Great art you didn't expect

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Great Works: 50 Paintings Explored

By Tom Lubbock

This is a book for everyone – not only those who are already avid art lovers. It is not a conventional art book: it is not ‘art criticism’ and even less is it ‘art history’. More than being about art, Great Works is about Tom Lubbock and his understanding of art, and it is as insightful as one might expect from the writer who took on the extraordinary task of recording what it was like to live with a brain tumour from 2008 until his death this year. But while that was introspective and poignant, his responses to artworks are as witty as they are observant, sometimes funny, sometimes profound, and always very personal.

We’re alerted to this by the unorthodox selection of works designated ‘great’. While there are some that you might expect, such as Vermeer (View of Delft)or Poussin (Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion),who would have thought of listing Juan Sánchez-Cotán or Giovanni Francesco Caroto amongst a top 50 – or James Barry, for goodness sake? And even when we might agree with the artists selected, the works chosen are frequently unexpected and certainly not the usual favourites – Vices from the dado of Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel, Boy Lighting a Candle by El Greco, Study of Truncated Limbs by Géricault, The Bed by Toulouse Lautrec.

If this may seem eccentric, it is an excellent tactic for forestalling the obvious, and the same strategy characterizes Lubbock’s approach to the works. He avoids more literal analysis, and his perceptive comments start you thinking about all manner of things, not just art – from movies and literature to life in general, along lines often as unforeseen as the chosen paintings. Few essays start with the work itself, but rather with an idea that is elucidated, expanded – or contradicted – by the painting. Few end in a way you might have foreseen – even the summary biographies of the artist that form a postscript to each work have surprises.

The opening sentences of three discussions suggest how unpredictable the topics can be: ‘Alfred Hitchcock was proud of his tricks’ (Zurbaran’s Still Life with Jars); ‘The ears of Mickey Mouse are a good lesson in two-dimensionality’ (Gustav Klimt’s Water Nymphs); ‘Educational illustrations of contraceptive devices used to include a 50 pence piece, lying amongst the caps, coils and condoms, “for scale”’ (Potter’s Wolfhound). But wherever they start out, the essays soon shed fresh light on the work selected – how, in these particular examples, I will leave you to guess, or discover when you read the book. Lubbock makes you look, and look again, at the works themselves. In fact it was a minor irritant that, because the brief essays extend over two or three pages, unlike their publication on the same page of the Independent where the texts first appeared, I found myself constantly paging back to look at the images again, to find details that I had forgotten or never noticed in the first place.

Reading this book as a reviewer in more or less a single lengthy sitting did not do it justice. It is a book that should be dipped into at will, just as one would have read the original columns in the Independent,singly, not in a continuous chunk. Doing so had me asking questions about how the essays were chosen, and in what order had they originally been written. Was it chance that placed Potter’s invincible Wolfhound straight after the pathos of Goya’s Dog? And did Lubbock’s three pieces about comic imagery (Antonio del Pollaiuolo’s Apollo and Daphne, Jackson Pollock’s Stenographic Figure and Jeremy Moon’s Hoop-La) follow each other in issues of the Independent as they do in the book?  But that is to miss the point. The texts are as self-sufficient as the works they discuss, and can be relished independently, as can phrases of Lubbock’s consummate word-smithing (ones that stayed with me were Ingres’ female portraits described as ‘gift-wrapped trophy wives’ and ‘incarnations of money and beauty, expensive fabric and expensive skin’).

If you were looking for an unusual gift for a discerning friend for the holiday season, choosing this book could bring endless pleasure, for it elucidates as much as it entertains.

Great Works: 50 Paintings Explored by Tom Lubbock is published by Frances Lincoln, 2011. 216 pp., 50 colour illus. ISBN 978-0-7112-3283-9