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. 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 mare both disturbing and consoling.Marina Vaizey
