Great Works
50 Paintings Explored
Published on 6. October 2011
Book
Hardback
216 pages
978-0-7112-3283-9 (ISBN)
Description
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 Zurbaran 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.
There are electrifying insights - using Hitchcock's Suspicion to explore the lighting effects in a Zurbaran 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.
Reviews / Votes
If you want to know why plenty of us thought that Tom was far and away the best art critic of our generation, you should buy and relish Great Works which reprints with handsome reproductions of each image, fifty of his short essays for The Independent... Utterly free of cant, posturing and received ideas, they teem with the kind of insight that only comes from protracted looking and profound lucid thinking. Buy copies for everyone you know who likes art and wants to know how it can be talked about with beautiful sanity and zero guff. One of Tom Lubbock's nicest habits as an art critic was to observe some quirk in a piece of art and, while distracting you with this magician's cloth and illuminate the whole work. It was a regular trick of the short essays he wrote in his 'Great Works' series: a preparatory manoeuvre priming you for the big picture. Published posthumously as a collection, Great Works deepens a neat journalistic technique into a profound way of seeing. An endlessly lively and surprising book. An outstanding book.An endlessly lively and surprising book.
If you want to know why plenty of us thought that Tom was far and away the best art critic of our generation, you should buy and relish Great Works which reprints with handsome reproductions of each image, fifty of his short essays for The Independent... Utterly free of cant, posturing and received ideas, they teem with the kind of insight that only comes from protracted looking and profound lucid thinking. Buy copies for everyone you know who likes art and wants to know how it can be talked about with beautiful sanity and zero guff.
One of Tom Lubbock's nicest habits as an art critic was to observe some quirk in a piece of art and, while distracting you with this magician's cloth and illuminate the whole work. It was a regular trick of the short essays he wrote in his 'Great Works' series: a preparatory manoeuvre priming you for the big picture. Published posthumously as a collection, Great Works deepens a neat journalistic technique into a profound way of seeing.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Quarto Publishing PLC
Illustrations
50 paintings in colour
Dimensions
Height: 218 mm
Width: 165 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-7112-3283-9 (9780711232839)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
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/
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/
Content
7 Introduction
12 El Greco - Boy Lighting a Candle, Museo di Capodimonte, Naples
16 Francesco Zurbaran - Still Life with Jars, Prado, Madrid
20 Kasimir Malevich - Red House, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg
24 Joan Miro - The Hunter, Catalan Landscape, Museum of Modern Art, New York
28 Johannes Vermeer - View of Delft, Mauritshuis, The Hague
32 Giovanni Francesco Caroto - Young Boy holding a Child's Drawing, Verona
36 Philipp Otto Runge - The Child in the Meadow, Kunsthalle, Hamburg
40 Vincent van Gogh - Wheatfield with Lark, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
44 Paul Nash - Event on the Downs, Government Art Collection, UK
48 Eugene Delacroix - Still Life with Lobsters, Louvre, Paris
52 Jacopo Tintoretto - Paradise, Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid
56 Peter Doig - Concrete Cabin (West Side), Private collection
60 John Constable - Study of Clouds, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
64 Francis Bacon - Sand Dune, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Basel
68 Peter Paul Rubens - The Dying Seneca, Alte Pinakothek, Munich
72 Homore Daumier - The Burden, Private collection
76 Edgar Degas - Combing the Hair, National Gallery, Oslo
80 Gustav Klimt - Water Nymphs, Zentralsparkasse der Gemeinde Wien, Vienna
84 Masaccio - The Expulsion from Paradise, Sta Maria del Carmine, Florence
88 Luca Signorelli - The Resurrection of the Flesh, Orvieto Cathedral, Umbria
92 Theodore Gericault - Study of Truncated Limbs, Musee Fabre, Montpellier
96 Philip Guston - Painter's Table, National Gallery of Art, Washington
100 Rembrandt van Rijn - Lucretia, National Gallery of Art, Washington
104 Vittore Carpaccio - The Apparition of 10,000 Martyrs, Gallerie dell' Accademia, Venice
108 Gerhard Richter - 1024 Colours, Centre Pompidou, Paris
112 Bernardo Bellotto - The Ruins of the Old Kreuzkirche in Dresden, Kunsthaus, Zuerich
116 Nicolas Poussin - Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion, Walker Gallery, Liverpool
120 Juan Sanchez-Cotan - Still Life with Quince, Cabbage ... , San Diego Museum of Art
124 Rene Magritte - Swift Hope, Kunsthalle, Hamburg
128 Albrecht Altdorfer - Alexander's Victory, Alte Pinakothek, Munich
132 Giovanni di Paolo - The Beheading of St John the Baptist, Art Institute of Chicago
136 Fernand Leger - Holly Leaf on Red Background, Private collection
