Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 92

Notre Dame and the culture it inspired – from Matisse to the Muppets

It mesmerised Proust, terrified Homer Simpson and gave us the Hunchback – Guardian critics celebrate Paris’s gothic masterpiece at the heart of the modern imagination

As Notre Dame Cathedral’s majestic spire tumbled into the inferno on Monday night, live newsreaders around the world decried the tragic loss of this 12th-century marvel. The great timber roof – nicknamed “the forest” for the thousands of trees used in its beams – was gone, the rose windows feared melted, the heart of Paris destroyed forever. What few realised in the heat of the shocking footage was that much of what was ablaze was a 19th-century fantasy. Like most buildings of this age, Notre Dame is the sum of centuries of restorations and reinventions, a muddled patchwork of myth and speculation.

Almost a thousand years after its original creation Notre Dame still speaks to us

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Leonardo da Vinci: the best books of the last 500 years

His death was five centuries ago, but the artist, scientist and inventor still fascinates. Jonathan Jones recommends the best books to come to grips with the Tuscan prodigy

It’s 500 years since Leonardo da Vinci died and almost as long since the first, and still most seductive, biography of him appeared. Giorgio Vasari’s 1550 book The Lives of the Artists is still in print – and a great read. It’s full of strange tales, including the time the teenaged artist made a monster from lizards, bats and insects then painted it on a shield to terrify his father. The way Vasari tells it, you’re not quite sure if this was art or magic – it almost reads as if the monster came to life. Yet Vasari’s fabulism is threaded with nuggets from people who knew the polymath. They remembered his love of young men with long curly hair, belief in animal rights and “heretical” lack of religion.

One of the reasons Vasari’s blend of history and fairytale still works is that Leonardo and the Renaissance Italy that produced him are almost too exotic for scholars to portray. That’s why the most approachable introduction to the Tuscan prodigy and his world may be through Sarah Dunant’s well-researched historical novels. (Virago) is about the artist’s ruthless patron Cesare Borgia, the pope’s son who tried to conquer Italy. We encounter Leonardo working for Borgia as a military engineer – will his fortifications be ready in time or will he get distracted by some other invention?

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Guardian culture critics: 'Art entangles itself with the raw reality of our world'

The Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones and its deputy music editor, Laura Snapes, discuss the life of reviewing in the digital age

Jonathan Jones is the Guardian’s art critic. Here he recalls interviewing Yoko Ono and finding the tape recorder had failed, causing a stir over the Tower of London poppies, tracing the footsteps of Caravaggio, and swimming in the Med with Tracey Emin

If you don’t think art is as important as politics, healthcare, education or any of the other topics that newspapers cover, you have probably never got on the wrong side of the power-brokers who think it is, and that they are too.

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'Turner gets his cobwebs blown away' – Sea Star: Sean Scully review

National Gallery, London
Sean Scully’s work has been placed alongside a much-misunderstood seascape by Turner. The result is a fascinating exhibition full of insight, power and glorious melting colour

Sometimes it takes a painter to see a painter. At the heart of Sean Scully’s exhibition in the National Gallery is an eye-opening meeting between him and JMW Turner on a beach where sky, sea and land are melting into an abstract layering of light.

Turner was born in London in 1775 and by the time of his death in 1851 he was seen by baffled Victorians as an abstracted madman throwing mustard and curry powder at his canvases. Scully was born in Dublin in 1945 and has never doubted his vocation as an abstract artist. You are more likely to see him on Celebrity Bake Off than painting a recognisable face or tree – and that’s not likely at all for an artist who consciously wears the mantle of great modern painters such as Mark Rothko and Ellsworth Kelly.

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Turner gets a soulmate and Rembrandt gets an update – the week in art

Turner takes sides with Sean Scully, Rembrandt triumphs over Hirst and Picasso, and three great American photographers size up Scotland

Sean Scully: Sea Star
JMW Turner’s beachscape The Evening Star reveals itself as an abstract masterpiece by being seen with Scully’s abstract art.
• National Gallery, London, 13 April to 11 August.

