Apollo back issues from March 2008:
Meditations for Lent: can museums promote greater understanding between faiths when by their very definition they separate art from the religious cultures that created it?
Mar 01, 2008; ... Last month the British media marked the beginning of Lent with the traditional ceremony of bashing the archbishop. A lecture on Islam in English law delivered by Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, was widely reported as proposing that Islamic sharia law should be given legal ...
Ten to catch: Apollo's selection for the month ahead.(Calendar)
Mar 01, 2008 ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] 'The Prints of Sean Scully' opens at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota, on 1 March (until 4 May). Planes of Light (1991;) is one of a selection taken from the only set of the artist's prints held in the us. +612 870 3131 ...
An Islamic symphony: David Khalili talks about his collection: Abu Dhabi is hosting the most comprehensive exhibition of Islamic art ever staged in the Middle East. It is drawn solely from the great collection of David Khalili, who explains to Susan Moore how it has been put together like a piece of music.(Cover story)
Mar 01, 2008; ... David Khalili puts most collectors to shame. In an age in which so many rich men call themselves collectors and seem more interested in displaying their wealth than the art they have acquired through it, Khalili has done rather more than simply raise a paddle in the saleroom. During the ...
The wonders of Maastricht: the European Fine Art Fair 2008: Susan Moore begins Apollo'S preview of the world's greatest art fair with an assessment of the European art market in its global context, and a choice of some of the outstanding treasures on offer.
Mar 01, 2008; ... European governments invariably underestimate the scale and economic importance of the art market. Why else would the EU suits in Brussels introduce changes to the law on VAT and droite de suite that effectively handed the lion's share of the international art market on a silver salver to ...
The master of old masters: Lucian Harris talks to Johnny Van Haeften: the doyen of London's Old Master dealers and a mainstay of Maastricht, Johnny Van Haeften talks about the state of the trade.(England, Netherlands)(Interview)
Mar 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Of the small core of dealers who have exhibited at Maastricht since its modest beginnings over 30 years ago, few have been more involved in the fair's great success than Johnny Van Haeften, whose stand is the first stop for everyone interested in Dutch and ...
The finest the world can offer: three decades of Maastricht: the success of Maastricht's European Fine Art Fair is in large part thanks to the commitment and energy of the select group of dealers who serve as the fair's trustees and executive committee members. Isabel Andrews and Annie Blinkhorn talked to them about the reasons for the fair's pre-eminence, and asked them to recall highlights from its history.
Mar 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED] Over its 32-year history the European Fine Art Fair at Maastricht has evolved from modest beginnings to become the leading event of the international art trade and collectors' calendar. TEFAF has its origins in two separate biannual events, the Pictura ...
See art in the round: Maastricht's Sculpture Highlights fair: this month visitors to Maastricht have the bonus of the world's only specialist sculpture fair. Now in its second year, its offerings range from the ancient world to contemporary art.(Netherlands)
Mar 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Given the already packed international circuit of antiques and fine art fairs, it is no small challenge to establish and ensure the success of yet another. Last year saw the launch of Maastricht's Sculpture Highlights, a small specialist fair that ...
Justice & mercy: the patron of Jan Van Eyck's Dresden Triptych: the identity of the patron portrayed in this celebrated masterpiece continues to elude scholars. Is he a crusader, a devotee of the Sacred Heart, or even Van Eyck himself? Peter Heath suggests that the triptych's little-noticed emphasis on justice is a major clue.(Critical essay)
Mar 01, 2008; ... Jan van Eyck's paintings are almost as replete with puzzles as they are with details. Some are prompted by the painter's own fertile imagination, some by the loss of perhaps informative frames, and others by the distance which separates our ways of thinking and our assumptions from those ...
Art nouveau at Sevres & the craftsman tradition in America: in the early 1900s, American writers and designers took a close interest in the remarkable art-nouveau designs that were being produced at Sevres. Gabriel P. Weisberg explores the impact of the firm's methods and achievements on American crafts.(Essay)
Mar 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] When Gustav Stickley, editor of The Craftsman, one of the premier American magazine art magazines of its age, published an article entitled 'Latest Ceramic Products of Sevres' in January 1904, he helped to introduce contemporary Sevres ceramics and the ...
