February 9th, 2010 Jonathan Jones
I used to believe that Britain's best art should be in public hands, not owned by the Queen. How wrong I was
It is a truth universally acknowledged, at least hereabouts, that the Royal Collection should be nationalised. It's a disgrace that the Queen owns all these marvellous works of art ...
Or is it? I've been having subversive thoughts recently – subversive when it comes to republicanism, that is. I'm just not feeling offended by the Royal Collection any more; it seems to be doing a good job. Its catalogues of drawings at Windsor Castle are exemplary. It loans a lot of works, including for long periods to our public collections. And the Queen's Gallery does put on proper shows. What's to be cross about, really?
I still worry about security: should works precious to humankind be kept in an ancient castle? But apart from that, the Cromwellian passion has died. I don't really mind that the Queen has so many masterpieces. There's one thing I love in art more than anything else: mystery. It is good to be able to chance on treasures, to encounter works of art you never knew or to see old favourites when you don't expect it. And this is what old collections allow us. The sporadic visibility, eccentricity and sheer size of the Royal Collection make it hard to know in total. This means you can be surprised by it again and again.
The other day, I saw some erotic Renaissance paintings in a small room at Hampton Court. I also saw a supreme masterpiece, Holbein's Noli Me Tangere, displayed in the royal gallery above the palace chapel – a perfect and evocative setting. It's so unexpected, at least in Britain, to see a great religious painting actually in a religious setting. If Holbein's painting belonged to the National Gallery, we'd never chance up on it in Henry VIII's private prayer closet juxtaposed with a vista of the knobbly pendants of the chapel's late Gothic ceiling.
I don't want art to be smoothed into modern shapes, and I don't want collections to become the property of bureaucrats who keep everything in storerooms. And so the Royal Collection strikes me as an image not of snobs snaffling up the loot, but of history enduring and flourishing.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Blogposts, Culture, guardian.co.uk, Heritage, Monarchy, Painting | Comments Off
February 9th, 2010 Jonathan Jones
Goodwin's quietly powerful portraits of London Underground staff capture the mystery and melancholy of life in the capital
Ordinary faces look back at you from posters at London Underground stations, drawn in intense black lines, almost like forests of wiring. There is a hum of represssed energy, as if you were approaching power lines on a wasteland. There is also a solitude, a silence in the portraits that reach out, with their eyes, to you the stranger ... and then you've moved on, carried by the crowd, the connection is lost.
Dryden Goodwin's portraits of London Transport staff are the latest – and some might say the most conventional – in the series of artworks commissioned by Art on the Underground. Goodwin made drawings of 60 underground workers. They're engaged, emotional, hardworking sketches. For those who need a bit of video to make them feel they are seeing some proper modern art, he has also made films of the drawing sessions. For me, though, what's interesting is the vision of London this artist is pursuing; these drawings continue the themes of solitude in the crowd that made his 2008 show at the Photographers' Gallery so quietly powerful.
It is an old-fashioned London he is drawing, more reminiscent of the 1950s city of a Frank Auerbach than the happening metropolis of now. Both Londons are mythic, of course. There is no one, fixed truth of London; this city is both a heaven and a hell, depending on your point view. But in contemporary culture, the point of view is almost always remorselessly upbeat and promotional. Goodwin's London is a more melancholy, mysterious place whose streets, in these winter days, we actually seem to walk. They're gripping, thought-provoking and evocative of life in the big city.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Blogposts, Culture, guardian.co.uk, London, Transport, UK news | Comments Off
February 2nd, 2010 Jonathan Jones
With echoes of 18th-century master Watteau, Mosely does something beautifully rare: think, not just paint
I like the paintings of Ryan Mosley, currently showing at London's Alison Jacques Gallery, for their marriage of grit and fantasy. Tough, hard-thought, intelligent textures – real painting, in other words – create realms of wilful play. Is it whimsy or is it tragedy? I'm not sure. The ambiguity interests me.
Let me put this praise in context. I am not saying Mosley is a genius, but I am saying this 30-year-old's first serious solo show is unusually promising, indeed that some of the promise is already fulfilled. Mosley's best paintings are his biggest. There's a fine freedom and confidence to his large, even slightly grandiose, pictures that imagine a balletic Wild West, as if painted by Antoine Watteau.
