Inhaltsverzeichnis für October 2025 in Apollo

In mid September, I attended ‘Colour and line: Watteau drawings’ in its final days at the British Museum. It was a happy reminder of the many narratives that are contained within the BM. Any encounter with Watteau (1684–1721) naturally contains ambiguities. On display in the exhibition was a drawing of a Savoyarde (a woman from Savoy) in Paris. At the time the drawing was made she was a poor immigrant, to one independent state from another. Today, the historical Savoy region is split between France and Italy. It was a reminder that even to state Watteau’s nationality is ambiguous. He is technically a French artist, but his native city, Valenciennes, was part of the Habsburg Netherlands until seven years before his birth. And it is, perhaps, Watteau’s Netherlandish inheritance that…

Venturing south-west out of the centre of Bordeaux towards the quiet suburb of Talence, one can easily miss the 20 hectares that make up the exquisite Château La Mission Haut-Brion, with its walled rose gardens, calm ponds and manicured lawns. It is not just the chateau’s diminutive size that makes it inconspicuous: its neighbour, Château Haut-Brion, rated Premier Grand Cru Classé, has historically attracted more attention, even if the plots are separated only by a regional road. The classic Bordelais composition of its parcels (48 per cent Cabernet Sauvignon, 45 per cent Merlot, 7 per cent Cabernet Franc) benefits from the same gravelly soil – hallmark of the Graves appellation. In certain vintages La Mission has rivalled its First Growth neighbour in demand. Prince Robert of Luxembourg, president of Domaine…

William Hogarth always had an eye for an opportunity. Fresh from the success of A Rake’s Progress (1732–34), published in engraved form in 1735, he seemed poised to launch into his newly invented genre, the ‘Modern Moral Subject’. But in nearby Smithfield, his local hospital was just emerging from scaffolding. Founded in the 12th century and strategically ‘refounded’ by Henry VIII, St Bartholomew’s Hospital was just metres from the dark timber dwelling where Hogarth had been born; from 1729, it was being rebuilt to designs by James Gibbs. His local pride piqued and ‘without’, as he wrote later, ‘having a stroke of this grand business before’, Hogarth offered the governors a gift: he would cover the stairwell of the new administrative block with two monumental religious paintings: Christ at the…

Giovanni Antonio Canal’s paintings are immediately recognisable but rarely set pulses racing. That changed this summer, when a ‘Canaletto’ from the 1730s, Venice, the Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day, sold at Christie’s London for a record £31.9m. It once belonged to Robert Walpole and hung in 10 Downing Street, and later Houghton Hall. One art advisor at the auction said it was ‘the perfect picture’ and added, ‘it shows that even when sentiment is down, if you bring a ten-out-often picture, the market will respond’. But unusually for an Old Master, it had a diamond symbol on its online listing – indicating that the work carried a third-party guarantee. Sometimes called an irrevocable bid, a guarantee means that someone – either a third-party buyer or the auction house…

It’s 8.30 in the morning in the Valley of the Kings and, along with the temperature, anticipation is rising among our small group of journalists. We are at the entrance to one of the 62 confirmed royal tombs in these arid hills on the west side of the Nile, the necropolis of ancient Thebes. Since the 19th century the tombs have been numbered in order of their (re)discovery – ‘KV62’, the burial place of Tutankhamun, being the last to be uncovered, in 1922. This one, ‘KV57’, unearthed in 1908 by Edward Ayrton, was made for the pharaoh Horemheb (reigned c. 1319–1292 BC), who had been the boy king’s general. Only a handful of these tombs are open to the public at any one time; Horemheb’s has long been closed for…

On the morning of 27 September 1979, a group of non-professional, mostly self-taught Chinese artists set up an exhibition outside the National Art Museum of China in Beijing. Oil paintings, ink paintings, woodcuts and wood carvings were hung on fences and in trees. Huang Rui, Ma Desheng, Li Shuang, Bo Yun, Wang Keping, Yan Li, Yang Yiping and Ai Weiwei were among the 23 artists of what became known as the Stars Art Group or Xing Xing. It was closed by the authorities after three days but, following a large protest, reopened in November for another 10 days. This was a significant moment for Chinese contemporary art – the birth of an avant-garde after Mao’s death and in the dawn of Deng Xiaoping’s era of ‘reform and opening up’. In…

