Innehållsförteckning för December 2025 från Apollo

The boards of museums in the United Kingdom rarely receive much attention. There is both good reason and tradition for this. Until about 40 years ago a board – unlike in the United States – was focused on running the museum, rather than fundraising. The idea that a British board member should personally commit to a phone-number-sized donation is still unusual. A chair rarely shapes the course of a museum as much as its director; after all, the chair’s role is supposed to be non-executive. In 2025, however, Apollo’s award for Personality of the Year goes to not one person but two – and one of them is the chair of the National Gallery. John Booth has held the post since 2021, an inauspicious year for museums around the world.…

The National Gallery’s extraordinary year was, according to John Booth, its chair of trustees, founded on food. When he took over the top job in September 2021, he had served on the board of the National Gallery for just a few months, as liaison trustee of the Tate Gallery. He didn’t know Gabriele Finaldi, the gallery’s director since 2015, personally: ‘I’d only really met him on Zoom meetings.’ Since Booth believes that the most crucial relationship in any institution is ‘between the chief executive and the chair’ he proposed that they get to know each other better. First Finaldi took Booth out to an Italian restaurant – ‘we shared a good bottle of wine and so on and we must have chatted for three hours, one of those good long…

Greeted with near-unanimous five-star reviews on both sides of the Atlantic, ‘Siena: The Rise of Painting’ magnificently demonstrated that a scholarly exhibition of Old Master paintings that included no works by household names can enthral a large public. For once, the claim ‘a once-in-a-generation event’ was justified: with more than 100 exhibits, most of great fragility, this was the largest exhibition in more than 20 years devoted to the art of Siena in the half century before the Black Death and nothing like it will be seen for decades to come. To make sense of this exceptionally rich subject, its curators focused on the innovations of Duccio and three younger artists, Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Simone Martini. The exhibition’s greatest coup was the reuniting of the eight surviving predella…

Great works of art have an inevitability of their own,’ wrote Francis Russell, then head of the Old Masters department at Christie’s, nearly 30 years ago in the Burlington Magazine. The occasion was his publication of a hitherto unknown devotional panel of the Crucifixion in an English private collection with an emphatic new attribution to the Florentine friar artist, Fra or Beato Angelico (active 1417–55). ‘It seems astonishing,’ Russell continued, ‘that Fra Angelico’s name has not previously been invoked in connection with [this panel].’ His essay more than remedied the oversight; since then the picture’s status as one of the artist’s pivotal early works has never been questioned. There was nothing inevitable, however, about how the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford secured the work for the public at the close of…

1 Beckmann Städel Museum, Frankfurt3 December–15 March 2026 Coinciding with the publication of the first catalogue raisonné of Max Beckmann’s drawings, this exhibition in Frankfurt presents more than 80 drawings, including early preparatory sketches from the museum’s collection that have rarely been on public display as well as loans from international institutions. Highlights include The Murder (pictured), a macabre illustration of a crime scene, painted in 1933, in which Beckmann seems to foreshadow the violence and chaos that would consume Germany in subsequent years. 2 Art around 1800 Hamburger Kunsthalle5 December–29 March 2026 Billed as an ‘exhibition about exhibitions’, this show reprises a series that took place at the gallery between 1974 and 1981 focusing on early 19th-century art. Contemporary and previously excluded works are shown with historic displays of…

The exhibition ‘Sixties Surreal’ at New York’s Whitney Museum explores Surrealism not at its Parisian roots but decades later, as an expressive mode in American art. It is a show of light and dark. Surrealism influenced art of many moods, from the gutter wit of Claes Oldenburg’s Soft Toilet to Lee Bontecou’s ominous, machine-like reliefs. With its conceptual roots in psychoanalysis, Surrealism was a mode impeccably suited to a mid-century American population in thrall to self-examination. The Surrealists’ fascination with dreams chimed with the psychedelic revelations of flower children, and their upfront engagement with sexuality with the liberatory tenets of free love. Juxtapositions achieved through collage proved a subversive tool for revolutionary social movements. Among the revolutionaries was the feminist Martha Rosler, whose activist art pasted pornographic images of women’s…

For three decades, Hew Locke’s art has unfolded across continents, materials and ideas. His work – now widely recognised – continues to question systems of power and illuminate their persistence. Apollo’s award acknowledges the artist’s remarkable career, in which he has persistently reshaped the visual symbols that inform our notions of identity and belonging – particularly the symbols of empire. My first encounter with Locke’s work was 25 years ago, as a recent art-history graduate, when I saw his astonishing installation Hemmed in Two at the V&A. Wedged between the museum’s Doric columns, it was made entirely of cardboard, but had an immense presence. I knew that this was the work of an important artist. Locke had found a singular means of expressing complex and fraught ideas in the simplest…

Oceanic art has inspired a vast literature. Since the early 20th century, hundreds of catalogues and monographs have highlighted the collections of museums, explored genres and traditions and, more recently, celebrated contemporary practice. The achievement of Toi Te Mana (which roughly translates as ‘arts of power’) is of another order altogether. Its subtitle points to its distinctiveness. This is both a work grounded in and animated by Māori concepts – of time, place, people and valuables – and the outcome of sophisticated art-historical research, which deftly mobilises the discipline’s foundational methods and the feminist and postcolonial perspectives that have challenged the field. The book promises and delivers a survey of core practices and mediums over time: sculpture, architecture, textiles, rock art and body art. Its accounts of colonialism and innovation,…

