Great Works: 50 Paintings Explored

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Tom Lubbock

Frances Lincoln, London, 2011, English

Nonfiction, Art and Cultural History

8.6 X 6.8 inches, hardcover, 216 pages

ISBN: 9780711232839

Suggested Retail Price: $29.95

From the Publisher. Here are 50 great essays on paintings by Tom Lubbock, first published in the passionately argued and much-loved "Great Works" series he wrote weekly for the Independent. Always inventive and authoritative, each piece is devoted to a single painting. This is a book of surprises: Giotto's Vices as "studies in self-destruction"; Hitchcock’s lighting tricks on Suspicion compared to the luminosity of a Zurbaran still life; how the figure in Gwen John's Girl in a Blue Dress "withdraws from life, fading into its surface, pressed like a flower"; Gericault's Study of Truncated Limbs, as "a good painting, simply, of sex." Collecting his best writing together for the first time, Tom Lubbock explores his thinking about art with great intelligence and humor. Spanning 800 years of Western art, this book is simply the cleverest, funniest, most moving and most original art book you are likely to see.

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