Visiting the world’s masterpieces is a quixotic undertaking

From his base in London, Martin Gayford has spent much of his career as an art critic travelling. He has interviewed and sometimes befriended many leading artists and scrutinised their works close up in their own environment. He has found that artistically creative men and women are not really very different from normal people.

The text of this informative and entertaining book is comprehensively balanced, fair, lucid and subtly witty, although some of the illustrations are handicapped by the smallness of the format. Art criticism itself can be an art. Gayford’s curiosity is wide and his judgments are tolerant, no matter how onerous the investigations can be. He explores remote, uncomfortable places, often accompanied by his wife Josephine, to whom the book is dedicated.

Typical of the arduous journeys that the couple have undertaken in their quest for the basic essences of art is one called ‘A Long Drive to Infinity: Brancusi’s Endless Column’. They were already on holiday in Sibiu, ‘a beautiful old town full of Romanian charm’. Brancusi’s masterpiece, with some of his lesser sculptures in the small town of Targu Jiu, ‘did not look all that far away, at least according to the map’ — only 150 miles deeper into the rural hinterland:

The opportunity to visit Endless Column in particular seemed too good to miss, partly because it had the lure of the rare and inaccessible. Although this is among the most celebrated works of the 20th century, almost nobody — in the London art world at least — had actually seen it… Our mad excursion was propelled by my urge to see certain works of art for real. Over the years this impulse has taken us on quite a few quixotic expeditions.