Old friends in fresh company: the new galleries for European painting at the Metropolitan: the opening of the Henry J. Heinz II Galleries has allowed the Metropolitan Museum to display virtually its entire holdings of 19th- and early-20th-century European paintings. As a result, writes Nancy Ireson, the collection's celebrated masterpieces are shown in revealing new contexts, and a familiar narrative is subtly but firmly readjusted.
Mar 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED] Last December, the Henry J. Heinz II Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York opened to provide 8,000 square feet of new exhibition space for 19th- and early-20th-century art. The result is an extensive suite of rooms, towards the southern ...
Drawings in Dresden: further newly identified works by Italian masters: Carmen C. Bambach continues her account of recent major discoveries in the Kupferstich-Kabinett Dresden with a discussion of some remarkable drawings by early-16th-century central Italian artists.(Critical essay)
Mar 01, 2008; ... This essay is a continuation of the article dedicated to Dresden drawings in the January issue of APOLLO, the fruit of a curatorial exchange programme between the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Kupferstich-Kabinett Dresden. It focuses primarily on central Italian artists of the 16th ...
All the arts & every pleasure: Diana Scarisbrick talks to Alvar Gonzales-Palacios: the celebrated Cuban-born art historian, collector and author looks back over his 50-year exile in Italy, recalls the men who influenced him, and reflects on the art world today.(Interview)
Mar 01, 2008; ... It has been said that the best biographies are those written by ourselves and certainly it would be difficult to improve upon the self-portrait that emerges from Alvar Gonzales-Palados's delightful diary Un Anno in Meno (2006). In the course of that year he takes us on a journey from his ...
Selling candy to the masses: last year Jeff Koons became the world's most expensive living artist. He talks to Martin Gayford about sex, pleasure, the need for self-acceptance--and an astonishing installation destined for Los Angeles.(ARTIST IN VIEW)(Interview)
Mar 01, 2008; ... Is Jeff Koons the world's first truly global artist? Or, to put it another way, is he the foremost representative in painting and sculpture of globalised turbo-capitalism? Consider the following. His raw material is the product of mass production and mass advertising, which is used--as its ...
Putting art on the table: Suzanne and Norman Cohn's passion for commissioning contemporary crafts has led to their creatively staged dinner parties, where guests enjoy not only exquisite food but also elaborate 'table art'. Louise Nicholson was invited to join them for an evening.(COLLECTORS & COLLECTING)(Interview)
Mar 01, 2008; ... Suzanne Cohn laid down a firm condition for talking about the table art that she and her husband, Norman, collect: 'You must experience it first. Our primary concern is the ongoing relationship with the artists and their table art. It is about how we put things together, how we use ...
Looking after Liverpool: Liverpool is the New European capital of culture--a title it merits only because of the people who fought against its destructive redevelopment after the war.(ARCHITECTURE)(England)
Mar 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Behind the great 16-column Corinthian portico of St George's Hall in Liverpool, which Sir Nikolaus Pevsner described as 'the freest neo-Grecian building in England and one of the finest in the world', are four empty plinths (Figs 3 and 4). It has long been ...
Market review: paintings with 'wall power' triumphed in Old Masters week in New York and a significant corporate collection went to the block in London.(THE ART MARKET: NEWS, ANALYSIS AND PREVIEWS FOR COLLECTORS)(England)
Mar 01, 2008; ... Big names proved a powerful draw at January's Old Master sales in New York, as did strong images. It was striking, too, that sculpture stole the day at Sotheby's opening session of Important Old Master Paintings including European Works of Art on 24 January. No one was surprised that the ...
Asian art market: launched by the International Asian Art Fair, New York's Asia Week offers an extraordinary wealth of shows and auction sales.
Mar 01, 2008; ... Asia Week in New York is nearly topped and tailed this year. Launching the events is the International Asian Art Fair, which moves both dates and venue to show from 15 to 19 March at the newly refurbished 583 Park Avenue, a handsome red-brick Georgian-style landmark building two blocks ...
Biedermeier furniture: collectors attracted to the modernity and fine craftsmanship of the best Biedermeier pieces will find that prices are temptingly modest.(COLLECTORS' FOCUS)
Mar 01, 2008; ... Between 1815 and 1848 German-speaking Europe developed a new style of living. Self-consciously middle class, it deliberately distanced itself from the affectations of court life, in favour of a new focus on simplicity. Named Biedermeier after a fictional petit-bourgeois German invented by ...
Art business: how do you insure a work that might--thanks to what it's made of--melt, disintegrate, or be eaten?
