Artwork Title: The Discussion

The Discussion, 1948

Geoffrey Arthur Tibble

Here’s a small, odd truth about cinema. If the large screen contains a smaller screen – a television, say, or a computer monitor – your eye will almost invariably be drawn towards it. It’s so dependable an effect that directors often use it to supply a kind of visual counterpoint for their main scene, but it’s also so effective that they have to be careful the viewer doesn’t become distracted and disappear down that embedded wormhole. Something similar can happen in a painting, though it’s far less potent. That might simply be because we’re dealing with a still image but also possibly because painters can decide precisely how clear the picture within the picture is going to be (not to mention the fact that they retain authority of everything within the frame). But even so, a painting or an image within a painting will often pull our gaze back repeatedly. We’re wired to look at what other people are looking at, even if the people doing the looking are only painted. Take this picture by Geoffrey Tibble, for instance, The Discussion, which includes what appears to be a page from a catalogue or an art magazine in the left foreground. It is, I assume, what’s being discussed, though there isn’t anything in the image that would make that indisputable. It doesn’t look like a very lively discussion at all, to be frank, though it’s possible that it has been caught at a moment when everyone present is thinking about something that’s just been said. ...It could just be a suggestive place-holder I suppose, a squiggle of paint intended to represent the concept of a picture rather than a specific one. But I can’t help feeling that Tibble knew exactly what it was, and that the discussion of the title bears some relationship to it. So I’m going to add my question to the Art Detective discussions and draw on a human search engine with a lot more connoisseurship and contextual knowledge (it has successfully solved other mysteries relating to other half-forgotten paintings). In the meantime, I’ll add Tibble’s picture to the list of those in which a painted painting competes with the painting itself for our deepest attention. Tom Sutcliffe, Arts Broadcaster, Radio 4 (https://artuk.org/discover/stories/artwork-in-focus-the-discussion) ..."The bearded man is indeed my father, Geoffrey Tibble; I would think he painted this in the early '40s. He seldom painted himself, but my mother was his model - the women in his paintings all with similar faces and timeless clothes, usually 2 or 3 in domestic settings often with an umbrella, or a telephone, sometimes depicting a pottery vase or piece of furniture from our home as was the ebony African sculpture pictured in the 'catalogue'...." >.."I am also the artist's daughter and, added to the information provide by Gina above, I have attached a photo of an African wooden carving which is in my possession and is highly likely to be that which is the subject of the catalogue or magazine in the foreground. This, together with the curved settle, was in our family home. Also attached is a photo which shows the resemblance of the man in the painting with the painter himself." (https://www.artuk.org/artdetective/discussions/discussions/can-more-be-found-about-geoffrey-arthur-tibbles-the-discussion)
Uploaded on Jul 22, 2017 by Suzan Hamer

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