Böcker av Marina Vaizey

In a set of essays entitled 'Doubles author, critic, curator and traveller, Marina Vaizey explores pairings of artists drawn from the canonical cycle of Western art. She considers themes of engagement such as the portrait or figure, treated as stories of wider implication for society, that draw on the artist's perception of the seen, combined with personal visions of dreams and imagination. It is the supreme ability of art, perhaps its highest purpose -acknowledged or not - to show and tell: to show us what we are, and in so doing to tell us. Art even at its most abstract is story telling. And what we like most is encapsulated in Alexander Pope's phrase from 1733, the proper study of mankind is man. Perhaps that explains that the artists who are among those most currently revered those exact contemporaries Rembrandt and Velazquez, Van Gogh and Munch, the appeal of the disruptive Francis Bacon and the joyful David Hockney are artists who in their own individual ways mare both disturbing and consoling.Marina Vaizey

Collection of essays on photographers by renowned American author and art historian Marina Vaizey.

Two of the most interesting and pioneering British artists of the 20th century may be just as crucial in the trajectory of modern art for their private lives, their biographies, as for their painting. Vanessa Bell was a significant woman artist, for whom portraiture was a central preoccupation, and whose personal life, as a member of the Bloomsbury Group, has been the subject of endless study. Her complex life story has almost obscured her art, which is now being newly examined. She experimented early on with abstraction, and then turned to domestic subjects, modifying the lessons of French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism which had so influenced Bloomsbury artistic thinking. David Hockney is a hugely versatile artist - painter, draughtsman, print-maker, writer, stage-designer - who has always been fascinated with new technology, including photography, fax, film and iPad. Yet he too is essentially an autobiographical artist, . MV 04/2017

Renowned artist Lucian Freud (1922-2011) is commemorated in an exhibition of portraits and figure studies, spanning seven decades his working life, held at the National Portrait Gallery London from February to May 2012. The monograph explores the development of his art from acutely observed studies of the 1940s to major paintings in the later phase, where the artist engaged in a complex and sometimes brutal meditation on the human being, drawn from an intimate engagement with the sitter. Freud's unsparing eye maps his subjects, sustaining single handed an almost unique commitmnt to the ambitions of high art, grounded in classical canons of Western tradition. The study includes a review by Marina Vaizey of Freud's drawings, prints and oil studies, exhibited at Blain|Southern Gallery, Hay Hill.Marina Vaizey is an art critic, lecturer and traveller; her books include The Artist as Photographer, 100 Masterpieces of Art; Great Women Collectors. She was the art critic for the Financial Times for four years, and The Sunday Times for eighteen. She has curated several exhibitions and written manycatalogues. She has been a Trustee for several national museums.

The survey began in April 1988 as interviews with artists, jewellers, fashion designers and furniture restorers, based at Old Loom House in Whitechapel, launching a quarterly review Cv Journal of Art and Crafts. Cv Journal was published to 1992 and the collection of interviews and features provided the foundation of Cv/Visual Arts Research archive and subsequent publications. Cv/VAR 154 publishes a study of Photography and Art in which authors Marina Vaizey and Anne Blood consider the historical impact of photography from pioneers Hill and Adamson, William Fox Talbot and Louis Daguerre to contemporary practitioners such as Andreas Gursky and Boris Mikhailov. The documentary power and graphic clarity of the medium challenged and persuaded artists such as Degas, Sickert, Andy Warhol and Richard Hamilton, and innumerable creative voices. In their essays Marina and Anne explore the conjunctions and variations where document and dream intermingle, in a revolutionary medium which transformed the classical canons of Western tradition. The volume includes biographical details of leading figures and a guide to National Collections and study centres. of the spectacle of battle and the horrors of war and human conflict.

Cv/VAR archive includes analytic essays on examples of Western art including: The Trinity by Masaccio at Santa Maria Novella, Florence, Vermeer's The Maidservant and Woman with a Balance; Velázquez court portraits, Cézanne, Salvador Dalí, Francis Bacon, Anthony Caro and Alison Wilding, Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol, with reviews of exhibitions in public and private galleries. The collection of over seventy pieces reveals strands that bind the continuum of classic and contemporary art. Cv/VAR 147 publishes an essay by Marina Vaizey 'which explores the work of artist Tracey Emin, exhibited at the Turner Contemporary Gallery Margate. May to September 2012. She considers her drawings, embroidery, prints and ne-ons, and the intricate correspondence of her art and life.