Oor Err Missus - The Arse in Art

Edward Lucie-Smith is a familiar name to me. As a teenager getting into poetry, I used to carry his generational Penguin anthology British Poetry Since 1945 around in my pocket. I remember leafing through it as I waited for a round caddying at The Old Course (not many of the caddies had an interest in poetry) and a year later, it was often a welcome distraction from university essays. Now, I'm busy working on a similar anthology, successor to the successor of the successor of his selection.

His double-barrelled name made me think of him as an elderly gentleman, but he was only 50 then and had done the anthology in his mid-30s. He has published well over 100 books in his lifetime, most of them poetry or art related, from his early poems about growing up in Jamaica to his latest which I have just read, or had a good look at, I should say.

I'm waffling a little, because it's not easy to write on a book which is composed mainly of pictures, even if they are pictures of people's bottoms. The Arse in Art published by Crombie Jardine is the book in question. It is not as you might think a follow-up to Lucie-Smith's 90s book Ars Erotica, which was a more scholarly investigation of erotic art.

The book offers one hundred images of fundaments, from painting, photography and sculpture, and challenges the reader to identify the artwork from which they derive. Smaller reproductions of the artworks are available in the back, complete with brief commentaries. In his introduction, Lucie-Smith claims not to mind whether high scorers do so out of ownership of a museum-like mind, or a plain dirty one. He condones sniggers, but requests thoughtful ones.

Taken out of context, arses are, frankly, a little anodyne, alien even. Given that I could only identify a few very famous ones - Ingres' Odalisque, a Cézanne bather, The Rokeby Venus with her rather over-rated posterior – I took to playing a more base sort of game which I hope would please Lucie-Smith, and that was to try to identify the gender of the bottom's owner, often without success.

So what are bottoms doing in art? Reclining often, bathing often, jutting manfully, or sprawling lasciviously, as in Boucher's much raunchier Odalisque, actually a painting of his wife, which brought him some grief and scandal back in the day. Boucher was a man with a loving penchant for the backside, it's clear, but his peers thought he should have stuck to painting outside of his marriage, such as the depictions, not shown here, of a young blonde Irish prostitute which make up his other Odalisque series.

Occasionally, the bottoms are otherwise engaged – Muybridge's naked cricketer swings his about in a series of photographs, in order to send down the perfect bowl. Meanwhile, I wasn't surprised to find that a rather muscly male bottom being used as a book rest was drawn by 'Tom of Finland' the hunk-happy homoerotic illustrator. This is a fun book, a good gift idea, a cheeky little number..