The Deformation: Attention and Discernment in Catholic Reformation Art and ArchitectureSusanna Berger In Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty (2013), the film’s protagonists go on a night-time journey through Rome’s most famous attractions, among them the colonnade at the Palazzo Spada popularly known as the ‘Prospettiva Borromini’. Sorrentino’s camera follows as one of the characters, Ramona (played by Sabrina Ferilli), enters and walks along what appears to be a regular colonnade of evenly spaced paired Doric columns. The further Ramona moves into the colonnade, however, the smaller the columns get and the closer they stand together. As she goes from being dwarfed by the colonnade to almost outgrowing it, we realise that the colonnade and its apparent depth was nothing but an ingenious illusion. Artifice and illusion are among the themes…

British Blonde: Women, Desire and the Image in Post-War BritainLynda Nead ‘I’m not bothered by the jokes about me being a dumb blonde,’ the country singer Dolly Parton once said, ‘because I know I’m not dumb. I also know I’m not blonde.’ A proud phoney, she knew that her particular brand of blondeness – luminous and fried almost into oblivion – could only ever be achieved by artificial means, and that pretending otherwise would have been foolish. Her trademark hue became a gleefully trampy calling card and it conferred certain benefits: sexual admiration; fame; a useful underestimation of her talents on the part of Neanderthal misogynists, the better to surprise them with her musical genius. Didn’t it follow that faking it was one of the things that made her smart…

London’s big museums have had a good autumn. The British Museum’s inaugural Met Gala-style ball not only raised £2.5 million, but announced a £10.3 million pledge from the Garfield Weston Foundation for new ‘welcome pavilions’ in Bloomsbury. The Science Museum secured £10 million from Indian vaccine giant the Serum Institute – its biggest ever international donation – to revamp its Making the Modern World gallery. And to top it all, the National Gallery announced that a new wing would be largely funded by two gifts of £150 million each – far outstripping the previous record for the biggest cash donation to a museum. With Labour having lived up to its no-promises manifesto and left the Conservatives’ austerity largely intact, these big gifts are a shot in the arm. Could 2025…

Giorgione’s Three Philosophers (c. 1508/09) depicts the Three Ages of Man, but can also be read as three stages of knowing. The old figure embodies inherited, bookish wisdom (ancient authority); the middle-aged man in the centre signals the transmission of classical science through Islamic medieval astronomy; the youngest figure turns outward towards empirical Renaissance observation, signalling a new science being born. Another of Giorgione’s paintings, The Tempest (c. 1506–08), was the philosopher Roger Scruton’s favourite work of art. Scruton, a wine-lover, argued for the consciousness-expanding use of drink: ‘Wine is not just an object of pleasure, but an object of knowledge; and the pleasure depends on the knowledge.’ A taste of how artists painted philosophers over the centuries reveals the ways in which images of drinking are also images for…

A five-year, $220m restoration and expansion has scarcely disrupted the Frick Collection’s longstanding illusion that the original owners will soon return from another Grand Tour shopping spree. In the 1910s, the block-long limestone compound was commissioned for the coal and steel tycoon Henry Clay Frick and his family. In 1935, it was enlarged for adaptation into a museum and library. By the 2000s, the collection had outgrown its home, but some overly obtrusive proposals for expansion caused controversy and had to be scrapped. The museum then set out, with a team led by the architect Annabelle Selldorf, to upgrade existing spaces and pack new limestone wings with rooms for public programmes, changing exhibitions, offices, conservation equipment and eateries. Rainbows of veiny marble pave the new corridors and stairs, and belowground,…

www.getty.edu/research/provenance The Getty Provenance Index (GPI) was launched in the 1980s and by the turn of the millennium had become an indispensable resource for curators and researchers. Drawing on a vast pool of archival material, including dealer stock books dating back to the 16th century, this searchable database made a bewildering array of information legible, allowing anyone to survey the ownership history of thousands of artworks stretching back to the Renaissance. In May this year the Getty Research Institute launched a radically reconfigured version – though those who miss the GPI’s previous version can still use it on the Getty’s website – making use of the enormous amounts of metadata buried in the existing records to help users map connections between works, and between buyers and sellers, in more detail…

Monuments23 October–3 May 2026The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and The Brick, Los Angeles A curious new feature has emerged in the public spaces of some American cities over the past decade: the empty plinth. In New Orleans, a barren white column rises more than 18 metres high; in Baltimore, a block of granite sits mutely, ringed by trees. Both are missing the large statues of Confederate army leaders that stood upon them for nearly a century. Hundreds of monuments to the Confederate cause – the slavery-preserving side in the 19th-century Civil War – were erected throughout the American South in the early 20th century. A transatlantic offshoot of Europe’s nationalist ‘monumentomania’, the public display of such markers was framed as memorialisation and the preservation of heritage, but functioned as a…

Comrades in Art: Artists Against Fascism 1933–1943Andy Friend Amid the global rise of the far right, geopolitical instability and economic shocks, historians and journalists increasingly compare the present with the 1930s. That partisan decade can seem to us like a time when art for its own sake had to be set aside, as artists turned urgently to ‘the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting’, as W.H. Auden wrote. Even before the decade ended, disillusionment had set in – and, during the Cold War, a host of repentant ex-Communists lined up to deliver the message that political commitment, especially ‘Marxist dogma’, leads inevitably to artistic failure. However, Andy Friend’s illuminating book Comrades in Art reveals a rich seam of committed art that dispels clichés about the Red Decade. It also…