140 Winslow Homer - Right and Left, National Gallery of Art, Washington
144 Francisco de Goya - The Dog, Prado, Madrid
148 Paulus Potter - The Wolfhound, Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg
152 Camille Pissarro - Place du Theatre Francaise, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
156 Caspar David Friedrich - On the Sailing Boat, Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg
160 Giovanni Bellini - Madonna with Saints, San Zaccaria, Venice
164 Edward Hopper - Early Sunday Morning, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
168 Henry Fuseli - Silence, Kunsthaus, Zuerich
172 Gwen John - Girl in a Blue Dress, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff
176 Edouard Vuillard - Interior, Mother and Sister of the Artist, MoMA, New York
180 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres - Madame Moitessier, National Gallery, Washington
184 James Barry - Jupiter and Juno on Mount Ida, Sheffield City Art Galleries
188 Giotto di Bondone - Inconstancy, Anger, Despair from Vices, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua
192 Pietro Longhi - The Presentation, Louvre, Paris
196 Antonio Pollaiuolo - Apollo and Daphne, National Gallery, London
200 Jackson Pollock - Stenographic Figure, Museum of Modern Art, New York
204 Jeremy Moon - Hoop-La, Tate Gallery, London
208 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec - The Bed, Musee d'Orsay, Paris
213 Index
216 Picture Credits
12 El Greco - Boy Lighting a Candle, Museo di Capodimonte, Naples
16 Francesco Zurbaran - Still Life with Jars, Prado, Madrid
20 Kasimir Malevich - Red House, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg
24 Joan Miro - The Hunter, Catalan Landscape, Museum of Modern Art, New York
28 Johannes Vermeer - View of Delft, Mauritshuis, The Hague
32 Giovanni Francesco Caroto - Young Boy holding a Child's Drawing, Verona
36 Philipp Otto Runge - The Child in the Meadow, Kunsthalle, Hamburg
40 Vincent van Gogh - Wheatfield with Lark, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
44 Paul Nash - Event on the Downs, Government Art Collection, UK
48 Eugene Delacroix - Still Life with Lobsters, Louvre, Paris
52 Jacopo Tintoretto - Paradise, Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid
56 Peter Doig - Concrete Cabin (West Side), Private collection
60 John Constable - Study of Clouds, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
64 Francis Bacon - Sand Dune, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Basel
68 Peter Paul Rubens - The Dying Seneca, Alte Pinakothek, Munich
72 Homore Daumier - The Burden, Private collection
76 Edgar Degas - Combing the Hair, National Gallery, Oslo
80 Gustav Klimt - Water Nymphs, Zentralsparkasse der Gemeinde Wien, Vienna
84 Masaccio - The Expulsion from Paradise, Sta Maria del Carmine, Florence
88 Luca Signorelli - The Resurrection of the Flesh, Orvieto Cathedral, Umbria
92 Theodore Gericault - Study of Truncated Limbs, Musee Fabre, Montpellier
96 Philip Guston - Painter's Table, National Gallery of Art, Washington
100 Rembrandt van Rijn - Lucretia, National Gallery of Art, Washington
104 Vittore Carpaccio - The Apparition of 10,000 Martyrs, Gallerie dell' Accademia, Venice
108 Gerhard Richter - 1024 Colours, Centre Pompidou, Paris
112 Bernardo Bellotto - The Ruins of the Old Kreuzkirche in Dresden, Kunsthaus, Zuerich
116 Nicolas Poussin - Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion, Walker Gallery, Liverpool
120 Juan Sanchez-Cotan - Still Life with Quince, Cabbage ... , San Diego Museum of Art
124 Rene Magritte - Swift Hope, Kunsthalle, Hamburg
128 Albrecht Altdorfer - Alexander's Victory, Alte Pinakothek, Munich
132 Giovanni di Paolo - The Beheading of St John the Baptist, Art Institute of Chicago
136 Fernand Leger - Holly Leaf on Red Background, Private collection
140 Winslow Homer - Right and Left, National Gallery of Art, Washington
144 Francisco de Goya - The Dog, Prado, Madrid
148 Paulus Potter - The Wolfhound, Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg
152 Camille Pissarro - Place du Theatre Francaise, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
156 Caspar David Friedrich - On the Sailing Boat, Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg
160 Giovanni Bellini - Madonna with Saints, San Zaccaria, Venice
164 Edward Hopper - Early Sunday Morning, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
168 Henry Fuseli - Silence, Kunsthaus, Zuerich
172 Gwen John - Girl in a Blue Dress, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff
176 Edouard Vuillard - Interior, Mother and Sister of the Artist, MoMA, New York
180 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres - Madame Moitessier, National Gallery, Washington
184 James Barry - Jupiter and Juno on Mount Ida, Sheffield City Art Galleries
188 Giotto di Bondone - Inconstancy, Anger, Despair from Vices, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua
192 Pietro Longhi - The Presentation, Louvre, Paris
196 Antonio Pollaiuolo - Apollo and Daphne, National Gallery, London
200 Jackson Pollock - Stenographic Figure, Museum of Modern Art, New York
204 Jeremy Moon - Hoop-La, Tate Gallery, London
208 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec - The Bed, Musee d'Orsay, Paris
213 Index
216 Picture Credits