Great Works: 50 Paintings Explored

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 Ingres such an exciting weirdo? Germolene, sticking plaster, marshmallows, prawn cocktail, pork paté and sausage meat: how many other ways could Philip Guston find to paint pink?

Great Works collects 50 great essays on paintings by Tom Lubbock, all first published in the ‘Great Works’ series he wrote weekly for the Independent and here collected for the first time. Always inventive and authoritative, each piece is devoted to a single painting. It is a book of surprises: Giotto’s Vices (1306) as ‘studies in self-destruction’; Hitchcock’s lighting tricks on Suspicion compared to the luminosity of a Zurbarán still life; how the figure in Gwen John’s Girl in a Blue Dress (1914) “withdraws from life, fading into its surface, pressed like a flower’; Géricault's Study of Truncated Limbs (1819), as ‘a good painting, simply, of sex”.