Marina Vaizey

Renowned artist Lucian Freud (1922-2011) is commemorated in an exhibition of fifty portraits spanning his working life, held at "The National Portrait Gallery London" from February to May 2012. The review explores the development of his art from the potent and hyper-sensed 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 commitment to the ambitions of high art, grounded in the canons of classic Western tradition. The monograph also includes a review of Freud's figure drawings, exhibited at Blain|Southern Gallery.

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 the Cv/Visual Arts Research archive and subsequent publications. Cv/VAR series 146 reviews the work of Damien Hirst (b.Bristol 1965) presented in a retrospective exhibition spanning twenty years, held at Tate Modern, April to September 2012. It explores the development of his art from the controversial animal vitrines and beautiful butterfly composites to an extensive series of spot paintings, where the artist engaged in a complex invigilation of coded systems that govern daily existence. With contributions by Marina Vaizey and James Cahill, it encounters a rarely exhibited work One Thousand Years, Mother and Child, Crematorium, Pharmacy and For The Love of God, the diamond studded skull.

The collection of essays and reviews published between 1990 and 2020 celebrates the life work of Britain's pre-eminent artist David Hockney (born Bradford 1937). The compendium ranges from a study of his printmaking by author Marina Vaizey, first published in the quarterly review, Cv Journal of Art and Crafts 3/2 June 1990, to a major exhibition 'A Bigger Picture' on the theme of the East Yorkshire Landscape staged at the Royal Academy in 2012. Renowned author, poet and art historian Edward Lucie-Smith considers the artist's presentation of 'Eighty Two portraits and One Still Life', exhibited at the Royal Academ in 2016, while Cv editor Nicholas James reviews 'Drawn From Life', a survey Hockney drawings exhibited at at the National Portrait Gallery London 2020.

Cv/VAR series 104 Reviews 'David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture', exhibited at the Royal Academy from January to April 2012. The project of creating monumental landscape paintings was based on a small area near the artist's home at Bridlington in East Yorkshire. Works developed with time-framed films, photographs, iPad studies, drawings, sketchbooks, oils and watercolours; recording particular motifs and places in the changing seasons. Studies were enlarged on joined canvases in compositions up to 30' wide, designed to immerse the viewer in an intense experience of the landscape.

Renowned artist Lucian Freud (1922-2011) is commemorated in an exhibition of fifty portraits spanning his working life, held at The National Portrait Gallery London from February to May 2012. The review explores the development of his art from the potent and hyper-sensed 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 commitment to the ambitions of high art, grounded in the canons of classic Western tradition.The monograph also includes a review of Freud's figure drawings, exhibited at BlainSouthern Gallery.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 many catalogues. She has been a Trustee for several national museums. Nicholas James studied painting with Frank Auerbach and Keith Vaughan at the Slade School UCL. He formed Cv Publications in 1992 and Cv/Visual Arts Research in 1995.

The photographers discussed in depth in this essay have all engaged with the everyday or the quotidian, yet they are a small sampling of the numerous photographers who have engaged with this subject. Work by Dorothea Lange, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, Ed Ruscha, Thomas Struth, Nan Goldin or Wolfgang Tillmans, to name a few, could have easily been included. Any history of photography is also a history of photographic technology, but it also a history of photography's distribution - where it was reproduced and how it was used. This history involves the rise (and fall) of picture magazines, such as Life, and the entrance of photography into the art museum and the art market. Even within the art world itself there is an interesting history of the use and influence of photographs (and photographers), such as the celebration of Eug ne Atget's work by the Surrealists or the adoption of Bernd and Hilla Becher by conceptual artists in the 1870s. Anne Blood

Explores the structure and development of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in the mid 19th century; and works which figure amongst the most enduring and generally popular in British art. Renowned writer and art critic Edward Lucie-Smith contributes a study of the brotherhood of seven artists, their inter-connection and intricate links with the social establishment of the time. James Cahill has a special interest in the movement, having studied Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Holman Hunt. He reviews a major exhibition of 150 works at Tate Britain launched in September 2012. 'I think what I want to do is to follow a trail that leads, through many twists and turns, from the religious revival of the early 19th century to Blue Period Picasso, then to Surrealism. It may take in the Children of the Raj and the discovery of Japan along the way. It leads from rather rigid moralism, to conscious immoralism, and then at last to Freud/Dali.' Edward Lucie-Smith 05/2012 Includes an essay by Marina Vaizey on the work of Julia Margaret Cameron and related Pre-Raphaelite photographers of her time and a review of the exhibition Pre-Rapgaelite Sisters staged at the National Portrait Gallery London.

Considers an exhibition at Tate Modern, June to October, of the great Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944), exploring his paintings and graphic work, with their relation to examples of his photography. Munch is distinguished by a highly original sensibility, characterised in nerve-edged works that probe the undercurrents of intimacy, sickness, isolation, loss and death; identifying themes that preoccupied the central European movement of Expressionism through the Great War into the 1930s. Munch can now be seen as a primary source of a profound psychodrama, played out through the 20th century and beyond.

London has been having symbolically enough in 2014 a sustained examination of not only art historically northern Europe in general with the National Gallery having looked at the northern renaissance but perhaps far more pertinently contemporary German art of the post war period, enhanced by an original examination of German history at the British Museum. The medium of painting is the prism, with significant showings of Anselm Kiefer, a West German b 1945, and Gerhard Richter b 1932, and Sigmar Polke, 1941-2010, both originally East Germans, who once showed together, and with others invented in the 1960s a brief anarchic movement called capitalist realism. They both studied too at the legendary Dusseldorf Kunstakademie. All of these three titans, their work now in the commercial stratosphere, have engaged profoundly with Germany's past, but Janus like in order to look forward also to a future. Marina Vaizey

Marina Vaizey amd Anne Blood consider the historical impact of photography on the fine and interpretive arts; from pioneers such as Hill and Adamson, Fox Talbot and Louis Daguerre to Edward Steichen, Eadweard Muybridge and Man Ray.

"Cv/VAR 147" publishes an essay by Marina Vaizey which explores the work of artist Tracey Emin, exhibited at the Turner Contemporary Gallery Margate, from May to September 2012. She considers her drawings, embroidery, prints and neons, manifesting the intricate correspondence of her art and life.

Cv/VAR 104 reviews 'David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture', exhibited at The Royal Academy January to April 2012. The project of creating monumental landscape paintings was based on a small area near the artist's home at Bridlington in East Yorkshire. The project developed with time-framed films, i-pad works, drawings, sketchbooks, oils and watercolours. recording particular motifs and places in the changing seasons. Studies were enlarged on joined canvases in compositions up to 32' wide, designed to immerse the viewer in an intense experience of the landscape. The monograph reviews the exhibition and recent books and catalogues on the artist.