CONTENTS June 2008
EDITORIAL
Blog on with the Goncourts
Apollo has launched a blog, for news and comment about the visual arts. Although blogs proliferate, none can yet be ranked with such masterpieces as the goncourt journals.
Art Business
Sotheby’s has become reluctant to offer price guarantees on works of art. What does this say about the state of the market?
Summer Delights
This month the eyes of the art world turn to London. Susan Moore selects some highlights of an enticing feast of fairs, auction sales and dealers’ shows.
Market Preview
Despite comings and goings at director level, this year's Art Basel will maintain its reputation as the world's best contemporary fair.
Market Review
Islamic art performed strongly in London and new records were set for Old Masters in New York, where 20th-century photographs also fetched high prices.
Collector's Focus
A surge of interest from the Gulf States is reinvigorating this market traditionally dominated by German collectors, writes .
All & nothing
Anish Kapoor’s massive works absorb both their environment and the viewing public. Martin Gayford talks to the sculptor about sexuality, spirituality and capturing emptiness.
Crying in the wilderness
In the 1450s Lorenzo the Magnificent’s father commissioned a bronze statuette of St John the Baptist for a holy-water stoup in SS Annunziata, Florence. Charles Avery presents new evidence that this lost work has survived unidentified in the Bargello.
Changes at Chatsworth
Michael Hall visits Chatsworth to talk to the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire about the way they are changing one of England’s greatest houses, from rethinking the historic interiors to adding contemporary art. Portrait by William Burlington.
The golden age returns
This issue of Apollo celebrates the redisplay of Chatsworth’s State Apartment, a sequence of rooms created for the 1st Duke of Devonshire at the end of the 17th century as a backdrop for baroque court ceremonial. Their purpose is made newly evident by the recent changes, as Hannah Obee explains.
A royal bed at Chatsworth
Annabel Westman unravels the mystery behind the newly-conserved state bed on display in the State Bedchamber at Chatsworth. It seems likely that it was made in 1723 for George II and was acquired by the 4th Duke of Devonshire as a perquisite in 1761.
Collectors & collecting
The Fondation Beyeler in Basel, which houses the collection formed by Ernst Beyeler during his illustrious career as an art dealer, has appointed a new director. On the eve of Art Basel, Louise Nicholson pays a visit.
Father of pop?
Philippe Büttner, curator of the exhibition ‘Fernand Léger: Paris-New York’, which opens this month at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel, discusses the crucial impact of America on Léger’s artistic development and considers the artist’s influence in turn on a whole generation of American artists.
Baroque exuberance
A key element of the 1st Duke of Devonshire’s interiors at Chatsworth is his remarkable collection of late-17th-century Delft flower vases. As Hannah Obee explains, their use and decoration provides a revealing insight into not only his taste but also his politics.
Rebuilding the Wall
Themes of defeat and defiance permeate the 5th Berlin Biennial, writes Rob Tufnell.
Brought into the light
Yonna Yapou welcomes an exhibition that retrieves the achievements of the calotypists.
Queen of calumnies?
This exhibition’s attempt to rehabilitate Marie-Antoinette is undermined by its design, writes Christoph Vogtherr.
National Treasure
Revered in his native Spain, Antonio López García is little known outside it. An exhibition in Boston could change that, writes Jonathan Lopez.
Salvaging the past
This richly detailed book is a pioneering contribution to the scholarship of the period room, writes Susan Jenkins.
Bronzes in every detail
David Ekserdjian welcomes the first volume of a much-needed catalogue of the Bargello’s bronze sculptures.
Coffee-table baroque
Can a new book on Sicilian baroque architecture hope to rival Anthony Blunt’s famous, pioneering survey, asks Julian Treuherz?