Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 87
July 19, 2019
Party in Pompeii, Da Vinci drawings and the Bauhaus for ever – the week in art
The dying hours of Pompeii, Leonardo’s life in drawings, a Bauhaus celebration and the best of the Edinburgh art festival – all in your weekly dispatch
David Batchelor
This fine artist of colour celebrates the centenary of the Bauhaus in his own idiosyncratic way.
• Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, 25 July to 25 August.
What to see this week in the UK
From Varda By Agnès to Rembrandt, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...July 17, 2019
Helene Schjerfbeck review – a chilling blast of Nordic noir
Royal Academy, London
The Finnish painter’s early work shows ability and vision, but this exhibition celebrates her long, brutal decline into decay and death
The Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck is not exactly a household name in Britain – and there’s no reason she should be. This is the first UK solo show of her sort-of expressionist works and it’s strictly for the dutiful. It might serve to cool you down on a hot day, though. Schjerfbeck’s uninspired miserabilism is a cold shower of second-rate art.
Born in Helsinki in 1862, Schjerfbeck had a long painting life that only ended with her death in 1946, her easel at her bedside. She is almost the exact contemporary of the Norwegian Edvard Munch and, like him, she painted the long dark night of the Nordic soul. However, in her art this teeters on bathos and descends into embarrassment. The curators have included three portraits of her mother, one a heavy-handed homage to Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black No 1. The artist’s daughterly devotion is clear, yet there’s nothing in them to make the viewer share that interest. It’s hard to know why we need to intrude on this private world.
Continue reading...July 16, 2019
The greatest photos ever? Why the moon landing shots are artistic masterpieces
From a spacesuited everyman to a golden-legged invader, the lunar images were astonishingly poetic works of art that captured humanity evolving before our very eyes. Can they ever be surpassed?
Fifty years ago this week, a former navy pilot created one of the most revolutionary artistic masterpieces of the 20th century, one we have yet to fully assimilate. His name was Neil Armstrong and his astonishing act of creativity is a photograph of his Apollo 11 crewmate Buzz Aldrin standing on the Sea of Tranquillity on the moon. Not that you can see Aldrin’s face. His features and flesh are hidden inside a thickly padded white spacesuit, its visor reflecting the tiny figure of Armstrong himself, beside the gold-coloured legs of the lunar lander.
This effacement of Aldrin came about because Apollo astronauts wore visors lined with gold to protect their eyes from sunlight. Yet these reflective qualities are part of what makes this such a powerful, complex image, one in which we can see two lunar horizons. Behind Aldrin, the moon’s bright surface recedes to a blue horizon against the black void of space. Meanwhile, reflected and warped by the helmet, the other horizon stretches away behind Armstrong. The photographer has incorporated the making of the image into the image, to tell the story of something new in the universe: two human beings looking at each other across the dusty surface of an alien world.
Continue reading...July 15, 2019
Banksy is the Brits’ favourite painter of all time - is this status deserved?
The anthropologist Marcel Mauss believed gift-giving is at the heart of human interaction. He might have seen the success of Banksy as proof, for Banksy is nothing if not giving. You never know when he might leave a mural on a garage wall in south Wales or in support of Extinction Rebellion. And as Mauss predicted, these gifts are reciprocated - in this case with a love that passeth all understanding. I don’t just mean he’s more popular than Damien Hirst or Grayson Perry. According to a poll reported in the Sun, the secretive stenciller is “Brits’ favourite painter of all time ... beating greats such as Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent van Gogh, Rembrandt and Monet.”
It is a vote that says more about us than it does about those dead artists. A meaningful comparison between Banksy and Van Gogh can only be made a century or so from now when he is part of history. Will his works endure as Van Gogh’s do? That is the only test of greatness in art. And it is one Banksy is unlikely to meet simply because his art is so pointed and current. In 100 years, will his union flag stab-proof vest worn by Stormzy at Glastonbury be anything more than a relic of pop history? Seems unlikely. But you can look at Rembrandt’s portrait of his lover Hendrickje Stoffels and her eyes pierce your soul, more than 300 years after artist and model died.
Continue reading...July 12, 2019
Apollo 11 celebrated, the legacy of rave culture and a monument to Melania Trump – the week in art
The 50th anniversary of the moon landing, a history of acid house music and the US first lady immortalised in wood – all in your weekly dispatch
The Moon
To mark the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, this exhibition surveys our fascination with the alien world closest to us.
• National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, 19 July to 5 January.
What to see this week in the UK
From Jaws to Garbage, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...July 5, 2019
Cultured cuppas, a stab-proof Banksy and 1.5 million maps – the week in art
Tea finally gets the show it deserves, Stormzy parades his Banksy union jack vest at Glastonbury and Oxford celebrates the wonder of cartography – all in your weekly dispatch
Olafur Eliasson
The artist who gave Tate Modern an indoor sun returns with more sublime experiments on the border of science and art.
• Tate Modern, London, 11 July to 5 January.
What to see this week in the UK
From Midsommar to Olafur Eliasson, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...July 2, 2019
Takis review – the lovable Greek and his mind-boggling magnetic marvels
Tate Modern, London
Takis has been tapping into the forces that govern our universe since the 1950s. Who would have thought electromagnetism could be so joyful?
It’s hard not to use the word “magic” about the art of Takis. A nail floats motionless in space. A cylinder and a ball dance jerkily with each other. Angelic music is played withno sign of a human hand. Yet none of this is the work of the supernatural, nor is Takis trying to fool anyone into thinking that it is. The force that gives his art its innocent joy is part of the fabric of the universe.
Magnetism – the phenomenon that Takis, who was born in Athens in 1925, has been making visible since the 1950s – has a long history of being mistaken for magic. Lodestones, with the power to attract ferrous metal, were coveted long before their properties were understood: it was said their spooky pull could be neutralised by garlic.
Takis: Sculptor of Magnetism, Light and Sound is at Tate Modern, London, from 3 July to 27 October
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