That 18th-century ghost haunts the best painting of all, a spacious white canvas with a minstrel playing a banjo – it's called Southern Banjo – beneath a tree. Isolated in his minstrelsy, at once proud and solitary, this timeless figure makes an immediate appeal to your sense of pathos. Mosley is a young 21st-century painter tackling themes comparable with those that Wallace Stevens described in his poem, inspired by Picasso, The Man With the Blue Guitar.
It's hard to be negative about any of the works here. What matters is the sense that here is a painter doing what painters need to do: work. He is thinking through paint, and finding in its demands a complex, skilled style of his own, in the only place this can be done, the studio.
Mosley has just been exhibited in St Petersburg – at the Hermitage, no less – in Charles Saatchi's exhibition Newspeak: British Art Now. This survey comes to London in June. I wouldn't want to bet on its overall quality, but his encouragement (and collecting) of Mosley shows that Saatchi still has the ability to spot real talent first.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Blogposts, Culture, guardian.co.uk, Painting, Saatchi gallery | Comments Off
February 1st, 2010 Charlotte Higgins
The antiquities gallery at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge reopens to the public on Saturday – with some fascinating stories
In the Greek and Roman gallery in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge –
one of the most important collections of antiquities in the country,
which reopens to the public on Saturday after a £950,000 makeover –
there is one Greek pot the eye might easily flit past.
Unless, that is, you happen to take more than a cursory view at the
central figure's genital area. In the bowl of this 5th-century Attic
kylix (drinking cup), is the figure of a man, naked but for a cloak,
and holding a lyre and a staff. But something rather peculiar seems to
have happened: there's a noticeably smudged, discoloured patch around
the groin area.
According to conservator Christina Rozeik, who has been working with
the objects in the refurbished gallery, that penis will be "the
subject of much detective work over the next year".
The pot was once owned by the collectors Charles Ricketts and Charles
Shannon, whose lives spanned the 1860s to 1930s. The pair met at art
school in London in the 1880s, and they later became friends and
supporters of Oscar Wilde.
They amassed a fine collection of antiquities that was later
bequeathed to the Fitzwilliam. According to the museum's keeper of
antiquities, Lucilla Burn, the two "were a pair of aesthetes; and they
collected on aesthetic grounds".
The flesh-coloured blotch is actually the trace of a rescue attempt on
the pot by one of the couple. "Genitals restored by Ricketts," states
the original Fitzwilliam catalogue entry baldly. A century on, the
restored patch has discoloured and faded, while the original surface
of the pot, dating from about 480BC, has survived impeccably.
According to Rozeik, who counts the restoration as "quite skilful",
the problem is that "we don't know what's underneath". Ricketts – a
fine painter as well as a set designer and typographer of note – had
motives for drawing in the figure's genitals that can only be
inferred.
Nor is it a question of simply removing Ricketts' work and having a
look at what lies beneath. "Part of the dilemma is that Ricketts is a
significant artist," she said. "We would have to think very hard
before removing his work."
The question of the blotchy genitals is a very modern conservation
dilemma. Should Rickett's restoration be regarded as a valid part of
the history of the object and left, or should it be removed? As Rozeik
asks, "Is there any such thing as authenticity? What's the 'real'
object?"
The Ricketts-Shannon collection in the Fitzwilliam includes about 100
objects. They are mostly Attic vases, though the couple did also own a
very sultry head of Antinous, the lover of the Roman emperor Hadrian.
He is instantly recognisable, according to Mary Beard, professor of
classics at Cambridge University, "because he's got that lovely
pouting lip". Burn added: "And then there's the downwards gaze and
tilted head – very Princess Diana."
Not all the pieces are as controversial as the smudged-penis kalyx;
but in this new display of the Fitzwilliam's antiquities the curators
are coming clean about past gaffes made by the institution. It is what
Beard calls "the new transparency".
For instance, a miniature bronze statuette of a Roman priest (known as
the "Marlay Genius") isn't much to look at now. But in the mid-20th
century it was one of the favourite objects of the then keeper of
antiquities, Winifred Lamb.
