Great Works: Encounters with Art

by Michael Glover, Michael Glover

This fully illustrated book offers a highly enjoyable and intelligently-written tour through art history, with the renowned art critic and poet Michael Glover. Every Saturday for the best part of a decade, thousands of people have been turning to the pages of the British newspaper The Independent to read Michael Glover s thoughts about a particular piece of art. Pithy, astute, erudite, often humorous, and always engaging, these enormously popular essays are filled with compelling and entertaining observations as well as trenchant commentary about art, history, culture, and humanity. Collected for the first time in book form, this selection of 50 essays a number of which have been exclusively written for this volume is organized in an unexpected manner, allowing readers to see connections and juxtapositions between works. Their subjects cover an enormous span in terms of style, era, and geography from Rembrandt s Bathsheba with King David s Letter and El Greco s The Vision of St. John to Ai Wei Wei s Iron Tree and Georgia O Keeffe s Single Lily with Red. All the texts are accompanied by full-color illustrations of the work in focus. With its compact format, this book is the perfect companion to a day at the museum, but also lends itself to leisurely dipping in-and-out of, either at home or as part of a daily commute. A great gift for art lovers, this book will also introduce Michael Glover to a host of new readers eager to learn about art from a charming and knowledgeable teacher."

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Essays

224 pages, Hardcover

Published October 25, 2016

About the author

Michael Glover served in the British army during the Second World War, after which he joined the British Council and became a professional author. He wrote many articles and books on Napoleonic and Victorian warfare.

Reviews

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read several books critiquing paintings, and for me, this one is by far and away the best. Michael Glover is an art critic for The Independent; he is also a poet - and this book is a delight.

So many books of criticism just leave me feeling stodgy and stuffed.... In many instance they turn me off the pictures, rather than turning me on. Not so with this book. It reminds me a bit of Neil MacGregor's History of the World in 100 Objects: the format is the same - each picture carefully chosen, followed by a critique/investigation - and I found that both MacGregor and Glover have the same ability to excite and inspire.

Glover is immensely good at communicating. He writes with originality, but there is nothing esoteric or unreachable about his work. He wears his knowledge lightly. He talks about 'encounters' and 'mystery', and elaborates these ideas wonderfully - he goes on journeys that we want to share. As well as relishing art in a highly personal way, he is also down to earth. He tells us "There is a crude way of testing the value of any work of art. It is called the Ten-Second Test. If any work of art is worth staring at for as long as ten seconds, it stands a chance. That's it."

The book covers a wide variety of artworks, from all different periods and genres. Herewith a few examples of the pix, and Glover's wonderful writing.



The Cow with the Subtile Nose (1954) Jean Dubuffet

This is a painting by an outsider artist. I love this pic, and Glover's mullings make us see it with fresh eyes. It sings for us, albeit in an offbeat fashion.

"It feels horribly contained within this space, which is far too small for it. What is more, this is a shocked creature. Look into its eyes. It was not expecting to be stared at by you and you and you.... Those eyes are ridiculous too, the way they pop at us. They are raving eyes, raging eyes, eyes fresh out of trauma....

And yet, for all that, we positively like this cow. Stripped of all pretensions to be anything other than a lumbering animal, it is one of us we feel. So much flotsam and jetsam like the rest of us....."

The Meroe Head of Augustus (27-25BC) Unknown artist.

"August Caesar, the divinely anointed heir to Julius, was a small man with carious teeth, widely spaced, and bad skin. He had some sort of bodily deformity. He also possessed extraordinary eyes, and this head is worth seeing for the sake of those eyes alone, which are fabricated from wedge-shaped, almost suckable lozenges of highly polished white limestone."

Starry Pumpkin Gold (2014) Yayoi Kusama.

He describes how Kusama was obsessed with painting pumpkins for many years, relished for their "solid, dependable, unpretentious earthiness."

"Then, well into her ninth decade, she fabricated the giant pumpkin you can see here...almost like an apotheosis of that idea of the pumpkin which she drew as a teenager with mineral pigments applied to paper or silk. And yet this is also a pumpkin transformed. It is not tender and yielding...Now it is bold, and almost defiant, in its glittering presence."

This is a book to inspire. To send you scuttling off to an art gallery or museum, or perhaps to embolden you to pick up a paintbrush or lump of clay. It's full of life - and it makes you want to dive in at the deep end. Highly recommended.

[Horatio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Glover's book was a fun and readable collection of short essays on various artworks and sculptures ranging from Classical Antiquity (The Assyrian Lion Hunt) to postmodern art (Richard Serra). It differed greatly from Barnes, since it looked at individual pieces without really going into detail about the author's influence and life.

There were several very, very good pieces in this book, yet many of the pieces felt very surface level and didn't particularly interest me. I also disagreed with several of his conclusions (like in his essay on Las Meninas, where I think he tried playing too much off the idea of the viewer in front of the canvas, and didn't address the reflection of the King and Queen in the mirror at the back) and felt like others tried to be too clever in their conclusions, leading to a stretching of the interpretation of the piece, but then again, Glover is an expert so who am I to criticise (I am pleasantly reminded of a time when Sam called out Andrew Hui and he responded blusteringly "I am a doctor and scholar, therefore I know my material". Ah good times I miss Sam).

But man, the good pieces were excellent! Esp the one on Fragonard's Swing, which is a rococo piece that I never really understood, but Glover's analysis was mindblowing! Other notable pieces were the ones on Vermeer's Art of Painting (the process of creation and the history of painting), Caravaggio's Crucifixion of Peter and Rembrandt's Bathsheba. Would recommend the book for these essays, but the rest was not that good. YMMV.

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

I hoped to pick up some knowledge about art genres/styles and famous artists while enjoying looking at some good pieces. I did all that, but the actual writing wasn't really for me. The style was simultaneously tongue in cheek and too formal, like it was trying to make you think it was relatable but the effort made it obvious that at its heart it wasn't. It also occasionally sounded like BS, one of my common critiques about art critiques. I would have liked even more emphasis on giving context and making connections to other artwork or historical events.

[Jay Gabler · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this; really appreciated the one-essay-per-object approach. I reviewed Great Works for The Tangential.

[Sigrun Hodne · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazingly beautiful, well considered - and often rather surprising - collection of essays on art. The book can be read in small portions, or in a big bite - depending on what you hunger for.