Stan Douglas: Ghostlight Until 30 November Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson In Der Sandmann (1995) by Stan Douglas, two 16mm projectors display a pair of looping, overlapping scenes: a Schrebergärten (allotment) in Potsdam, seen both at its fertile peak and as a despoiled, defoliated wasteland. As the cameras pan circles around the artist’s studio, the public garden, once a source of fresh food for working people in the GDR, transforms into private property and then back to common land, as a Black German man named Nathanael relates a story from his childhood about a strange gardener. Like the two panning feeds, his narration both does and does not line up with the story by E.T.A. Hoffmann that gives the piece its name. It generates an effect of convergence and…

Josefa de Óbidos Carmen Ripollés The first surprise provided by Carmen Ripollés’s new monograph is that the painter Josefa de Óbidos was born not in the Portuguese town after which she is named, or anywhere else in Portugal for that matter, but in the Spanish city of Seville. In 1630, the year of her birth, Portugal barely existed. Since 1580, the country had been ruled by the kings of Spain and much of its talent – including Josefa’s father, the artist Baltazar Gomes Figueira – had drifted across the Guadiana River in the hope of betterment in the trading termini of Andalusia. In Spain, Baltazar helped beat off an English raiding party, hung out with Francisco de Zurbarán and eventually made enough of a reputation for himself as a painter of…

Art Basel Paris has been in a process of reinvention. The fair began in 2022 with a hastily organised event as Paris+ par Art Basel and held its first two editions in the Grand Palais Éphémère, a temporary space used while the Grand Palais itself was being prepared to host the Olympics. Last year’s fair was the first to take place in the Grand Palais and this year’s will do so too, even though renovations are not fully complete. More change is on the way: the fair’s director since 2022, Clément Delépine, recently announced that he is leaving the role after this year’s edition. ‘It’s been a ride,’ he tells me when we speak in late August, but ‘this is as close as it gets for a normal edition for…

Unassuming in appearance and mild in flavour, the potato is taken for granted as a humble, everyday foodstuff. In fact, this modest-looking tuber has a remarkable history. Its origins are in South America, where it was a staple food for Andean communities. The potato was introduced from Latin America to Europe as part of the ‘Columbian Exchange’ – the transfer of plants – including tomatoes, maize and chillies – as well as animals and diseases, that followed Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the Americas in 1492. Today, the potato is the world’s fourth most cultivated food crop, after the three great grains, rice, wheat and maize. Hardy, easy to grow and a good source of energy, the potato plant was cultivated by rural communities throughout Europe. European statesmen and rulers, seeking…

When the Princeton University Art Museum reopens at the end of the month at the heart of a historic campus older than the United States, it will have been five years in the making and even longer in the planning. Its new home, a 13,500-square-metre modernist statement piece designed by Adjaye Associates, unites a collection that spans world cultures and time periods, defined by the interests of generations of alumni and an acquisitions budget beyond the dreams of most universities. Among its ambitious opening displays is a series of six contemporary art installations that have been commissioned or acquired for the building’s inauguration by Nick Cave, Diana Al-Hadid, Jane Irish, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Jun Kaneko and Rose B. Simpson. In many ways the project is the culmination of nearly 275…

Hew Locke can’t remember exactly when, on 7 June 2020, he first heard that the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol had been pulled off its plinth and thrown into the city’s harbour. While he thinks it may have been when the Art Newspaper asked him for comment, that also doesn’t seem right to him: ‘In my mind – memory plays tricks on you – that’s the story I tell myself.’ But now, he wonders, surely he heard the news on the radio first? What he is adamant about is that he was ‘stunned’. When Black Lives Matter protestors deposed the late 19th-century statue of the 17th-century slave trader, Locke had more reason to be surprised than most. In Bristol, the continued presence of the statue in the heart of…

Ruth Asawa: The Tamarind Prints Cara Manes andDominika TylczMuseum of Modern Art, $35ISBN 9781633451872 In 1965 the American artist, best known for her elegant wire sculptures, embarked on a two-month residency at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles. The 54 lithographs Asawa produced during her stay – which include delicate depictions of flowers, birds, human faces and household objects such as chairs – are reproduced in full splendour here. The Great Exhibition in Art: Picturing the First World’s Fair, 1851 Julius BryantLund Humphries, £39.95ISBN 9781848227132 The Great Exhibition is usually seen as a ‘trade fair’, but it was also a solution to the fact that, when it came to art and design, ‘fashionable buyers looked abroad’. Bryant’s study looks at the art at the fair and how the event…