EDITORIAL

Click onto a new world of art

January is traditionally a time for renewal, so we have taken the opportunity to make a few changes to apollo’s appearance, and have also undertaken a thorough redesign and overhaul of our website, www.apollo-magazine.com.

CONTEMPORARY ART

Rooms divided

The new installation in Tate modern’s turbine hall is far from being the first attempt by an artist to undermine a building.

ARCHITECTURE

Long journey’s end

The revival of st pancras could never have happened without the victorian society, which was founded 50 years ago.

Art Business

Buying art online via galleries or at auction is increasingly popular – but do the benefits outweigh the disadvantages?

Collectors’ Focus: Medieval Sculpture

Strong interest from private collectors attracted by moderate prices has fired up this market, writes Lucian Harris.

Asian Art Market

Auction-house expansion and new cultural spaces are encouraging the growth of China’s fledgling art market, writes Susan Moore.

Market Review

In an extraordinary month in the salerooms, many record prices were set, but as several high-priced lots failed to sell, is the market beginning to slow down?

Market Preview

Fine carving is a special attraction this month, ranging from rare American furniture and medieval sculpture in New York to African art in Brussels and collectible contemporary craft in London.

The many lives of a collector

When the lawyer Stuart Evans offered to create collections of contemporary British art for his firm, Simmons & Simmons, he unlocked a passion for collecting that has led to an exhibition opening in York this month, as Rose Aidin discovers. Photographs by Derry Moore.

Drawings in dresden: Newly Identified works by Italian Masters

A curatorial exchange programme between the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the oldest collection of Old Master drawings in Germany, the Kupferstich-Kabinett Dresden, has led to the identification of a number of drawings of great beauty and importance, published here in the first of three articles by Carmen C. Bambach.

Art for an age of unbelief

We live in an age in which art takes pleasure in its fictive playfulness, having abandoned any idea of serving beliefs outside itself. Matthew Collings yearns instead for the ideals represented by Britain’s leading abstract artists of the 1950s, notably Patrick Heron and Robyn Denny, which offer the possibility that art can connect to ‘something deep and true’.

The curwen press’s illustrators: rebels against commercial ugliness

Commissions from the innovatory Curwen Press helped Edward Bawden and his fellow artists to revolutionise graphic design in interwar Britain, as Peyton Skipwith explains.

The word made mosaic

Tom Phillips creates works out of words as well as images and ignores distinctions between fine art and decoration. His contempt for boundaries has produced a remarkable masterpiece – a design for mosaics for a chapel at Westminster Cathedral, London. Portrait by Snowdon

An art gallery for the office

Lisa K Erf, director of the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection, talks to Louise Nicholson about the important role that contemporary art plays in the bank’s life, currently highlighted by a travelling exhibition of some of its major works. Photographs by Miki Duisterhof

Giving the Prado space to breathe

Rafael Moneo’s extension has transformed the experience of visiting the Prado, writes Xavier Bray, especially as it returns much-needed space to the collection’s display.

Nolan’s hero

The Sidney Nolan retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales has some curious gaps, writes Patricia Anderson.

Black-and-white Barcelona

John Russell Taylor finds the Van Gogh Museum’s account of Barcelona in 1900 an oddly monochromatic experience.

Perfect – and vacant

Ruth Guilding visits a Canova exhibition in Rome that focuses on the sculptor’s relationship with Napoleon and his family.

Protestant virtues

To mark the publication of a catalogue of its Dutch paintings, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is showing its entire collection, writes Jonathan Lopez.

Riches in Ferrara

The artistic achievements of the d’Este court in the 15th century are being celebrated in a two-part exhibition that has Cosmè Tura at its heart, writes Robert Oresko.

Apotheosis of the cliché: pop art portraits.

‘I like boring things. I like things to be exactly the same over and over again’, said Andy Warhol, hero of ‘Pop Art Portraits’ at the National Portrait Gallery, London. That’s the problem with pop art, writes Rob Tufnell.