The Best Art You've Never Seen: 101 Hidden Treasures From Around the World (Rough Guides Reference) [Paperback]

I absolutely loved this book! When I first saw it I thought 'oh it'll just be full of strange obscure stuff that's actually just bizarre and not good', but I was beyond pleasantly surprised. Some of the pieces are better known than others, but you get a completely different outlook on them, as well as discovering some wonderful hidden treasures! Beautifully written, presented and illustrated, as well as quite a bargain for a book of this size! Love it and couldn't recommend it more.

Congratulations to author Julian Spalding and to Rough Guides - this book does brilliantly just what the cover promises: we get to know 101 glorious artworks from all over the world, with a beautifully written, thought-provoking and very well informed commentary on each. I kept finding startling artworks I couldn't believe I'd never come across before. A few of the choices may be familiar if you're already adventurous in seeking out special interests, but I can't imagine anyone would fail to get some real surprises. It's a wonderful book to browse, and great value given the number, quality and size of the pictures - all 101 items are there, full-page in colour.

This is a far cry from a dry, factual guide, but is equally far removed from a precious coffee table book on art. It is a wonderful and wonderfully eclectic collection of obscure and less obscure art works from around the world, from the `Young Man of Mozia' to `Bimbo Town', a rather unusual night club in Leipzig, Germany.
Spalding has extraordinary powers of observation and description, and his prose, lyrical at times, has a flowing clarity; it's extraordinary how he, with a few short sentences, manages to conjure up a vivid picture in the reader's mind's eye.
Here he writes about a painting by Papua New Guinean Mathias Kauage: "One, entitled Carry Leg, shows a couple with their legs entwined and radiant smiles on their sun-like faces. These were the liberated young who had defied their parents' wishes and married for love. Flowers bloom around them in the green jungle."
The texts, accompanying each of the 101 full-page colour reproductions, are as varied as the art itself. Some place the works into their cultural and political context, the customs and practices of their day or in the wider frame of humanity itself, while others are linked poignantly to the burning issues of the present day, as when he writes about J.M.W. Turner's `Staffa'. "Turner's subject was the atmosphere. We have to learn to appreciate the Earth's atmosphere again, in all its transient beauty, if we are going to save our world from catastrophe."
There is a wealth of anecdotes, and snippets of contemporary gossip, such as speculation about the identity of the model Gustave Courbet used for his painting `The Origin of the World'. It was painted for a private collector in 1866, but not seen in public until 1995, because, as Spalding puts it, "Male genitalia have been aired in Western art for centuries, but those of females have always been covered up."
Some works, such as the Mona Lisa, are well known and it came as a surprise to find her included here - until I read the text. What the viewer at the Louvre actually sees is a painting obscured by a layer of 200 year old, brown varnish.
She features under the heading `Hidden by Conservation', and Spalding does Sir Arthur Evans, who excavated and "restored" Knossos on the island of Crete, a great kindness by including `Prince of the Lilies' in this chapter. Destroyed by Conservation would have been a more apt title. The prince is little more than a figment of Evan's imagination, as he imposed his blinkered view of having discovered an ideal society on Knossos with disastrous and irreversible results.
It was a particular pleasure to find works of art that do not lend themselves to being displayed in museum cases, or hung on gallery walls. I first discovered Niki de Saint Phalle's Tuscan Tarot Garden in 1994, and fell under its spell, as did Spalding it seems: "The grove you are walking in is inhabited by gods and goddesses. What's odd is that, because everything is so light, you don't feel their massive presence between the trunks and branches, but only sense them as if they were daylight ghosts or spirits - apparitions from another age, allowing themselves to be glimpsed as a special privilege."
The `Rock Garden of Chandigarh'in northern India, was created - initially in secret and worked on by night - by Nek Chand, a road inspector. It is, like the Tarot Garden, a work of pure, personal artistic expression and, thanks to this book, now features high on my list of places to visit.

. The `Young Man of Mozia', mentioned above, is a Greek marble statue, dating to the 5th century BC, and was found buried underneath a stone wall on an island off the coast of Sicily in 1979, probably used as part of its foundation. Spalding, describing the exquisite workmanship says: "Not one line is slavishly echoed; every inch is individually observed, yet no detail looks finicky; everything adds to the grandeur of the overall effect." This sentence, when moved from the context of art into that of literature, describes this book in a nutshell, and far better than I can. A treasure trove from cover to cover; it takes the reader on an exhilarating journey of discovery, and is written by somebody who not only knows his subject intimately, but brings to it the emotional depth and enthusiasm of somebody who loves it and revels in it.