The 10 best ... New Year's resolution artworks

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2012/jan/01/10-new-year-resolution-paintings


Horror at Home, by Damien Hirst. Photograph: Museo Archeologico PR

1. Give up smoking

Horror at Home, Damien Hirst
Saatchi Gallery, London

This could be a scene from an Alan Carr session in which the smokers keep on puffing, stubbing out their fags in overflowing ashtrays, appalled to see the accumulation of butts. Hirst's gigantic Brobdingnagian tray is filled with the contents of several bin bags, apparently all from a night at the Groucho club in the days when members could chain it. The work stinks, the pristine sculpture is defiled, life is going up in smoke. Let Horror at Home stiffen your resolve: it's an all-out cautionary tale.

2. Give up drinking

L'Absinthe, by Edgar Degas
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Degas's L'Absinthe, with its dead-eyed couple apparently paralysed by the eponymous drink, appalled French critics when it was first shown in 1876. How ugly and disgusting to portray an inebriated woman! In Britain, it was considered a morality tale: this is what happens when you drink too much. But in fact it is a painting of modern life, in Baudelaire's famous phrase, composed in the studio under the influence of Japanese art. She's stoned, he's drinking a hangover cure in what looks like the cold light of day. It's the morning after, or they've been at it all night. They've got to give up.

3. Read more

The Artist's Two Youngest Sisters, Constantin Hansen
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

A book so riveting two children can read it at once without irritating each other? If only Hansen had revealed its title. But of course his reading party is really a portrait by other means, of his younger sisters in spellbound concentration, as well as the joys of reading. He painted the girls absorbed in writing and thinking too, completing the triangle of literature. Hansen is a pioneer of the Golden Age of Danish painting. He cared for these girls on his own, from a young age, when their parents died very suddenly of typhus.

4. Give more

The Boy With the Club Foot, Ribera
Louvre, Paris


The Boy With the Club Foot, Ribera The Boy With the Club Foot, Ribera. Photograph: Scala

The boy is a beggar, but is he actually begging? Ribera's great portrait makes a monument of this spirited child with his defiant grin and marching pose. The viewpoint is low, so you have to look up to the boy, and the deformity all but invisible in the shadows. He carries his crutch like a spade or weapon and appears anything but downtrodden, for all his shoeless and orphaned state. But it is a performance, an act of bravery, for in his hand is the written plea: "Give Me Alms, for the Love of God." Keep him in mind in 2012.