Mar 01, 2008; ... Contemporary art may occasionally confuse gallery goers but that is as nothing compared to the puzzlement it engenders in insurance brokers who must work out the premiums needed to cover the works. How much, for example, does it cost to insure a pickled shark, in the case of Damien Hirst's ...
Around the galleries: unusual Dutch art and rare Chinese sculpture are on offer in Maastricht's galleries this month.(Netherlands)
Mar 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A fine choice of exhibitions in Maastricht's city centre accompanies the European Fine Art Fair this month. Among the offerings from the eighth Maastricht Fine Art Open House (Tongersestraat 2; +31 [0] 653211649, 6-16 March) are antique and contemporary ...
The most arrogant artist in France: the impressive retrospective that has just transferred from Paris to New York presents Gustave Courbet in all his guises, from self-assertive hero and suffering martyr to stylish dandy.(EXHIBITIONS)(France)
Mar 01, 2008; ... The exhibition devoted to Gustave Courbet that opened in New York last month after its showing at the Grand Palais in Paris takes place 130 years after the artist's death in his Swiss exile at La Tour-de-Peilz, close to the medieval Chateau de Chillon, a place that artists and poets, ...
Essence of the sublime: once considered the lowliest of genres, landscape, in the hands of Nicolas Poussin, achieved emotion, narrative power and, above all, multiplicity of meanings.(EXHIBITIONS)
Mar 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] There is much to pay attention to in this extraordinary exhibition --perhaps one of the most compelling on this most canonical of academic artists--because of the subject of the exhibition itself: landscape paintings, a genre that 17th-century French ...
Supreme storytellers: to mark the publication of Christopher White's catalogue of the Queen's later Flemish pictures, the Royal Collection has staged a splendid exhibition of selected masterpieces.(EXHIBITIONS)
Mar 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] It is often said that James VI and I was indifferent to pictures. Surely he was no connoisseur, but he was no fool. He knew very well just how effective imagery could be. It was in his reign that Rubens's Banqueting House ceiling was conceived and he was ...
A skilful charmer: the first exhibition on Karel du Jardin reveals a versatile painter with a taste for the good life.(EXHIBITIONS)
Mar 01, 2008; ... For the first monographic exhibition ever devoted to Karel du Jardin, the Rijksmuseum has assembled 23 of the artist's finest paintings, highlighting his remarkable versatility across three distinct genres. The show presents not only the Italianate landscapes for which Du Jardin is best ...
Leighton's art therapy: seize your last chance to see a touring exhibition of Lord Leighton's ravishing drawings.(EXHIBITIONS)(A Victorian Master: Drawings by Frederic, Lord Leighton)
Mar 01, 2008; ... Frederic Leighton was born in Scarborough in 1830, the son of a doctor. From the age of nine, when his family moved to Paris, he led a roofless, peripatetic existence, becoming cosmopolitan, polyglot and sophisticated, and laying the foundations of an unrivalled art education. At Florence, ...
Golden trophies: the Metropolitan Museum's magnificent catalogue of its Dutch paintings reveals how this great collection was shaped by the tastes of America's Gilded Age plutocrats.(Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art)(Book review)
Mar 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art WALTER LIEDTKE Yale University Press, $175/95 [pounds sterling] (two volumes) ISBN 9780300120288 When it was founded in 1870, the Metropolitan Museum ...
In the age of duchesses: Clare Finn applauds the latest volume in John Richardson's great biography of Picasso.(A Life of Picasso, vol. 3: The Triumphant Years - 1917-1932)(Book review)
Mar 01, 2008; ... A Life of Picasso Volume III, The Triumphant Years: 1917-1932 JOHN RICHARDSON Jonathan Cape 30 [pounds sterling]/Knopf, $40 ISBN 9780224031219 Among the tales that John Richardson gives us with his dry wit in this latest volume of ...
A fear of strange beds: in the January 1976 issue, Eileen Harris described the career of Carlo Pellegrini. Although best known as Vanity Fairs caricaturist Ape', he longed to be a fashionable painter, like his friend Whistler.(FROM THE APOLLO ARCHIVES)(James McNeill Whistler)(Reprint)
Mar 01, 2008; ... By resuming his role as 'Ape' in July, 1877, Pellegrini was financially able to adopt the life-style of a Whistlerian painter. He followed Whistler to Tite Street, where their mutual I friend and architect, E.W. Godwin, designed him a studio--according to his specifications it was flooded ...