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The word avant-garde, so much used in connection with the various manifestations of contemporary art, is starting to have a strange, ironic ring to it. One might even claim that it is starting to signify what is behind the times, rather than in front of them. Like all such terms, it is in fact a metaphor, rather than a direct description. Borrowed from old-fashioned military terminology, it seeks to describe a situation where social norms are being perpetually challenged by artists. In the military sphere, where it originated, it is long out of use.

This essay takes as its focus two paintings by Johannes Vermeer (1632-75): The Milkmaid c.1661-62 and Woman Holding a Balance c.1662-65, and considers critical approaches to the artist by four historians, Edward A. Snow, Lawrence Gowing, John Michael Montias, and Martin Pops. Its aim is not solely to describe Vermeer's art, but by a process of comparative analysis to discern the various standpoints of his biographers, and to clarify their methodologies in research.

The exhibition attempts a revaluation of the pre-Raphaelite movement of the mid 19th century, as Dr Marsh indicates it is not about gender competition. Rather, it's about rebalancing the contribution of partners, models, and studio managers. It is also about creative discourse and the other significant roles undertaken by women associated with individual artists.

Explores the structure and development of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in the mid-19th century and works that figure among the most enduring and generally popular in British art. Renowned writer and art critic Edward Lucie-Smith contributes a study of the brotherhood of seven artists and their interconnection and intricate links with the social establishment of the time. James Cahill has a special interest in the movement, having studied Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Holman Hunt. He reviews a major exhibition of 150 works at Tate Britain launched in September 2012.

Ben Luke, resident art critic of the London Evening Standard, calls Ai Weiwei "probably the most famous artist in the world. He has transcended the world of museums and galleries, and exerts a newsworthiness that no other artist competes with." This statement, if one bothers to look through the kind of publicity that Ai now attracts - thanks to the digital revolution most of this is easily available with a few clicks on one’s computer - is self-evidently true.

Yayoi Kusama is now one of Japan’s best-known contemporary artists. She was the recipient of her country’s Praemium Imperiale for painting in 2006 - the most prestigious award Japan can offer to any painter, native or foreign. Her rise to fame has been unconventional, even by the standards of the art world of the 21st century, where eccentricities of all kinds pass without question.

Andrea Palladio is the most influential architect who ever lived - much more so than those heroes of the Modern Movement - Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. It is significant that buildings we call "Palladian" are still being built today - for example, by the British architect Quinlan Terry. Palladio’s ideas were disseminated not only by his buildings, but also, even more effectively, by his writings, most notably by his didactic masterpiece, I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura (The Four Books of Architecture), published in 1570.

A review of the retrospective exhibition of sculptor Sir Antony Gormley OBE held at the Royal Academy London. Encounters varied works from studies and notebooks to gigantic installations.

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.

A commentary on the Pierre Bonnard exhibition recorded at the press view on Monday January 21, 2018. Views figure studies and landscapes made between 1900 and 1940 and responds to the conception of the compositions with their radiant color fields.

A study of Giacometti portraits at the National Portrait Gallery London and Frank Auerbach at Tate Britain.

Hammershoi is, in a certain sense, the Danish Vermeer, an artist whom he occasionally paraphrased. That is to say, a quietist painter obsessed by subtle effects of light, forgotten very soon after his death, but rediscovered and turned into a demi-god by a later generation.

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.

An interview with the author J. P. Donleavy, recorded in 1989 on the occasion of his exhibition at Anna-Mei Chadwick Gallery, Chelsea. He describes his formative experience of Dublin, with exhibitions there in 1948, '50, and '51, the catalogue manifestos, for these were his first published writings, leading to work on his first renowned novel, The Ginger Man.

A visit to the Palace of Knossos in Crete in 2005 leads to the story of the fabled Ring of Minos, lost for 2,000 years but rediscovered in the 1930s, now in the local museum of Herakleon. The author joins the tour of the ancient Minoan palace and adds historical reference to this detailed study of a great and vanished culture.

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.

>This study explores the work of Britain's foremost national landscape painter John Constable (1776-1837). Based on her view of the Constable exhibition at Tate Britain 2006, author Janet Barber considers the development of the artist, placing his works in context of the cultural conditions of his time, and noting contemporary reactions to his public exhibitions at the Royal Academy; efforts which often met with a profound distaste for their powerfully expressive naturalism.

A study of a later period album of drawings on the theme of old women and nightmares by Francisco Goya exhibited at the Courtauld Gallery London, with reference to his supernatural "Black Paintings".

Published as a Cv audiobook, Cv/VAR series 94 reviews "'Beyond Belief", a major exhibition at White Cube of the prominent British artist Damien Hirst (born 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" and views "For the Love of God", the iconic GBP50 million diamond skull.

As a working critic, I find the most difficult exhibitions to write about are those that combine an evidently important subject with a faintly dispiriting result. The new Edvard Munch show at Tate Modern is a case in point. Munch is undoubtedly a major Modernist artist, a Norwegian cultural icon who was the precursor and to some extent the inventor of what came to be known as Expressionism. One version of his composition, The Scream, very recently made a record price.