Mandela’s sketch of his Robben Island cell will be sold at auction

… and her Serpentine show is a furious, uneasy delight

Rembrandt’s resplendence upstages Bacon, Warhol and Koons at the Gagosian

Wildly coloured glass artworks have sprung up in Kew Gardens

Harry Clarke’s bizarre visions fused the past with an alien future

Sriwhana Spong is taking on colonialism with Gamelan and GoPros

Queen Victoria’s coronet is reducing V&A visitors to tears

Leyton’s metalheads are laying on family fun

Edvard Munch is a five-star treat

New York has a new Shed to play in

… but the Hudson Yards development surrounding it is a horror

Meanwhile, the city could get a Lowline to go with its High Line

We took a peek at Madelon Vriesendorp’s flat

Juergen Teller is raising awareness of children’s terminal care

Three female performance artists have won the inaugural Katthy Cavaliere fellowships

… Let’s hope this new Australian award continues with vision

Galleries are talking again to art patron Anthony d’Offay

Photographer Brian Rose found Atlantic City was a ghost town

Damien Hirst has created a demon

A rediscovered Malevich is no such thing

Andres Amador is letting his work be washed away

Tate bought a Yinka Shonibare

Rembrandt has become a film star

And we remembered Dan Robbins, the inventor of painting by numbers

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What to see this week in the UK

From Mid90s to Dave, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days

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Edvard Munch: Love and Angst review – 'Ripples of trauma hit you like a bomb'

British Museum, London
From his sunsets and deathbeds to the world-warping Scream, the Norwegian created apocalyptic masterpieces that are brutal, refined – and addictive

The man who created The Scream introduces himself with morbid panache at the start of the British Museum’s inkily beautiful journey into his imagination. He looks normal enough, calm and sombre, except that he’s got a skeleton arm. “Edvard Munch 1895”, reads the inscription above him. He presents himself in this bony self-portrait as a specimen of fin-de-siècle decay, a morbid example of the modern condition. Munch was 32 when he created this. In his head he clearly thought he was finished. In fact he would live until 1944, but this exhibition concentrates on his apocalyptic masterpieces of symbolist gloom from the 1890s and 1900s.

Munch had good reason to feel cursed. Growing up in 19th-century Norway he was surrounded by illness and death. The most upsetting images here are not symbolist at all but distressingly matter-of-fact. Munch’s painting The Sick Child is shown beside its equally harrowing print version. They both mourn his sister Johanne Sophie, who died when he was a teenager. Nearby is another cry of anguish, Dead Mother and Child. The child’s face is a doll-like mask of terror. Munch’s mother died of tuberculosis when he was five years old.

Edvard Munch: Love and Angst is at the British Museum, London, from 11 April to 21 July.

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From Warhol to minimalism: how painting by numbers revolutionised art

Designer Dan Robbins’s concept was inadvertently a parody of 50s modernist reverence, and brought abstract painting techniques into middle-American homes

It took a genius to see the genius of Dan Robbins, the inventor of painting-by-numbers who has died aged 93. For art critics, painting-by-numbers was, and is, a byword for robotic repetition and unoriginality – and that was exactly what Andy Warhol adored about it. In 1962, when he was searching for a mechanical artistic process, he painted a series of homages to Robbins. His Do it Yourself paintings mimic painting-by-numbers landscapes, with blocky areas of flat colour guided by a grid of numbers visible through the paint.

Warhol recognised a great piece of pop culture when he saw it. He and Robbins were both bringing art to the people. In the 50s, the American art world took itself extremely seriously. Abstract painters such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko painted sublime slabs that were praised in hushed voices. Painting-by-numbers may not have been intended as a parody of this modernist reverence – but it sure looked that way. Robbins designed quaint scenes of farmhouses and mountain valleys that anyone could complete – they were good, solid pictures for good, solid middle-American homes.

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Munch's death obsession and Mackintosh's sensual mysticism – the week in art

The British Museum goes beyond the Scream, Liverpool gets a sensual dose of Glasgow, and George Shaw’s hymns to housing estates arrive in Bath – all in our weekly dispatch

Edvard Munch: Love and Angst
The bleak beauty of this darkly ravishing artist’s images infects your soul and ensnares you in his terrifyingly intense reality. And that’s before you even get to The Scream.
• British Museum, London, from 11 April to 21 July.

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What to see this week in the UK

From Pet Sematary to Edvard Munch, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days

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