The statuette was packed away with other precious items during the war
and hidden in Shropshire. But when it came out of storage in 1947, it
was found to be suffering from "bronze disease" – a condition arising
from damp that caused green pustules to burst out on the sculpture's
surface.
The condition could have completely destroyed the object, so advice
was sought from Cambridge's chemistry department. Various solutions
were proposed, and Lamb wrote to the director of the museum: "I'd
rather see him yellow, purple, any colour, like a Woolworth ornament
than have him in a galloping consumption."
The up-to-the-minute cure for the condition – which would be regarded
as rather extreme these days – was to dunk the figure into fearsome
solution including caustic soda for 50 hours. The little priest came
out cured – but also minus much of the exquisite surface detail that
had made him such a favourite of Lamb's.
According to Beard: "The story of the object goes right up to now. It
didn't just miraculously finish at the end of the Roman empire. In the
case of the Marlay Genius, it was like treating a cancer patient. Now,
he's lucky to be alive – if pockmarked."
Posted in Archaeology, Art, Blogposts, Classics, Culture, guardian.co.uk, Museums | Comments Off
January 28th, 2010 Jonathan Jones
Numerous British artists of the 1990s haven't quite lived up to the hype. But we shouldn't worry: art carries on regardless
So another modern British artist bites ... well, not the dust exactly. But in comparison with the hopes once held for him, the reception of Chris Ofili's new show at London's Tate Britain is flat. Hey, these new works are interesting ... or are they ... hmm, they could be garbage, but we still like him.
I personally find Ofili's new direction intriguing, but I come from a different starting point: I do not think much of his Upper Room cycle or other early works. I did once, but I had a terrible moment of alienation after writing a big raving feature about him then seeing ... well, not much at all in the exhibition I had helped to puff. Ofili is a good and interesting artist, but the fame he won in the late 1990s was overblown and now there is bound to be a correction.
And that puts him in good – or perhaps we need to say so-so – company. The truth is that almost no talent of the British 1990s has endured. All were given a soft ride – and all are landing, with varying degrees of softness, back into the realm of reality. Gary Hume's latest works will be seen not at a snazzy London venue, but the New Art Centre, Salisbury. Damien Hirst ... but I promised to keep silent about him, Rachel Whiteread, Gillian Wearing, that guy who did the Tube map ... so many have fallen. Gently.
Nor does this mean art is in trouble. Actually things look quite good. I am optimistic that 2010 will see another excellent Turner prize shortlist. There are plenty of good and worthwhile artists to choose from, of all ages. But it is not what we were promised. It is not what seemed possible. It is, actually, business as usual. The dust has settled, and art in Britain in 2010 is much like art in Britain in 1987, or 1977. Interesting, varied, often surprising.
Undoubtedly, we are a nation with something to offer the art world - we always were. But when it comes to the really high stakes the Freuds and Auerbachs have nothing to fear from my generation, and they never did.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Blogposts, Chris Ofili, Culture, Damien Hirst, guardian.co.uk, Painting, Tracey Emin | Comments Off
January 27th, 2010 Chris Wilkinson
As a recent debate at the ICA revealed, the real value of art lies in its capacity to be contradictory – even agonisingly boring
"What is the value of art?" That was the question Tom Morris asked his audience at a talk he gave last Saturday as part of the London international mime festival. It is a question which he has been mulling over for many years, and in order to answer it, he asked all of us to close our eyes and focus on one piece of artwork that had had a significant impact on us.
As we each remembered a particular sculpture, song or play, Morris asked a series of further questions: "was it simple or complicated? Did it feel private or public? Did it change you?" And so on.
After this he asked us to feedback on what we had discovered about those works of art that made them feel special. For some, art had provided them with a moment of "transcendence" or of "emotional purity". For others, the work had articulated perfectly a feeling or an idea they already had: as Alexander Pope put it, "what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed".
All of these responses make sense and are good reasons for valuing art. But for me, the answer to this question lies elsewhere. When I closed my eyes, the thing that immediately popped into my head was the National Theatre of Scotland's Black Watch. Given the enormous success the show enjoyed, this was hardly an original idea. But what surprised me, as I listened to Morris's questions and thought about the show, was that I realised it had affected me in a way I had not noticed before.
