50 Paintings Explored

GREAT WORKS GREAT How does the flatness of Mickey Mouse’s ears Tom Lubbock was an original TOM LUBBOCK illuminate the ‘non-specific bodies’ of Klimt’s thinker who could always Water Nymphs? Why was Vuillard’s genius be relied upon to come up confined to the decade when he worked at with a fresh and independent home? What was it that made Ingres such an He was one of a really very view. He could make plain the exciting weirdo? Germolene, sticking plaster, small body of English art critics meaning behind even marshmallows, prawn cocktail, pork paté and – an outspoken and honest writer. the most complicated art. sausage meat: how many other ways could He could tackle intelligently both Sir Nicholas Serota Philip Guston find to paint pink? Old Masters and contemporary art. Here are 50 great essays on paintings I don’t think he cared about by Tom Lubbock, first published in the offending, or not offending – and TOM LUBBOCK passionately argued and much-loved Great that’s where his honesty lay. Tom Lubbock, critic and illustrator, was the Works series he wrote weekly for the Brian Sewell chief art critic of the Independent from 1997 Independent. Always inventive and authoritative, until his death in 2011. He wrote widely on art, each piece is devoted to a single painting. This books and radio and produced major catalogue is a book of surprises: Giotto’s Vices as ‘studies essays on Goya, Thomas Bewick and Ian in self-destruction’; Hitchcock’s lighting tricks Hamilton Finlay. His illustrations, mainly done 50 PAINTINGS EXPLORED on Suspicion compared to the luminosity of in collage, appeared every Saturday on the His writings are a a Zurbarán still life; how the figure in Gwen editorial page of the Independent between 1999 dramatisation of what it is like John’s Girl in a Blue Dress ‘withdraws from life, and 2004. His weekly Great Works column, to think about art. They never fading into its surface, pressed like a flower’; from which these essays are taken, ran say ‘look at me’. They say ‘Look Géricault’s Study of Truncated Limbs, as ‘a good between 2005 and 2010. at these things more carefully’. painting, simply, of sex’. Tom Sutcliffe This book collects Tom Lubbock’s best writing together for the first time. In it, he explores his thinking about art with great intelligence and humour. Spanning 800 years of western art, this is simply the cleverest, FrANCES LINCOLN LIMITED funniest, most moving and most original art FRONT COVER: The Child in the Meadow, detail from PUBLISHErS book you are likely to see. Morning, 1809, by Philipp Otto Runge, Kunsthalle, ISBN 978-0-7112-3283-9 Hamburg/Bridgeman Art Library 52995 BACK COVER: Study of Clouds, detail, 1822, by John With an introduction by Laura Cumming, art Constable, Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford/ critic of the Observer. Bridgeman Art Library Author photograph by Marion Coutts 9 780711 232839 £18.99/ US $29.95 www.franceslincoln.com.

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