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 Zurbarán 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.

Some critics on the Independent newspaper were once asked to write about theirperfect pastime for an illustrated series paragliding, classical ballet, perhapsfishing for marlin off Bermuda. Tom Lubbock's choice was To Sit Quietly ByHimself in a Room. Needless to say, the paper did not like this suggestion of apastime that cost nothing, yielded no advertising and couldn't be accompanied byspectacular photographs. His idea was binned, to Tom's gleeful amusement.But what his readers lost was an essay on thinking, and thinking really wasTom's passion as well as his gift. Almost anything could be made interestingonce it had passed through his mind, and what could not was material forhumour. Ideas developed in his writing, as they did in his conversation, withexacting clarity and a stupendous range of registers: mirthful, argumentative,celebratory, probing, contemplative, comic. The mind represented all thefreedom in the world to Tom; it was bigger than any room.And what he thought about most in the last two decades of his professionallife was art. By the time of his death, just days after his fifty-third birthday in2011, Tom Lubbock was widely considered the most original art writer in Britain;quite possibly the most industrious too. You could read him not once but threetimes a week in the Independent, where his details competition had a strongfollowing (including several famous artists) for its pithy critiques of famous art,and his Monday reviews were eagerly awaited by the hoards of readers whoadmired and learned from his fearlessly honest examinations of art, both oldand contemporary. As a critic he had perfect judgement, which time will surelyprove, but more than that his approach was unique. He saw art as an experienceboth in and of life; for him the two were not separate; each could illuminateand enrich the other. Holbein and the Airfix kits of childhood, Rothko and theanthems of Mariah Carey, conceptual art and the uses of the electric toaster:every review was a heady adventure.But it was the 'Great Works' series, which began in 2005 and continuedvirtually up to his death, which offered Tom the maximum freedom. Theseshort essays were not time-tied or pegged to a show. He could choose tobring to life paintings that had lain dormant for years look at the startlingbaby on the cover of this book, taken from a picture by Philipp Otto Runge,which inspired a wonderful essay on self-contained details, and the suddenarrival of self-contained babies and he could choose to concentrate on thegreat art that is often ignored. Instead of Giotto's full-colour frescos in theArena Chapel, for example, Tom explores the black-and-white Noh play of theVices; instead of The Raft of the Medusa, he takes one of Gericault's preparatorystudies as the starting point for an argument about sex in painting that buildsto the persuasive assertion that Study of Truncated Limbs may show a heapof human remains but is quite possibly the one true depiction of post-coitalsensuousness in art.The first excitement on leafing through the paper to Tom's 'Great Works' so aptly named, as people said was discovering where he would start (andhow he would get to the Work). The light hidden inside the glass of milk inHitchcock's Suspicion is a revelation in itself, but Tom uses it to analyse thesacramental glow of a Zurbarán. The ideas of the French mystic Simone Weilhelp him to clinch the mysterious atmosphere of Edward Hopper's Early SundayMorning. How would he negotiate between James Joyce's Ulysses and Ingres'sMadame Moitessier, or even more hazardously from Venn diagrams to a portraitby Rembrandt? The reader's curiosity was piqued by these wild analogies; andthen it was abundantly rewarded.In 'Great Works', Tom wrote about the relationship between painting andtheatre, between words and pictures, between illusions and cinematic effects. Heconsidered aspects of art that are commonly overlooked: sight gags and slapstick,paintings and puppet shows, games of hide and seek, blips where the paintingstops making sense. How the shape or scale of a picture orchestrates the drama,how a painting can ever convey (rather than just tidily describe) a mess.The essays made one think about art in a whole new way. The picture was tobe considered on (and as) its own evidence, first and last. Tom did not examinepaintings, as others do, through the prism of theory, scholarship, art or socialhistory, though he was erudite in all. Tellingly, his artists' biographies alwaysappear as self-contained footnotes. A model of what was interesting, and notrote 'Painting was perhaps not Vermeer's main job. He had a line as an innkeeper' these sketches would make a brilliant anthology of brief lives.Like John Berger, with whom he has been compared, Tom proposed newways of seeing. Try the mirror trick in the essay on Daumier and you will learnsomething about optics, bodies and the disparities between two and threedimensions, not to mention the greatness of this French cartoonist and painter(tellingly, one of Tom's favourites). Take up crayon and scissors, or their modernequivalent in Photoshop, and follow his suggestion of moving or deleting thebird in Van Gogh's Wheatfield with Lark. Through this ruse and of course Tom'sobservations you will appreciate the painting far more.'The lighting tells the time'. 'The composition says etc'. 'Art invents the worldfrom scratch'. Tom's writing is addictively clear and epigrammatic; he likedto hunt down the mot juste, to turn an argument on the proverbial sixpence.He probably brought more people to art than many a scholar simply by beingintellectually lucid and funny. Above all, he wrote about these great works, andthis remains unique, as if they were autonomous beings in themselves.What can a painting believe, he would ask? What sort of jokes can it tell? Whatkind language does it speak? In the essay on Gwen John, he even imagines whatit is like to be inside a painting, immobilised and flattened and unable to standfree. It is a profound vision of the inner life of art, and of this artist's paintings.Tom was a stickler for truth, a mocker of cant; he was also leery of theunfocused emotional response. But reading these essays, with their formidableknowledge of art, poetry, music, philosophy and film, one feels that some ofhis own traits are reflected in the chosen works inventiveness, wit, acute andfearless intelligence. In the marvellous essay on Proust and Vermeer's Viewof Delft, written when he was about to undergo emergency brain surgery forthe brain tumour that would kill him, he imagines losing consciousness evenwhile contemplating the difference between painting and fiction. It is classicTom: proposition, revelation, prose into poetry. What he prized in art mentalfreedom, as he wrote is exactly what he shows here, and what he will continueto inspire in his readers.