Lives Remembered: Tom Lubbock

Further to your obituary of Tom Lubbock (10 January), Tom's championship of the painter he regarded as Britain's most important Modernist, Wyndham Lewis, will not be forgotten, writes Paul Edwards, Trustee, the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust. Encountering the paintings first in reproduction in a public library in his youth, he was overwhelmed: "I had no ide- 13/01/2011, Obituaries

Letters: Perspectives on Tom Lubbock

Tom Lubbock's writing in The Independent has helped me more than anything else to understand art, particularly through his Friday discussions of particular paintings. As well as being a tragedy for himself and his close family, his early death has therefore left a deep sense of loss in me, and I am sure many others whose lives have been lit b...- 13/01/2011, Letters

Tom Lubbock: 1957-2011

Tom Lubbock, who died on Sunday, wrote reviews that were often more entertaining than the shows themselves. Iconoclastic, thoughtful and provocative, The Independent's art critic made the most difficult art accessible to the layman. Here we reprint his brilliant review of the Turner Prize shortlist exhibition at Tate Britain, first published on 29 Oct Tom L...- 11/01/2011, Features

Tom Lubbock, artist, critic and 'Independent' great, dies at 53

Tom Lubbock, the chief art critic of The Independent for the last 13 years and a respected illustrator in his own right, has died after a battle with cancer which he chronicled with characteristic candour. He was 53.- 10/01/2011, News

The friend of 30 years with a brilliant eye for absurdity

I first met Tom Lubbock at university – dispatched to his rooms, as novice on the student newspaper, to pick up a piece of artwork for the next edition. Arriving outside his door in Corpus I found a large knife embedded in the woodwork, pinning up a hand-written note which read "Lubbock – you will die".- 10/01/2011, Thomas Sutcliffe

Tom Lubbock: Passionate and erudite chief art critic for 'The Independent' and 'The Independent on Sunday'

It is the habit of art critics to review from the inside out, starting with the object and adding bits of history and context to suggest a kind of omniscience. It was the particular genius of Tom Lubbock to do none of those things. Lubbock, who was this paper's chief art critic for 13 years and a contributor for five before that, and who has di...- 10/01/2011, Obituaries

Tom Sutcliffe: A critic who sees the whole picture

At the beginning of this year, Tom Lubbock reviewed the Richard Hamilton retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery in London. Like all of the fine art criticism he wrote for this paper it was a notably thoughtful piece, delivering to a reader not just the results of thought but the process of thinking as well. It's one of the reasons his criticism is so goo Th...- 10/12/2010, Thomas Sutcliffe

Tom Lubbock: Collages that cut to the quick

Every Saturday between 1999 and 2004, The Independent revealed a new Tom Lubbock collage. It was impossible to anticipate each week whether he might run with the topical, the newsworthy or something more personal, philosophical; modern mores up against the eternal verities, art everywhere. It was an open brief and, given such leave, he Each week...- 03/12/2010, Features

Great Works: A Corner Of The Artist's Room In Paris(1907-09), Gwen John

A picture can make objects into a portrait or self-portrait; an empty room into a life or a personality. For instance, there is the memorial image by the famous London illustrator, Luke Fildes. It shows The Empty Chair, Gad's Hill – Ninth of June 1870, which was published in the Christmas edition of the magazine The Graphic in 1870. Fildes depicts t An...- 24/09/2010, Great Works

Great Works: The West Front of the Sint-Mariakerk, Utrecht (1662), Pieter Jansz. Saenredam

Cubes, rectangles, triangles, rounds, arches, cylinders: these are the components of children's bricks, and sometimes they can be made in nothing more than the simplest ways. There is the homemade cardboard practice, derived from cornflakes boxes and toilet rolls, from Blue Peter and Vision On. There is the growing plastic empire of Lego, invented by the Of...- 10/09/2010, Great Works

Great Works: A Fantasy, The Fairy Ring (c1850), George Cruikshank

The fairies? It sounds a bit like that. T S Eliot imagines his figures in his poem "East Coker", in a country setting, remote and haunted. "In that open field If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close, On a summer midnight, you can hear the music Of the weak pipe and the little drum And see them dancing around t...- 03/09/2010, Great Works

Great Works: View of Haarlem (with bleaching fields) (c1670) by Jacob van Ruisdael

Very flat, the Netherlands. And the horizon of this landscape is an almost perfect horizontal. In the dark foreground the land rises, offering a vantage point, from where we look down upon the scene. But in the distance, where the sky and the earth meet, a straight and level line cuts through the view. Jacob van Ruisdael's View of Haarlem has a...- 18/06/2010, Great Works

Welcome to the mad house: A monument to the world of the surreal

Surrealism is always coming round, and every time it becomes more and more normal. So if we still believe in it at all, we should hold out for something surprising. And this time there is a surprise. It's a fun house, a crooked house, a haunted house. It is the name for The Surreal House, which has just opened at the Barbican. Though when you thi...- 14/06/2010, Features

Great works: The Dance of Albion (circa 1795), William Blake

This is a hypothetical image for a hypothetical day. It's an affirmative vision for a moment that's very unlikely to be now. It was chosen in advance, of course. But whatever results are emerging this morning, William Blake's The Dance of Albion can only feel like a cruel irony or a bitter protest or an impossibly remote ideal. Even in its own day, it was Al...- 07/05/2010, Great Works

Great Works: Running Man (circa 1932), Kasimir Malevich

Human beings are like many things. But the most persuasive likenesses are often the ones in which humans are likened to things that look human. The difference is usually relatively small: scarecrow, suit of clothes, puppet, mannequin, robot, statue, ghost, angel, ape, god, alien, cartoon character. But while these things are all based on the human model, In...- 16/04/2010, Great Works