When I was a child, my parents would take me, every year, to see the Royal Tournament – a large military tattoo held at Earls Court in London. I have vivid recollections of these militaristic jamborees, and I realised that Black Watch, which itself takes the form of a tattoo, is now, in my mind, intimately linked to and subversive of these memories. So, for me, the experience of watching the show was both public and communal, but also private and individual.
And it is this capacity to be two contradictory things at once that I think gives great art its real value. So much of what I have seen that has really affected me has revelled in the pleasure of paradox. For instance, the very space that Morris was speaking in at the ICA was the same theatre where I had first seen Forced Entertainment perform when I was a sixth former back in 1997. Their show, Pleasure, had a formative impact on me. As a performance, it was slow – agonizingly, stupefyingly, slow – the show seemed to rejoice in its capacity to be boring. And yet it was because it was so "boring" that I ended up finding it so thoroughly absorbing and interesting.
To take another example, the only time I have ever been truly overwhelmed emotionally by a piece of visual art was when I saw Michelangelo's David for the first time. I was astonished by the sculpture's beauty – a perfect depiction of the perfect male form. But the more I looked at it the more I realised it was ludicrously out of proportion, with hands and feet that were far too large for the body. It was an image that was both true and false at the same time. And surely this paradox is inherent in any work of art – after all, we know that the characters on stage are merely actors and that David is just a lump of marble.
Perhaps the artistic importance of these contradictions is why I, like Anthony Nielson, feel so suspicious whenever I hear someone claim that a play should have a "thesis" or an argument. Polemic works well on the two dimensions of the newspaper page, but in the three dimensional world of the stage it can end up feeling hollow. And if paradox is the lifeblood of the theatre, then perhaps we can answer the question "to be or not to be?" with the statement "to be and not to be".
Posted in Art, Art and design, Blogposts, guardian.co.uk, Stage, Theatre | Comments Off
January 27th, 2010 Jonathan Jones
How can London be the capital of global art when our celebrity culture makes it such a miserable place for artists to live and work?
Chris Ofili, whose retrospective has just opened at Tate Britain, is just one of the British artists who have chosen to live abroad to get away from the madness of art's celebrity culture – including such serious figures as Tacita Dean and Steve McQueen.
So here's a paradox. Constantly, the media tell us that London is this century's Manhattan or Paris, that Britain is the world's leading art capital. Yet I believe that in Manhattan in the 1960s you would actually have found artists living and working – and if Picasso had fled back to Barcelona, the Musée Picasso wouldn't have been in Paris. Art capitals are traditionally places where artists thrive. But what kind of artist really thrives on our brand of instant celebrity?
As a critic, you forget what celebrity means. It's seeing people coo over someone who seems very ordinary to me, such as Grayson Perry – someone I've sometimes been rude about, sometimes praised, but certainly never mistaken for the kind of artist I, personally, would go weak at the knees to meet.
Celebrity is such a small thing compared with real fame. For me, a famous artist is one whose works have secured them a true place in art history, whose talent is mysterious and personality elusive. Jasper Johns is famous; Perry is a celebrity.
A celebrity is someone who is "like us" – just watch all those talent shows on TV – which by definition limits their genius. A celebrity, to have democratic appeal, really has to be a bit second rung, a bit ordinary. It's quite a contradiction. You have to catch the eye and yet you can't intimidate people with supreme abilities.
The purest expression of modern Britain's celebrity art culture, and its logical conclusion, was Antony Gormley's participatory artwork on the Fourth Plinth. Here was the mediocrity of the celebrity culture made monumental – everyone an artist, everyone a star, not a trace of imagination in sight.
No wonder the real artists run for their lives.
Posted in Antony Gormley, Art, Art and design, Blogposts, Celebrity, Chris Ofili, Culture, Fourth plinth, Grayson Perry, guardian.co.uk, Jasper Johns, Pablo Picasso, Steve McQueen | Comments Off
January 26th, 2010 Jonathan Jones
Flowing, spiralling, massing, falling – all the things fabric worn on the body can do, Veit Stoss does with hypnotising accomplishment, in wood
She holds up her baby for everyone to see, her face downcast, the child bald and almost monk-like. There is a simplicity to their expressions that transports you to the medieval cultural world of the people the German wood carver Veit Stoss made his works for – people who believed, who trusted in images. Yet it is not the faces, or the bodies, or even the sacred status of this work of art in the V&A that holds you and keeps you coming back – but the way he renders the Virgin's robes.
