Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 76
February 28, 2020
Too filthy to print – Aubrey Beardsley and his explosions of obscenity
His erotic ink drawings, full of nudity and sex, influenced everyone from Klimt to Picasso. But, ahead of a Tate Britain show, we look at the pictures that were deemed just too outrageous. WARNING: explicit content
A woman who is naked except for fancy stockings touches what the artist calls her “coynte” while a winged cupid teases her bottom with a powder puff. A wizened man admires a young man’s elephantine erection, the glans as big as his bald head – all delineated in sharp black outlines and shadowed with inky pools against expanses of white. These are a few of the many explosions of obscenity that a slender, pale young man created in the room he checked into at the Spread Eagle hotel in Epsom, Surrey, in June 1896.
The drawings Aubrey Beardsley completed in this suburban hideaway were to illustrate the ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata by Aristophanes. The works, that can be perused at your leisure in Tate Britain’s forthcoming exhibition, had an incalculable effect on the birth of modern art. Beardsley’s eroticism would soon be emulated all over Europe by revolutionaries such as Klimt, Schiele and Picasso, while James Joyce summed up his impact on modernism in a double entendre: “Kunstfull”.
Continue reading...
What to see this week in the UK
From Portrait of a Lady on Fire to the 6 Music festival, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...February 25, 2020
David Hockney: Drawing from Life review – stripping subjects down to their gym socks
National Portrait Gallery, London
From joyful sketches of old friends to a nude meeting with Picasso – when Hockney wields his pencil we see the undisguised truth
Celia Birtwell on being drawn by Hockney
When it comes to wielding a pencil, an etching needle or just a felt pen, David Hockney has no rivals. Lucian Freud’s etchings bore me senseless, Francis Bacon barely doodled, but Hockney is a graphic master. His retrospective of a life of portrait drawing is the most dazzling display of his art I have ever seen.
Forget the rants about smoking, or the personality that has always made him so lovable. Hockney here is not a star but a stare. In self-portraits drawn with a steady black line, he eyeballs himself in the mirror, mercilessly seeing lank hair and a skinny body. He draws his own eyes through the unforgiving lenses of his spectacles. It’s uncomfortable to stand close to those eyes – the sense of Hockney sizing you up is almost oppressive. This series was made in 1983, when he was still blond, but he can see himself getting older. What does the future hold? The intensity of Hockney’s self-inspection, fag in mouth, bears comparison with Rembrandt. When an artist looks so hard into the mirror, we share what they see – we are invited into the undisguised truth.
Related: Hockney muse Celia Birtwell: 'Nobody else has ever asked to draw me'
At the National Portrait Gallery, London, from 27 February to 28 June.
Continue reading...February 21, 2020
Domestic scandals by the Dutch master and Hockney turns to his friends – the week in art
A new exhibition by Nicolaes Maes puts women and household secrets centre stage, the early years of Rembrandt are laid bare and we explore outsider art – all in your weekly dispatch
Nicolaes Maes: Dutch Master of the Golden Age
The humble fascinations of 17th-century Dutch art will have you lingering over kitchen scenes and domestic scandals in this excellent, and free, survey of an artist who puts women centre stage.
• National Gallery, London, from 22 February to 31 May.
Nicolaes Maes: Dutch Master of the dark art of everyday intrigue
National Gallery, London
This quietly captivating exhibition reveals the depths of the Dutch Golden Age artist whose paintings are as rich in hidden drama as any theatre
The young woman painted by Nicolaes Maes in the 1650s, resting her elbow on a cushion on a window ledge while she meditatively cradles her chin in her hand, looks like she is independently reaching the same conclusion as René Descartes just a few years earlier: “I think, therefore I am.” Maes’s masterpiece Girl at a Window shows her surrounded by solid things. A wooden window covering has been flung open to show its planks to us in perspective. Bright apricots bulge over decaying plaster and brick. And yet, as the girl contemplates the physical world, a black void opens behind her. It is the cavern of consciousness in which all she can be sure of is cogito ergo sum.
