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.