Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 94
March 14, 2019
A lusciously perverse view of a backward land - Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light review
National Gallery, London
He was the global face of Spanish art, a quirky and flamboyant painter of a sun-kissed country. But this sensual Spaniard could never paint more than he could see
Luis Buñuel called the first chapter of his autobiography “Growing up in the Middle Ages” because he remembered Spain at the start of the 20th century as a country barely touched by the modern world, dominated by the Catholic church and near-feudal poverty. If you want an eyeful of that archaic Spain, stand in front of Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida’s almost three-metre-wide 1899 canvas, Sad Inheritance.
If you squint your eyes and look only at the turquoise sea rippling into light blue waves, it’s a vivid seascape reminiscent of Manet. The scene on Sorolla’s beach, however, is a far cry from the parasols and picnics of impressionist art. A black-robed monk towers over a crowd of naked disabled boys as they head into the sea for a therapeutic swim. They are the victims of hereditary syphilis, implies the title. Sorolla, an artist of immense style, juxtaposes blue sea, pale bodies and the raven-like priest to truly unsettling effect.
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March 8, 2019
Nicholas Hilliard by Elizabeth Goldring – the inventor of British art?
Vanity, gold and tokens of love – how a miniaturist persuaded Tudor England that painters weren’t just artisans but artists
A good-looking and immaculately primped man gazes back at us from under an elegant cap tilted to show off brown curls. He has quizzical manicured eyebrows, a beard trimmed to a fine point, and a white ruff collar whose lacy elaborations frame his tapered face and set off his black silk shoulders. This self-portrait is vain as hell. The picture of his own dapper handsomeness that Nicholas Hilliard created in 1577, when he was about 30, is a revolutionary assertion that artists are stars who belong in the best society.
Hilliard’s Self-Portrait is tiny – a disc of vellum just over 4cm in diameter. That is the typical scale of his portraits of contemporaries from Elizabeth I to her gifted courtiers Francis Bacon and Sir Walter Raleigh. That’s about as far as most people’s knowledge of Hilliard goes, but in her landmark scholarly biography of this brilliant Elizabethan, Elizabeth Goldring argues that he was something bigger: the inventor of British art.
Hilliard never got rich, partly because he spent so much on looking the part of a gentleman
Continue reading...Italian scholars unveil Leonardo da Vinci's 'only surviving sculpture'
Experts say crucial details prove that V&A’s Virgin with the Laughing Child is the master’s work
The curators of an exhibition in Florence have this week unveiled what they claim is the only surviving sculpture by Leonardo da Vinci.
It’s always been part of Leonardo’s legend that he made sculptures, including a giant horse, but not a single extant three-dimensional work by him had been identified.
Related: Did Leonardo da Vinci create a nude Mona Lisa – and if so, who was the model?
Continue reading...The Virgin with the Laughing Child has the playfulness of a true Leonardo
It’s no Mona Lisa but the tender sculpture is more credible than Salvator Mundi
Leonardo da Vinci’s “rediscovered” painting Salvator Mundi sold for $450,312,500 in 2017, setting a record for the highest price ever fetched at auction – one that is unlikely to be beaten any time soon. Yet the art world’s scepticism about it is virulent. So is the small terracotta sculpture known as The Virgin with the Laughing Child more or less likely to be a true Leonardo?
Unlike Salvator Mundi, it’s not for sale. No one is playing the market; it feels more like pure love by the experts who believe in it. And the fact is, it’s a much lovelier thing. The terracotta is well preserved – fired clay is tough stuff – and you can practically feel the artist’s fingers shaping it. It’s clearly influenced by Verocchio, the sweetly graceful artist of tender Madonnas and frolicking cupids. But at the same time, it has a wild touch that’s different from his. So what makes more sense than for it to be the work of a student of Verocchio’s – who also happened to be a genius? Leonardo is the obvious candidate.
Continue reading...Parr's everyday absurdities and a return to the 60s – the week in art
Hew Locke sails into Birmingham, Martin Parr hits the National Portrait Gallery and Anthea Hamilton resurrects the 60s – all in our weekly dispatch
Hew Locke
Witty assemblage art that uncovers the darkness of Britain’s imperial history.
• Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, until 2 June.
What to see this week in the UK
From Captain Marvel to Henry Moore, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...March 5, 2019
Did Leonardo da Vinci create a nude Mona Lisa – and if so, who was the model?
Leonardo da Vinci’s studio was a fun place. When they weren’t playing music and trying on clothes, he and his young assistants – among them the good-looking pickpocket Salaì – enjoyed making rude jokes. For that is what the Monna Vanna is. This charcoal drawing of a naked woman, a nude version of the Mona Lisa posed just like his renowned portrait, goes on exhibition in Paris later this year for Leonardo’s 500th anniversary. The Louvre has detected Leonardo’s own hand in it – evidence of his subversive sense of humour.
The Mona Lisa, which Leonardo worked on obsessively for years and kept with him until his death in 1519, is a painting of veiled ambiguities. Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo, the Florentine woman who posed for it, wears a diaphanous silk headcovering almost too thin to see, and subtle mysteries resonate from her shadowed eyes to the distant riverscape. The Monna Vanna (it translates as “vain woman”) is a blunt travesty preserving Leonardo’s own sly interpretation of his masterpiece.
Continue reading...The Helmet Heads review – Henry Moore should never have gone near a chisel
Wallace Collection, London
This exhibition invites you to compare the British artist’s work to antique armoury and Picasso – both show him up as slow, ponderous and complacent
Henry Moore should have been a teacher. He was, of course, a tutor at London art schools, like many artists are before they can afford to work in the studio full time. But he should have taught full-time and never gone near a chisel. That way his enormous erudition and civilised appreciation of art, history and mythology could have inspired generations of pupils – he was 88 when he died in 1986 – instead of becoming grist for his massive but mediocre artistic output.
The Wallace Collection gives a textbook demonstration (and it really is as thrilling as a textbook) of why knowledge is not the same as inspiration in its pointlessly scholarly exhibition of some of Moore’s silliest sculptures. It is a tragic encounter between fascinating historical sources and the woolly jumper he knitted from them.
Continue reading...March 1, 2019
Painted into a corner … British art responds to the folly of Brexit
A shrinking map of the UK, xenophobic graffiti, a white flag … here is the depressing, defeated art of a country on the precipice of a historic mistake
So this is it: March. Month of mad hares and parted ways. Maybe, after all, 29 March will come and go and Britain will still be in the EU by parliamentary vote and, who knows, a delay could produce a second referendum. But as things stand, this is officially the last month of Britain belonging to the community of European nations. And a sad exhibition at one London gallery muses on the miserable stupidity of it all.
Related: 'I went loopy': the photographer who walked 1,200 miles from Wales to Poland
Continue reading...Greatest nudes, Brexit protest art and Hockney's rescue – the week in art
Renaissance art exposed, Henry Moore goes rococo and what happens to British art after we leave the EU – all in our weekly dispatch
The Renaissance Nude
Some of the greatest artists in history, including Titian and Bronzino, portraying bodies of both sexes with unparalleled sensual poetry … what’s not to like?
• Royal Academy, London, 3 March-2 June.
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