Observer review: Maggi Hambling - The Works

Painter and sculptor Maggi Hambling, whose prodigious career is profiled in Maggi Hambling: The Works (Unicorn Press £40), is used to causing a commotion. When her tribute to Benjamin Britten, an outsize scallop shell in stainless steel, was unveiled on a shingle beach in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, local opinion was so divided that the piece was vandalised and a poll was taken to determine whether it should be allowed to remain.

Her portrait of Michael Jackson, completed in 2004, was submitted to and rejected from the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition on the grounds that Hambling thought him innocent, but the fascinating conversations with critic Andrew Lambirth that form this book's text reveal her lack of interest in retaining the good opinion of the powers that be.

Of Jackson, she says simply: 'I can respond to his predicament. I felt his loneliness and vulnerability in the face of the feeding frenzy of the media.' Having never met her subject, she painted from a photograph, attempting to portray Jackson as 'frozen as if in the dock, juxtaposed with the trademark of his genius as a dancer'.

Elsewhere in her repertoire are other, less contentious, entertainers including Michael Gambon, George Melly, Stephen Fry and, perhaps most famously, Max Wall, who responded to Hambling's request to paint him with the note: 'Re: painting little me, I am flattered indeed - what colour?' In fact, Hambling confides, she often thought about the herons in Battersea Park when Wall was sitting for her, hence, one imagines, the startling picture of him and the bird in question staring one another out.

Apart from the familiar faces, there are numerous and frequently moving portraits of Hambling's friends and family, including an extraordinary image of her mother, dead, from 1988, after which the painter, as if in reaction, began a series of incandescent sunsets, filled with 'dancing figures, eyes, lagoons and fires'.