Folded, flowing, spiralling, massing, wrinkling, falling – all the things fabric worn on the body can do, are done by the robes of Mary in this little sculpture. Yet every tweak, rumple, rustle is created, with hypnotising accomplishment, in wood. The very softness and mobility of cloth has been imitated – all in boxwood.
When we talk about the idea of "craft" versus "art", it's easy to forget exactly how multifarious the world of craft used to be. Once, there were wood carvers like Stoss whose sculptures have the power and grace of great art. And while Germany's wood carvers are rightly famous, in another gallery at the V&A you can see a work by Grinling Gibbons that shows such talent also flourished in Britain.
The question is, what did wood offer artists that stone did not? An answer lies in the Virgin's robes. So fragile, so light, so precious – there's a texture to these robes that would be different in stone. Not that marble cannot be sculpted to resemble cloth: by a genius like Gianlorenzo Bernini, it can, as a third masterpiece in the V&A, his portrait bust of Thomas Baker, scintillatingly demonstrates. Bernini's joyous brilliance imitates not just the cut of Baker's lace, but the vitality of his hair – and yet the effect is very different from wood. It is different in feel: more dazzling, maybe, but less heartwarming.
Beauty lies in the particular. Works of art do not follow rules, nor do they assert absolutes. They are never formulaic. To follow the chisel of an artist like Stoss, Gibbons, or Bernini is to see the potentialities of specific materials, touched by a singular talent. It is to encounter not a generalised artistic excellence, but a one-off loveliness. This is a journey worth taking because it will help us to see that everything that matters is unique. Wood is not stone – nor is one wooden Virgin like another. That is the meaning of craft.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Blogposts, Culture, guardian.co.uk, Sculpture | Comments Off
January 26th, 2010 Charlotte Higgins
No elephant dung, no glitter, no textured, collaged surfaces. It's all a bit of a shock. But do we like Ofili's new work?
I'd seen some of Chris Ofili's new work in the lavish new Rizzoli book he has helped put together. Even so, after walking past so many greatest hits and old friends in the galleries at London's Tate Britain, where his latest career survey opens to the public tomorrow, I got a jolt when I walked into the final pair of rooms, filled with his most recent work. In the first, the paintings are entirely blue – deep, midnight shades of indigo, ultramarine and bilberry. In the second, the paintings are screaming with acid colours: strident purple next to citrus orange; a tintinnabulating turquoise; egg-yolk yellow. And there is no elephant dung. And no glitter.
I have to confess I'm a bit of an Ofili fan. I've always loved the unashamedly stuff-encrusted surfaces of his paintings. So it's a bit odd to see works stripped of their jewels, so to speak.
I'm still figuring out whether I like the new work, which is steeped in the landscape and mysterious atmosphere of Trinidad, where Ofili has lived and worked since 2005. The moment I walked into the final room of the show my heart, I have to confess, sank. Then I looked at the paintings a bit more, and concluded that I kind of liked them. Then I was sure again. There's something slightly off-key about them. In fact, I just don't know. A couple of the recent works were shown in New York in 2007, and the Village Voice critic wrote:
To my mind, what makes Ofili consistently perverse – aside from his habit of turning ostensibly religious subjects into lewd jokes – is that his paintings often flirt with being outright terrible. In the wrong hands, the hyperstylized retro look he employs in these new works could, with just a few bad choices, easily turn into overweening poster art, glib parodies fit only for suburban malls.
I admit to a similar fear. On which side of the good/bad divide do the new Ofilis sit? I'm still digesting them. Adrian Searle has given his view in today's G2. What I love is that Ofili is keeping us on our toes – and is unafraid to change, and, quite possibly, fail.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Blogposts, Chris Ofili, Culture, Exhibitions, guardian.co.uk, Tate Britain | Comments Off