Maes was a pioneer of one of the world’s most beloved art styles – the humble realism of the Dutch Golden Age. The paintings in this quietly captivating exhibition lay down elements that his contemporary, Johannes Vermeer, would refine – women working in rooms, domestic mysteries, secret glances. He pulls back the curtain on a private realm. In one of a series of variations on the image of an eavesdropper smiling complicitly at us while she listens in on household secrets, this is literally true – there’s a curtain rail across the front of the picture with a green silk curtain partly pulled back to half-reveal a domestic row. The ordinary middle-class Dutch home, suggests Maes, is as rich in hidden drama as any theatre.
Continue reading...What to see this week in the UK
From Greed to Cashmere Cat, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...February 14, 2020
The war on trolls, punk's cutting edge and the big birds of books – the week in art
Art bites back at cyberbullies, Hockney shows early promise and the critic who shattered a $20,000 work in glass – all in your weekly dispatch
Linderism
The photomontage genius of Manchester punk brings her cutting blade to gentle Cambridge.
• Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, until 26 April.
What to see this week in the UK
From Sonic the Hedgehog to the 1975, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...February 12, 2020
The Meet Vincent van Gogh Experience – 'Left me hungry enough to eat paint'
South Bank, London
This should have been a rollercoaster. Instead, it’s a sedate trudge through giant canvases – giving you the bottle but not the booze, the facts but not the feeling
I would love to meet Vincent van Gogh. I would shake his hand – a gesture we know meant a lot to him because he sometimes signed letters “with a handshake”. And I’d tell him: “Vincent, you are loved.”
As it happens, Bill Nighy beat me to it, playing a critic in the 2010 Doctor Who episode Vincent and the Doctor. Tony Curran, who starred as Vincent in that instalment, is on screen at the end of the Meet Vincent Van Gogh Experience, along with the late Kirk Douglas, who portrayed the artist in Lust for Life. Their presence reminds you that Van Gogh has become a bit like Hamlet: an epic challenge for actors, with a last act to make anyone weep.
The exhibition has the laid-back feel of a spiegeltent serving slightly flat beer
Related: Gloomy Van Gogh self-portrait in Oslo gallery confirmed authentic
Continue reading...February 10, 2020
A $20,000 artwork accidentally destroyed by a critic? That's nothing!
I sympathise with the critic who smashed Gabriel Rico’s sheet of glass work. I once knocked a priceless artefact off the director of the Louvre’s desk
Art critics, by our very nature, are prone to taking violently against inanimate objects. Yet we are also given exclusive access to precious masterpieces, with minimal supervision. Now the inevitable has happened. Art critic Avelina Lésper has destroyed a $20,000 piece by Gabriel Rico at an art fair in Mexico City. She says the obliteration was accidental – but also confesses that she disliked the work, a sheet of glass with a variety of everyday objects inside it. When she put an empty drink can near it to take a photograph as a critical comment, the whole thing shattered. Lésper is claiming the accident as spooky critical action: “It was like the work heard my comment and felt what I thought of it.”
I have never destroyed art on this scale, although I have no idea where my Gary Hume drawing got to and I let my stick of Tracey Emin rock crumble into dust. But this incident sounds to me more like a professional nightmare come true. Theatre critics don’t sit on the stage and film critics don’t do their reviewing on set. Yet I am regularly allowed into exhibitions before they are open. Quite often there’s still work being done. Cables, ladders and buckets of water may lie around. The opportunities for slapstick are immense. And I’m quite clumsy. I once knocked an exquisite artefact off the director of the Louvre’s desk while interviewing him. He saved it. The experience haunts me whenever I am alone with expensive art. I imagine myself crashing into a Damien Hirst painting and trying, Mr Bean style, to stick the butterfly wings back on before anyone notices. Worse. What if an inexplicable impulse made me pull off those wings on purpose? Not that I would, would I?
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