my mind was the much less comforting one with which TS Eliot opens The Waste Land – “April is the cruellest month …” When Eliot published these words in 1922, the first world war and the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-20 had made conventional hymns to spring seem corny. Even before those disasters, early 20th-century modernism scorned chocolate-box seasonal celebrations. Stravinsky’s 1913 ballet The Rite of Spring, with its designs by the artist Nicholas Roerich, is not a soothing pastoral but a chopping vision of primitive sacrifice. That same rejection of pious joy in spring continues in modern art, right up to Andy Warhol’s painting-by-numbers daffodils, which perfectly capture the poverty of cliche: to paint a spring flower, suggests Warhol, is to restate an empty affirmation.
Continue reading...March 27, 2020
'We are all Edward Hopper paintings now': is he the artist of the coronavirus age?
With his deserted cityscapes and isolated figures, the US painter captured the loneliness and alienation of modern life. But the pandemic has given his work a terrifying new significance
Who can fail to have been moved by all the images of people on their doorsteps clapping for the NHS last night? They filled TV screens and news websites, presenting a warming picture of solidarity in enforced solitude – all alone yet all together. But there are some far less reassuring images circulating on social media. Some people are saying we now all exist inside an Edward Hopper painting. It doesn’t seem to matter which one.
I assume this is because we are coldly distanced from each other, sitting at our lonely windows overlooking an eerily empty city, like the woman perched on her bed in Morning Sun, or the other looking out of a bay window in Cape Cod Morning.
Continue reading...Leonardo's dreams, pick of the podcasts and female sculptors – the week in art
Inside the mind of a Renaissance genius, chats with Chris Ofili and the dramatic lives of great British sculptors – all in your weekly dispatch
The new Sculpting Lives podcast series explores and celebrates the dramatic lives of British female sculptors including Barbara Hepworth, Elisabeth Frink and Phyllida Barlow.
Talk Art with Russell Tovey and Robert Diament
Inside the Mind of Leonardo da Vinci
National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh.
Continue reading...Jonathan Jones's Blog
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