Great Works: 50 Paintings Explored - Hardcover

Lubbock, Tom

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0711232830 ISBN 13: 9780711232839

Publisher: Frances Lincoln, 2011

Synopsis

The best of Tom Lubbock, one of Britain's most intelligent, outspoken and revelatory art critics, is collected here for the first time.

There are electrifying insights - using Hitchcock’s Suspicion to explore the lighting effects in a Zurbarán still life, imagining three short films to tease out the meanings of El Greco’s Boy Lighting a Candle - and cool judgements - how Vuillard's genius is confined to a single decade, when he worked at home, why Ingres is really ‘an exciting wierdo’.

Ranging with passionate perspicacity over eight hundred years of Western art, whether it's Giotto’s raging vices, Guston’s ‘slobbish, squidgy’ pinks, Gericault’s pile of truncated limbs or Gwen John’s Girl in a Blue Dress, Tom Lubbock writes with immediacy and authority about the fifty works which most gripped his imagination.

About this title

About the Author

Laura Cumming is the art critic of the Observer.

Tom Lubbock, critic and illustrator, was the chief art critic of the Independent from 1997 until his death in 2011. He wrote widely on art, books and radio and produced major catalogue essays on Goya, Thomas Bewick and Ian Hamilton Finlay. His illustrations, mainly done in collage, appeared every Saturday on the editorial page of the Independent between 1999 and 2004. His weekly Great Works column, from which these essays are taken, ran between 2005 and 2010.

http://tomlubbock.com/

From the Inside Flap

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 Inres such an exciting weirdo? Germolene, sticking plaster, marshmallows, prawn cocktail, pork pate and sausage meat: how many other ways could Philip Guston find to paint pink?
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 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.
With an introduction by Laura Cumming.

Edition details

• Publisher: Frances Lincoln
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0711232830
• ISBN 13: 9780711232839
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 216