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 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...

A review of Lucian Freud Portraits exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery London from February to May 2012.It considers some fifty portraits covering the span of the artist's working life, their qualities of personal perception and as works of art within the canons of Western classical tradition.

Despite his short span of activity, from 1423 to 1428, Masaccio can be posited as the signifier of a radical break with the period of Italian painting known as the Trecento, and, alone among his contemporaries, in his use of dramatic realism points the way to the spectacular creations of the High Renaissance, in which artists such as Michelangelo, Raphael and Palladio, achieved a fusion of classic and humanist ideals in painting, sculpture and architecture.

This essay explores the development of Salvador Dali, from the early phases of childhood, the bizarre and complex aims of his first experiments, to his absorption into high society of Paris in the 1930s, and his inclusion in the Surrealist movement from 1928 to 1939. The essay focuses on the makeup of a provocative and original personality acutely reflexive, intelligent and pathologically driven. As a creative signifier of considerable and generative impact, Dali can be identified as a unique sounding board for his own and succeeding times.

Published as a Cv digital file, "Cv/VAR series 94" reviews 'Beyond Belief', a major exhibition at White Cube of the prominent British artist Damien Hirst (b 1965, Bristol UK, upbringing in Leeds Yorkshire). The author experiences the Biopsy and Fact paintings, votive pieces and installations including the imposing "Saint Sebastian, Exquisite Pain" 2007; and, views "For The Love Of God", the iconic GBP50 million diamond skull.

Continuing Cv/VAR's series of 'digital files', slimline monographs of individual artists; Cv/VAR 101 documents a commissioned sculpture by Anish Kapoor for the Monumenta series at Grand Palais, Paris. An initial presentation by the artist at his London studio in March,with curators Jean de Loisy and Mark Sanchez, describes the project, with reference to scale models, plus a discussion of the 'Orbit Tower' in process for the 2012 Olympics. Visits 'Leviathan' installed at the Grand Palais in May.

The survey began in April 1988 as interviews with artists,jewellers, fashion designers and furniture restorers, based at Old Loom House Studios, Whitechapel, launching a quarterly review Cv Journal of Art and Crafts. Cv Journal was published to 1992 and the collection of interviews, features and reviews provided the basis of the Cv/Visual Arts Research archive and subsequent publications. The archive is published as books and digital files, as well as CDs and DVDs in Cv's software catalogue. Cv/VAR series number 101, Small Histories is a collection of essays and reviews by Nicholas James...

This book reviews Andy Warhol: a celebration of life..and death at The National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. This book provides comprehensive exploration of phases of art from magazine illustrations 1950s to screen tests at The Factory 1964-5, '60s portraits, Brillo Boxes and Heinz replica stock cartons, the Disaster Paintings, with special installations at the gallery: "Cow Wallpaper-War" series, Paintings for Children, with historical detail and assessments.

Formed in 1995 Cv/Visual Arts Research is a documentary resource of developments in contemporary art. The survey began in April 1988, and was first published as the quarterly review "Cv Journal of Art and Crafts" (later "Cv Journal of the Arts"). Cv was produced until 1992 and the collection of interviews, features and reviews provided the foundation of the Cv/VAR archive and subsequent publications. Following Cv Journal the data-base shifted towards electronic publishing, allowing a greater flexibility of communication. "Cv/VAR" addresses the fields of academic research, galleries and...