Catherine the Great of Russia acquired art voraciously. Cosmetics magnate Helena Rubenstein collected African and contemporary art, miniature furniture, and Victorian glass. Coco Chanel amassed all enormous hoard of French 18th-century furniture. This fresh and fascinating volume is the first to look at women who, from 1750 to the present, have assembled significant collections of art, ceramics, jewelry, glass, furniture, textiles, and other objects.

The kinds of collections these empresses, queens, socialites, actresses, and entrepreneurs assembled often differed tangibly from those of their male counterparts. The authors show how and why -- and explore the obstacles the women overcame to create such important collections, many of which can be seen today in major museums. This illustrated volume is an original contribution both to the study of collecting and to women's studies.

Cv/VAR 146 reviews the work of Damien Hirst (b. Bristol 1965) presented in a retrospective exhibition spanning twenty years 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. It encounters a rarely exhibited work One Thousand Years 1991, Pharmacy and For The Love of God, the celebrated diamond studded skull.

'It is not a history of photography ---but we are going to try and define the photographers whose work has migrated beyond magazines, newspapers, publication into the great museum collections.' Marina Vaizey 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, in a revolutionary medium which transformed the classical canons of Western tradition.

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

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.

A collection of essays, articles and reviews of photography by Marina Vaizey published in the past decade.Photography is the one art form in which we all participate.We all take photographs, are photographed, and look at photographs. A striking phenomenon of the post war period, the last half century or so, has been the proliferation of collections of photography in museums and galleries of all kinds, the integration of photography with the other fine arts, and the complementary increase of scholarship, publications and the attention of universities. Thus the expansion of photography in the visual universe has been both commercial, critical There have been auction prices for individual prints that have reached millions of dollars, and increasing attention not only to all of the categories of photography from documentation and reportage to what we might call art in all its guises. In Britain for example the variety of approaches is clear in the great national collections. The Victoria and Albert museum collected photography as part of its documentation of art, architecture and fashion, but also formed the first national collection of photography for its aesthetic values.The Science Museum, London's National Portrait Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery of Scotland, the National Monuments Record are other great collections. It is however only in the past ten years that Tate has established posts for dedicated curators in the field. The Museum of Modern Art in New York established in 1929, started to collect modern photography in 1930 and established its department in 1940. Both the Centre Pompidou and the Musee d'Orsay in Paris collect, curate and exhibit photography as a core part of their activity. So the histories are various.What is clear however is that both historic and contemporary photography, however the ramifications of the digital age we now inhabit, is of inescapable importance in how we view and understand the world around us. And that this significance is now universally recognised. MV

Reviews 'David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture', exhibited at The Royal Academy. 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, i-pad 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 32' wide, designed to immerse the viewer in an intense experience of the landscape. The monograph includes exhibition reviews by James Cahill and Michael Lovell Pank + reviews of recent catalogues and books on the artist by Marco Livingstone, Martin Gayford and Christopher Simon Sykes, by Marina Vaizey.

"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.

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.

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.