Great Works: 50 Paintings Explored

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.

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/