All the art you’d pay not to own

‘To my mind,’ Renoir once wrote, ‘a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful and pretty. There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is.’ What would he have made of Edward Brooke-Hitching’s The Madman’s Gallery? Of the 100-plus artworks it examines, few are cheerful and fewer pretty. Often you turn the pages of an art book wondering which painting you most covet, but with this one it’s more a question of which you’d pay not to own: the 13th-century ‘Penis tree’ maybe? The 90 cans of excrement sealed up by Piero Manzoni in 1961 and now selling for up to €275,000 apiece? Or, most repellent, the ‘Portrait of Barbara van Beck’(c.1640), her whole face sprouting thick, luxuriant hair?

Brooke-Hitching has a taste for the imaginary, the eccentric and sometimes the completely erased. His book Fox Tossing, Octopus Wrestling and Other Forgotten Sports (2015) revisited some of the oddest competitive games man has devised. The Phantom Atlas (2016) explored the world not as it is but as some have dreamed it to be. And The Madman’s Library (2020) tracked down many of the strangest examples of the printed word ever created.

What that last book did for bibliophiles, this new, beautifully produced and elegantly written anthology does for art lovers, offering ‘an alternative guided tour of art history’, focusing on the ‘forgotten’ and the ‘freakish’. The idea for it took root in 2015, when Banksy converted a derelict seaside tourist venue in Somerset into a parody of Disneyland, and the performance artist Stelarc attempted to grow a human ear on his own arm. The exhibits in the hypothetical gallery range in age from a carved tusk of a woolly mammoth (38,000-33,000 BC) to dreamlike images created by AI just last year.

Zarh Pritchard worked on canvases 60 feet underwater, pinned to the ocean floor by leaded shoes

The research that has gone into this is prodigious, but Brooke-Hitching loves storytelling even more than scholarship, and he has a gift for it. Sometimes it’s as if he’s luring you into an Andrew Lang fairy tale:‘In Mesoamerica, long before the Aztec and their intricate goldwork, before the Maya and their hieroglyphic writing, before even the Zapotec and their dazzling geometric textiles, there were the Olmec and their giant heads.’ Some of his yarns will linger in the mind long after the last page is turned. He offers a vivid retelling of how in 1936 Dali gave a lecture on surrealist art dressed in a diving suit and sealed helmet, and was saved from suffocation only just in time when the poet David Gascoyne leapt forward and jimmied open the helmet with a billiard cue. And of how, in the late 19th century, Zarh Pritchard worked on canvases 60 feet underwater, pinned to the ocean floor by leaded shoes.

For those with magpie minds, there are many glittering details to hoard: that the ‘Mona Lisa’ is the only Louvre painting with its own postbox; that the painting we know as Leonardo’s ‘Last Supper’ is in fact only 45 per cent Leonardo’s work, while 40 per cent is the work of restorers and 17.5 per cent is lost; that Turner, who seems to have been lackadaisical when it came to his own work, once tore a hole in a corner of a masterpiece to form a cat flap for his seven Manx cats.

Throughout the book there is a sense of vigorous, ongoing discovery. Who would have thought anything new could be learnt about Tutankhamun’s treasures? Yet it was 2016 before it emerged that one of the daggers wrapped in the boy king’s winding sheets was of ‘extraterrestrial origin’ – made from meteorite.

Some works yield up their secrets after lying hidden for centuries. In 1869, a Surrey clergyman saw ‘a flare of red pigment’ burst through the whitewashed west wall of his church. Painstaking scraping eventually revealed a massive medieval ‘Doom’ painting, warning parishioners to repent of their sins. Did J.L. Carr know about this – and could it have been the inspiration for his novel A Month in the Country?

The most arresting images in the book for me are Piranesi’s imaginary prison pictures: nightmare compositions of stairways and landings leading nowhere, filled with a feeling of claustrophobia and menace. They were created in 1750, and yet they still perfectly capture the atmosphere of the one prison I know well, HMP Wandsworth –the sense that the air has stood still for decades, the lack of natural light, the prisoners drifting about like shoals of ghosts.

Even these compositions I wouldn’t want on my wall. But they do challenge Renoir’s beliefs. Perhaps the last word should go instead to the Marquis de Sade: ‘Beauty belongs to the sphere of the simple, the ordinary, whilst ugliness is something extraordinary, and there is no question but that every ardent imagination prefers in lubricity the extraordinary to the commonplace.’