Marina Vaizey has 6 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 4 narrators. The most-rated is Photography and Art: Documents and Dreams.
Doubles 1: Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch
Summary
Cover: Vincent van Gogh Self-Portrait Saint-Rémy, autumn 1889 Oil paint on canvas 578 x 445 mm National Gallery of Art, Washington, Collection of Mr and Mrs John Hay Whitney 1998.74.5. Edvard Munch (1863-1944). Self-Portrait, 1895. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Doubles 1: Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch by Marina Vaizey. Introduction 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. The artist as recorder 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 are both disturbing and consoling. There is a particular kind of painter who is indeed only interested in appearance of what he or she is looking at, and that appearance might be anything. And there are others who acknowledge the importance of appearance and also go beyond. Titian, Rembrandt, Velazquez, El Greco, Holbein, Van Dyck, Goya, Cézanne, Dégas, Edvard Munch, Vincent van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse, Francis Bacon, Lucian, Freud, Gerhard, Richter, are just a handful of the masters of the portrait and the self-portrait. A significant majority of the artists considered the greatest in the Western canon devoted much even at times the majority, of their work to the portrait. There are even some mythical figures in the painted world that produced, it seems, hardly anything but portraits, mysteries with humans at the centre. The tiny output of Vermeer is a case in point and paint: Almost no interior without a single person or a couple.
©2020 Cv Publications (P)2020 Cv Publications
Genre: A Personal View
Summary
Author, critic, and traveller Marina Vaizey in her second Lockdown Essay writes about her favourite story material: crime and pulp fiction. Murder! Violence! Terror! Mayhem! Chaos! Destruction! And even quotidian life. In ordinary guises. John D MacDonald, Daniel Silva, Robert B Parker, David Baldacci, James Sallis, Attica Locke, Don Winslow, Robert Crais, John Sandford, C J Box, Walter Mosley, Barry Eisler, why are these and scores of others the authors to whom I turn, my comfort stories, as they are for millions? How can it be comforting to be told about the many ways in which people meet death in dreadful ways and about the horrible ways in which people treat each other, and to be shown the myriad motives, from greed – personal and corporate – lust for power, distorted politics, sadistic impulses, and the like? Yes it is all fictional and evil doers often meet their justified ends. For many of the flawed characters who feature so large there are various forms of redemption. Moreover there are enough echoes of the real world for us to suspend disbelief. 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.
©2019 Cv Publications (P)2020 Cv Publications
The Art World: A Personal Essay That Reaches No Conclusions
Summary
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. The expansion of museums and galleries is almost overwhelming. Just a few at random: The Pompidou in Paris, 1977; the Louvre almost doubled its public spaces with a huge reclamation of existing spaces within the palace; and its branches, eg the Louvre-Lens; Tate Modern (2000) which nearly doubled with the Blavatnik building, Tate Britain with the Clore; V & A Dundee, and the V &A East project; the Getty in Los Angeles, the Guggenheim in New York (1959) and in Bilbao (19970). The new museums throughout the Emirates, the new museum of modern art in Capetown, the Zeitz MOCAA, 2017; throughout West Germany enormous new collections have been made post war (for interesting psychological reasons) and often with museums to match, the Ludwig say in Cologne, and David Chipperfield’s masterly rejuvenation of the Neues Museum on Museum Island (2009) with the adjacent James-Simon-Galerie (2019). The last is typical too of what museums now offer, for the newest addition houses amenities such as the café and the shop rather than art galleries. Austria has its modern museum island in Vienna, based on the Ludwig collections, and almost any established museum has expanded and refurbished: the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge, the Ashmolean in Oxford. This is just a tiny glimpses; every city world wide has been at it, not to mention finding musuems and galleries in the most remote locations. The list is endless, and the roles of museums, not to mention art and artists, continually evolving MV London August 2020
©2020 Cv Publications (P)2020 Cv Publications
Painted Lives
Summary
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.
©2017 Cv Publications (P)2017 Cv Publications
The Lives of Others
Summary
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. Digital just proves, too, that at least for us oldies, the live event trumps all. Even the best CDs are tinny to my ear (which is not a great ear) compared to even - well, perhaps, not quite the worst - bad live performances. And the cat pursues his independence. He disdains any other creature’s neediness and spurs the notion of any togetherness. It is reading - not domesticities or doing all the sorting and tidying that I have promised myself for so long, or fulfilling commissions to write - but reading that rescues the hours and days. Home with piles of books and what to read? Oddly, I discover looking at several thousand exhibition catalogues and monographs that art, although I have spent my life looking at what is portentously but I think accurately called material culture, does not save the world, however it may express the world. So what books from the piles on the floor and the tables and the serried rows on the shelves have almost accidentally proved the most totally absorbing? Books I never thought I would read, and if so, enjoy, but are somehow here, acquired for reasons long lost in the mist of the past.
©2020 CV Publications (P)2020 CV Publications
Photography and Art: Documents and Dreams
Summary
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. Cv acknowledges with gratitude the assistance of Collections and Archives at the National Portrait Gallery, London; the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate Images, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Fraenkel Gallery, The Estate of Garry Winogrand and Scala Group, Florence, in the process of research for the publication. The authors: Photography and Art 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 18. She has curated exhibitions and written many catalogues. She has been a trustee for several national museums. Anne Blood gained a Master of Art History (MA) at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. She was the Assistant Editor at The Burlington Magazine and is now editor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York.
©2020 Cv Publications (P)2021 Cv Publications