Great Works: 50 Paintings Explored
Tom Lubbock (2011)
ND1143.L933 2011
“How does the flatness of Mickey Mouse's ears illuminate the 'non-specific bodies' of Klimt's Water Nymphs? Why was Vuillard's genius confined to the decade when he worked at home? What was it that made Ingres such an exciting weirdo? …Here are 50 great essays on paintings by Tom Lubbock, first published in the passionately argued and much-loved 'Great Works' series he wrote weekly for the UK’s Independent. Always inventive and authoritative, each piece is devoted to a single painting. This is a book of surprises: Giotto's Vices as 'studies in self-destruction'; Hitchcock's lighting tricks on Suspicion compared to the luminosity of a Zurbaran still life; how the figure in Gwen John's Girl in a Blue Dress 'withdraws from life, fading into its surface, pressed like a flower'; Gericault's Study of Truncated Limbs, as 'a good painting, simply, of sex'.
Collecting his best writing together for the first time Tom Lubbock explores his thinking about art with great intelligence and humour. Spanning 800 years of western art, this book is simply the cleverest, funniest, most moving and most original art book you are likely to see.” From the Inside Flap – Great Works: 50 Paintings Explored
If Art (with a capital “A”) challenges us, among other things, to see our world and ourselves differently, then the late Tom Lubbock, critic, reviewer, essayist and winner of the Hawthornden Prize for Art Criticism, challenges – no, shakes – us to look at the art and the standard criticism (and our relationship to accepted criticism) again in ways that perhaps might just bring a smile to a semiologist.
In his obituary, which appeared in the UK’s The Guardian of January 10, 2011, it was said of him that “…apart from his keen eye and his wide range of reference, Tom's virtues included bracing clarity (he never used art-speak or any other kind of higher waffle), utter honesty (he was never intimidated by reputations), and originality (even if you thought you knew his tastes, he could surprise you). He could also be howlingly funny. His essay about conceptual art, based on various things you might do with a toaster, should be mounted in every modern art gallery as a contribution to public sanity.” What survives Tom are the "…exquisitely crafted ‘pieces’ addressing the world in many different registers – sardonic, caustic, erudite and celebratory, with instinct, intelligence and wit".
Lubbock’s challenge, as it were, is both simultaneously all the more pronounced and retreating as we see old art as new and are, consequently, more directly part of the art. His insights lead us to acknowledge the art differently putting us in touch, perhaps not comfortably, with our humanity. Lubbock’s thoughts on Vermeer’s View of Delft or Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Lark are but two examples in the collection that cause us to see these works with fresh insight and, in his own way, gives us permission to ask and face the most basic questions of living and dying. How to properly read a painting – abstract to representational – is the legacy and gift of a man too soon gone.
