Showing results by author "Marina Vaizey" in All Categories

Francesca Woodman killed herself at the age of 22, the biographical fact that colors her work and which it is de riguer to mention. She left behind paintings it is said, as yet publicly unseen, and literally hundreds upon hundreds of negatives and 800 proofs of black and white pre-digital photography.

An in-depth study by Marina Vaizey explores the lives and art of David Hockney and Vanessa Bell, drawing on exhibitions at the Tate and Dulwich Picture Gallery.

In a 1968 photograph a US Marine pauses for thought, inadvertently echoing those renaissance paintings of meditating scholars, holding his helmet rather than a book - but this is a quiet moment in the battle for Hue. It is McCullin's photographs which helped to define the savage war in Vietnam for Britain, and beyond. Some is unbearably sad: a young North Vietnamese soldier, a casualty of Hue, stares sightlessly at the photographer, his hands outstretched to the detritus of his pockets, scattered on the earth beside the body.

Alice Liddell, sweetly dignified, the inspiration for the heroine of Alice in Wonderland, is posed and identified as Pomona, goddess of abundance, in a marvelous 1872 photograph by the irrepressible Julia Margaret Cameron; appropriately she is the cover girl for this lavish standalone publication, which also acted as the catalogue accompanying the recent exhibition of the same title at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, (October 31 2010-January 30 2011), and the Museé d'Orsay Paris, March 6 - May 29, 2011).

A study of three leading German artists presently exhibited in London at Tate Modern, the British Museum and the Royal Academy. In 2014, a resonant series of anniversaries and commemorations prompted an enhanced awareness in London of the history of the Teutonic world in general, and - specifically - a sense of post-war Germany in terms of three of its most symbolic and emblematic visual artists.

Renowned artist Lucian Freud (1922-2011) was commemorated in an exhibition of 50 portraits spanning his working life, held at The National Portrait Gallery London from February to May 2012. The review explored the development of his art from the potent and hypersensed 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.

Marina Vaizey reviews the work of Julia Margaret Cameron, Victorian photographer, exhibited at the Victoria and Albert, and Science Museum London.

A collection of reviews and studies of photographers published since 2001. Includes David Bailey, Horst, Cecil Beaton, Don McCullin, Lee Miller, Francesca Woofman, E.O.Hoppe, and others.

Author, critic, and traveler, Marina Vaizey reflects on her experiences of the international art world, in a career spanning six decades, including eighteen years as the chief art critic at the Sunday Times. I can offer a lecture, very short, on the art world post war until now. Here it is. More. More artists, more money, more collectors, more collections, more scholarship, more publications, more museums, more galleries, more countries involved publicly world wide: Just - for good and ill - more.

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 watercolors, recording particular motifs and places in the changing seasons.

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. The volume includes biographical details of leading figures and a guide to national collections and study centres.

Author, critic and traveler, Marina Vaizey, in her third lockdown essay, reflects on the books of figures in the changing façade of English society and the establishment. Missing people, even with telephones and emails. And music and theatre even with the incredibly generous digital provision.

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.

Both men and women enjoy thrillers, mystery, and crime. Yet it may still feel not quite respectable, somehow a guilty (sorry!) pleasure. Do these novels so often categorized as genre offer something the literary novel does not? The market is enormous, perhaps the largest in publishing. It is a cliché which may be true that only the Bible – say - outsells Agatha Christie. And then there are films and television, either original or adapted from novels.

The reputation of Cecil Beaton hardly rests on the fact that he was the most prolific and productive of official war photographers both on the home front and abroad during World War II; rather, he is thought of as a royal-society- and celebrity-portrait photographer, designer for stage and film - recipient of three Oscars and a Tony - prolific author, and gossipy and fascinating diarist.

This study explores the work of celebrated artist Tracey Emin, exhibited at Turner Contemporary in Margate Kent. It reviews the figurative studies and neon calligraphic scultpures.

EM Forster's famous dictum "Only connect!" is often quoted out of context but it is a resoundingly emotive phrase which might also be taken as the motto for the first major excursion by the National Gallery, London, into the history, portent and meaning of photography as a medium. Before Seduced by Art: Photography Past and Present, the National Gallery has only exhibited the work of a contemporary photographer on one occasion.

Linnaeus Tripe? Shades of a minor character in Dickens or Trollope, but in fact the resoundingly named Tripe (1822-1902), army officer and photographer, was the sixth son and ninth child of a professional middle-class family from Devonport, his father a surgeon in the Royal Navy. He joined, as so many of his background did - younger son, but of a certain social status - the East India Company's army (the 12th Madras Native Infantry) aged only 17, the third Tripe son to do so.

This ample exhibition - 150 or so photographs, and a small complementary display of well chosen magazines, showing a succinct number in published form - by Man Ray (1890-1976) is described as the first to concentrate exclusively on his portraits. He was born in Philadelphia as Michael Emmanuel Radnitzky, the eldest child of Russian Jewish immigrants (the father's classic occupation for someone of his ethnicity and class that of a tailor); the family moved to Brooklyn in 1897, the first of Man Ray's advantageous geographical relocations.

The dazzling exhibition of Horst at the Victoria and Albert is particularly apt: classically trained in avant garde design and architecture, Horst was involved as a precociously successful photographer for Condé Nast publications, not only with the leading fashion houses, but the social and artistic élite. And he took sustained inspiration from the isms of art - past and present. In the thirties he photographed costumes by Dali and used props from Giacometti furniture. Dali designed a set for a photograph for Horst to take for American Vogue, with dresses by Hattie Carnegie.