Showing results by author "Marina Vaizey" in All Categories

Several hundred photographs of varying scales, and most of them newly printed gelatin silver prints, in superb tones of greys, blacks, and whites, take us into a world that has been subliminally familiar to us for nearly 50 years. Stardust is the title given to this self-selected retrospective, three years in the making, the photographer his own curator, and the word neatly encapsulates the fascinating conundrum of photography itself. As Bailey himself puts it, "It's not the camera that takes the picture, it's the person," and these photographs are as much about Bailey as his subject.

Once upon a time in Düsseldorf, in the 1970s, there was an astonishing art academy, the Kunstakademie, with amazing teachers, and amazing students. Düsseldorf was a very proud art city, and even published at the time, a book of photographs called Düsseldorf City of Artists. The presence of that great, messianic leader, Joseph Beuys loomed large. Gerhard Richter, (and Gotthard Graubner among others), taught painting, and an outstanding couple, Bernd and Hilla Becher, taught photography.

Marina Vaizey and 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 and Man Ray. The documentary power and graphic clarity of the medium challenged and persuaded artists such as Degas, Sickert, Warhol, and innumerable creative voices. In their essays Marina and Anne explore the conjunctions and variations where document and dream intermingle.

The work of the photographer, theatrical designer, narcissist, snob, careerist, and exceptionally talented Cecil Beaton (1904-1980), including 18,000 vintage prints, negatives and transparencies, contact sheets and 45 books of cuttings are at the Victoria & Albert Museum. They have all been brilliantly culled for the alluring and significant exhibition of some of Beaton's royal portraits, billed as A Diamond Jubilee Celebration.

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.

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.

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.

It is an enthralling and unexpected selection, and the anthology resonates beyond this showing. It is from the Eric and Louise Franck collection, which has been donated to the Tate, and is part of the process by which the gallery has very belatedly, but with almost overwhelming enthusiasm, entered into collecting and showing photography as a medium in in its own right, with a very active patrons group supporting acquisitions. One of the benefits of Tate joining the fray is evident in the installation of this show.

Country House Collection documents the development of stately homes in England with a trajectory from Medieval times to a burgeoning of the neo-classical style of building in the early to mid 18th-century. The grand houses that appeared in rural locations manifested statements of a ruling class composed of self-made landowners, merchants and families of historic lineage and title.