Carl Laubin: Paintings
by John Russell Taylor and David Watkin
Showing the wide range of Carl Laubin's work, this book presents him as one of the finest architectural painters of all time. It follows the development of the architectural capriccio from the earlier incorporation of whimsical ideas in Laubin's paintings to the more elaborate architectural compositions based on the buildings of Wren, Hawksmoor, Cockerell and Ledoux. This book is published in associaton with Plus One Galleries, the leading dealers in Photorealist art.
353 colour, 18 mono illustrations
ISBN 13: 978 0 85667 633 8
Published in 2007
Product dimension: 275 x 245 mm
Hardcover: 240 pages
Product dimension: 275 x 245 mm
Hardcover: 240 pages
Approx £39.50
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Prints Available:
'Another Professor's Dream, a Tribute to Charles Robert Cockerell RA'
High quality Giclee prints are available in a limited edition of 300;
image size 35 x 50cm, paper size 55 x 68cm
Price £295 plus postage and packaging
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'Strong Reason and Good Fancy'
image size 35 x 60cm, paper size 55 x 78cm
Price £295 plus postage and packaging
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This book review by Tony McIntyre was published in Building Design, 26th October 2007:
Some of Laubin’s extraordinary paintings are on show at the Plus One Gallery in central London, and what is better, we can now see the major part of his output in a book published at the same time. Many architects will be familiar with Laubin’s paintings of buildings, from the Royal Opera House to London’s City Hall under construction, but the other work may come as a surprise.
His first work for Dixon, a romantic view of his Dudgeon’s Wharf housing scheme (1986), immediately staked a claim for “paintings that would be valued in their own right rather than as promotional imagery”. In fact, he was promoting a different set of values: that context is as important as the architecture, and that building defects can have attractive outcomes. Here, poor drainage on the pavement produces the fabulous reflections that form the paintings’ centre of interest. This, of course, is a romantic view.
For the Opera House project, his work operated a dialectic with the design. If form or detail failed to convince on canvas, the design was changed and the painting then altered to reflect that. The ability to do this shows a practical advantage of painting in oils, which might seem to some people rather too elevated a medium for the task.
Laubin has gradually moved away from these “scheme” paintings — no doubt he finds greater licence elsewhere. His painting of John Outram’s competition entry for Bracken House in 1987 was already much more suggestive, with the building shown as a fantasy of mythology and narrative. Although he continued to do commission paintings of this kind for architects, he increasingly substituted his own programme, or that of non-architect patrons.
The “capriccio” has become a favourite, the recombination and rearrangement of architectural elements into fantasy compositions after the manner of Cockerell’s Professor’s Dream, and further developed by Ledoux. He has given monumental treatment to the works of Hawksmoor and Wren to create dream paintings full of scale and distortion, lit from sources you can’t quite put your finger on.
The book’s vast number of illustrations are threaded together with essays by David Watkin and John Russell Taylor. Watkin gives us a glimpse of the patron-artist relationship, which is not a common one these days: the artist with a client and a client with demands. He is also good at sounding out the precedents, from Canaletto and Bellotto, to Saenredam and Claude. It is left to Russell Taylor to see the connection to surrealism. The lighting is often reminiscent of Magritte, the flat, pure skies and intense light of Dali. And there is a feeling that something has happened or will happen, but uncertainty as to what it might be.
What I think both miss, perhaps deceived by the medium of oil paint, is the connection to photography. Laubin says of his painting of the ruined stump of the World Trade Centre: “Like Greek tragedy, the real tragedy happens off stage outside of view, we only watch the consequences,” which seems to echo Peter Galassi’s comment about the photographs of Walker Evans: “The essential social transaction does not take place among the actors on the street… it is an encounter between the viewer and the [photographed] individual.”
It is worth making this connection because of the realism of Laubin’s work. It is not the photorealism of Richard Estes or the mechanically enthralled realism of Ben Johnson. It connects with a sensibility conditioned by photography, as Claude’s and Canaletto’s obviously could not have been. Lee Friedlander, Henry Wessel — the mood is there, of the knowing, silent observer.
The book closes with a single image that the exhibition amplifies into a series of paintings called Verismo. That famous 15th century painting Ideal City, in the Ducal Palace at Urbino, by Piero della Francesca, is repainted by Laubin — but now overtaken by the modern world, an embarrassing survival in a culture that has moved on and wants to turn the central tempietto into a casino (casino is Italian slang for a mess, and also bordello).
The buildings remain, but we see the monuments of modern prosperity rising in the distance, while the foreground is filled with hoi polloi and worse. It is a lovely conceit. Urbino was only ever going to be ideal as long as nobody touched it. Any built utopia will be overwhelmed by error and progress. This is the element of human tragedy, in different degrees, that ties together Laubin’s work, from the Dudgeon’s Wharf painting, through the World Trade Centre, to this one: Verismo.
See the exhibition and buy the book — they are unique examples of modern painting.
There is also a book review by Richard W. Cameron, in The Classicist, No.8, 2007:
