Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 96
February 15, 2019
Rijksmuseum: All the Rembrandts review – human chaos made glorious
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
From a child’s tottering first steps to Amsterdam’s answer to Dad’s Army, this epic exhibition shows the Dutch master’s extraordinary humanity and lust for life
In front of Rembrandt van Rijn’s huge painting The Night Watch, people chat, squat, walk about and joke, showing nothing like the hushed silence exacted by other world-famous masterpieces. For this is a comic work of art. You’re allowed to laugh – it’s hilarious. The citizen militia company of Amsterdam’s Second District, gathered for their official group portrait in 1642, crowd into the picture, get their hands in front of each other’s faces, even fire off a gun by accident. Others look off in all directions, wave banners clumsily and get their pikes in a twist.
The glorious human disorder of Rembrandt’s incomparable anti-history painting is revealed in a new light by the Rijksmuseum’s All the Rembrandts, a subtle and awe-inspiring exhibition for his 350th anniversary. That disorder spreads from gormless lumpen faces into the work’s very structure. Behind the brightly illuminated figures of Captain Cocq and Lieutenant Ruytenburch, their men are arranged in the kind of grand pyramid beloved of formal classical artists. But Rembrandt has composed this pyramid only to subvert it. Everywhere you look, harmony is collapsing into chaos.
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What to see this week in the UK
From Notting Hill to Fatboy Slim, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...February 8, 2019
Diane Arbus hits her stride and tomorrow happens in 1956 – the week in art
George Shaw tells the story of modern Britain, Arbus keeps it uneasy and the Whitechapel Gallery revisits its classic 1956 exhibition – all in our weekly dispatch
George Shaw
An astonishing body of work in which Shaw tells the story of modern Britain through his paintings of Coventry’s Tile Hill estate.
• Holburne Museum, Bath, until 6 May.
What to see this week in the UK
From Burning to Robots in Edinburgh, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...February 7, 2019
George Shaw review – the only artist who can unite England
Holburne Museum, Bath
Flags and graffiti on rundown estates speak for the people left behind by their country’s Brexit politics – yet these are images of redemptive promise
An England flag flutters over sharp, spear-like fence tops, in front of a roof as bleak as a bunker, in George Shaw’s painting Someone Else’s House. Painted in 2018 as we stumbled towards the Brexit crisis that is now upon us, its title seems plain enough. This is a remainer’s alienated view of Brexit England as a strange, bigoted neighbour skulking behind a nationalist fence. Yet there’s a twist – or two. The red cross on the flag is the cross of St George, and it’s been painted by a man called George. There is a white cross inside the red one – what does that mean? This may be a more private and quirky symbol than we know; perhaps it is even religious. Since Shaw, who was raised Catholic, makes similarly subtle religious allusions in many of his paintings, that does not seem a far-fetched interpretation.
In other words, Shaw is not outside the scene. He’s not looking down on people who choose to put up a flag, shuddering at the millions who voted leave. On the contrary, he’s the artist of the left behind, in more ways than one. He paints left-behind people and left-behind cats and dogs. Or rather left-behind pubs, lockups and care homes, for there are no people in most of Shaw’s scenes. The only human figure in his mini-retrospective at Bath’s Holburne Museum is the artist himself, pissing against a tree in his picture The Call of Nature.
As Shaw's Coventry home decayed, it has become a monstrous landscape of disillusion and betrayal
George Shaw: A Corner of a Foreign Field is at the Holburne Museum, Bath, 8 February-6 May.
Continue reading...February 1, 2019
Velvet Buzzsaw is a fiendish portrait of art-world avarice – but is it realistic?
In Netflix’s new showpiece, Jake Gyllenhaal sells his soul to an LA art scene full of grime, crime and flesh-eating sculptures. ‘It’s 100% accurate,’ says its director
Want to make a funny but worrying film about the way we live now? The art world has everything you need. With its po-faced claims that mediocrity is genius, its jaw-dropping celebration of naked wealth and its cast of pretentious curators, rapacious dealers and power-mad critics, it’s an industry that’s begging to be ridiculed.
And sure enough, art-world satire is becoming a mini-genre of cinema. In Paolo Sorrentino’s 2013 film The Great Beauty, one image of emptiness inscrutably observed by Toni Servillo’s character Jep is a performance in which an artist rams her head against a Roman aqueduct. Four years later, in Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or winning The Square, museum cleaners mistake installations for garbage, while a PR company’s attempt to popularise “relational aesthetics” results in a viral video of an exploding child. They’re terrific fun, but how accurate are they about contemporary art?
Continue reading...Koons apes the old masters and robots invade Edinburgh – the week in art
Jeff Koons heads to Oxford, Tracey Emin shows new work in London and the V&A debuts a sumptuous survey of Christian Dior – all in our weekly dispatch
Jeff Koons
The master of pop art takes on the old masters.
• Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 7 February until 9 June.
What to see this week in the UK
From Burning to Yinka Shonibare, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...January 31, 2019
Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing review – the superhuman hits you like a thunderbolt
Museums across the UK
These drawings from the Royal Collection – dispersed around Britain – are like pure, clear windows on to the extraordinary mind of this enigmatic and visionary genius
It was in Cardiff that I finally cracked the Da Vinci Code. For years I’ve been searching for the clues that would explain this weird and wonderful genius. I’ve visited the Tuscan hill town Vinci, where an illegitimate boy called Leonardo was born in 1452, and Amboise in the Loire Valley, where he died on 2 May 1519, looking for traces of his secret self. Yet it was on an icy afternoon in the Welsh capital that I finally found the killer clue to a real Leonardo da Vinci mystery: his sex life.
Leonardo’s inky fingerprint has been found – it’s just barely visible with the naked eye – on his drawing The Cardiovascular System and Principal Organs of a Woman, done c.1509-10, yet this is not the revelation. This big, bold graphic dissection of a female body is a window on Leonardo’s emotions. He has drawn a female nude then transposed against her rounded breasts a complex machinery of tubes and pumps, bags and balloons. Her uterus looks like an alien creature. As an image of the female form it isn’t exactly intimate, let alone lustful. At the National Museum Wales, you can look straight from this to a far more sensual portrayal of the human body that he drew in about 1504: a scintillating study of a naked man from behind. Leonardo’s muscular model stands at attention, showing us his curly locks and rippling back. His hands seem to visibly shake with contained energy. His stance is potent. Leonardo uses red chalk to give this nude a carnal warmth: its softness lets him delicately model every bulge and recess of taut skin. The man’s buttocks are ripe ovals of perfection.
Was Leonardo gay – and is that the key to his inner life? It's a marvel that we can even talk about him in this way
Near the end of his life, he became obsessed with deluges tearing the world apart, smashing a mountain, destroying an army like ants
Continue reading...January 29, 2019
Let's not lose our marbles over the British Museum boss's remarks | Jonathan Jones
Hartwig Fischer said that removing the Parthenon marbles from Greece was a ‘creative act’ – but there is a logic to this provocative view that shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand
The British Museum has tended to keep its lips sealed about its most controversial set of treasures: the sculptures removed from the Parthenon in Athens by Lord Elgin at the start of the 19th century. I know, because I’ve taken part in public debates to put its case – without anyone from the museum to back me up – most recently at University College London, which is so close to the museum that its curators would have only needed to pop around the corner to say their piece.
Related: British Museum chief: taking the Parthenon marbles was 'creative'
Placing these sculptures in the British Museum was an act of reverence.
“To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?”
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