Features

The Russian modernist who made the European avant-garde feel at home

Marianne Werefkin has long been overshadowed by her male peers, but the Royal Academy’s show devoted to modernist women may restore her to her rightful place

24 Sep 2022
Marco Scotini and Can Altay

At this year’s Istanbul Biennial, the city is the real star

This long-delayed edition of the event puts Istanbul front and centre and encourages visitors to rediscover and reinvent its public spaces

23 Sep 2022
The National Gallery. Photo: imageBROKER/Alamy Stock Photo

How are UK museums going to keep the lights on this winter?

The government’s energy caps offer short-term relief, but if museums are really going to serve as ‘warm havens’ they need more certainty

22 Sep 2022
Queen Elizabeth II

The many faces of the Queen

From Cecil Beaton to Lucian Freud, some of the greatest names of the late 20th century have captured the Queen’s likeness

8 Sep 2022
Fernando Gallego

Acquisitions of the Month: August 2022

A painting by the late American artist Emma Amos and a devotional triptych by the Spanish painter Fernando Gallego are among this month’s highlights

7 Sep 2022
Dom Pedro I heart

Why nostalgia is at the heart of Brazil’s bicentenary celebrations

The bicentennial of Brazil’s independence falls at a troubling time, so it’s no wonder the commemorations focus on an idealised past

3 Sep 2022

For most artists, there’s no such thing as the ‘wrong’ side of a piece of paper

Though we rarely encounter them, the preparatory sketches and absent-minded doodling on the backs of drawings can reveal much about what an artist really had in mind

2 Sep 2022
The Osulloc Tea Museum on Jeju Island.

The South Korean island with something for everyone

Andrew Russeth finds that Jeju Island offers everything from a teddy bear museum to masterpieces of modern Korean art

30 Aug 2022
The pavilion of Indochina in the Garden of Tropical Agronomy René Dumont in Paris

What should happen to Paris’s abandoned colonial garden?

The neglect of the Garden of Tropical Agronomy points to a wider ambivalence about what to do with the city’s colonial sites

30 Aug 2022
Adoration of the Magi by Perugino

Making over Umbria’s greatest museum

The Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, home to some of Perugino’s most important works, can now display its outstanding collection in suitably grand style

30 Aug 2022
(detail; 1601–04), Cristofano Gaffurri after a design by Jacopo Ligozzi. Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence

How Ferdinand I de’ Medici set his might in stone

Curator Alessandra Griffo of the Uffizi tells Apollo how a remarkable pietra dura table-top would have dazzled visitors to the Medici court

30 Aug 2022
The Pink Room at Palazzo Butera

The grand restoration of Palazzo Butera

Fresh connections between contemporary art and Old Masters come to the fore in this 400-year-old palace, which has been transformed into a museum and home

30 Aug 2022
Jean-François de Troy’s

The saucy legends of the champagne coupe

The distinctive saucer-shaped glass might have fallen out of fashion, but the tales of its origins still make for titillating table talk

30 Aug 2022

How gastronomic maps paved the way for regional French cooking

The first gastronomic map of France may have been created to serve the appetites of greedy Parisians, but it also opened up new ways of eating

30 Aug 2022
Pope's Villa

Will Alexander Pope’s underground grotto finally come to light?

The poet’s bejewelled lair on the banks of the Thames was his pride and joy – and its restoration shines new light into the shadowy depths of his mind

26 Aug 2022
Helen Frankenthaler studio visit

What artists are really doing when they take up residencies

Recent initiatives are expanding on the traditional model of patronage through community engagement, cross-disciplinary collaboration and mentorship schemes

9 Aug 2022

Acquisitions of the Month: July 2022

Two significant works by Renaissance masters to the National Gallery in London are among this month’s highlights

5 Aug 2022
Vernon Lee (1881), John Singer Sargent. Tate collection

How Vernon Lee kept her finger on the pulse of gallery-goers

Long before the invention of the visitor-response survey, the writer was curious about how works of art affected their viewers

31 Jul 2022
Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel (late 1470s–mid 1480s), Sandro Botticelli. Private collection

The blingy side of Botticelli

The painter’s use of gold in his works suggests a debt to earlier artists – and reveals a more antiquarian side of 15th-century Florence

17 Jul 2022
glassblowing on the island of Murano

Playing with fire – how rising fuel prices are endangering Murano’s glass industry

As the cost of gas continues to increase across Europe, the Venetian island’s glassmakers are fighting to preserve a centuries-old tradition

8 Jul 2022
Covered box with scene from The Tale of Genji (c. 1895), Ota Jinnoeimon. Peabody Essex Museum, Salem. Photo: © 2022 John Bigelow Taylor

Acquisitions of the Month: June 2022

An outstanding collection of some 900 Japanese cloisonné enamels is among this month’s highlights

30 Jun 2022
Wolf's Cove miniature village

The architect whose greatest achievement was the world’s first miniature village

Wolf’s Cove, the model village in Gloucestershire designed by Charles Paget Wade, is proof of the architect’s commitment to creating ideal communities

27 Jun 2022
A Jewish family home in Baghdad

A culinary education – Claudia Roden’s ode to Jewish cuisine

Twenty-five years after it was first published, ‘The Book of Jewish Food’ remains an invaluable record of the Jewish diaspora and its manifold culinary traditions

27 Jun 2022
Exterior view of the ‘Borderlands’ exhibition, including Enrique Martínez Celaya’s There-bound (2021), at the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino.

Progress report – the Huntington reckons with its past and looks to the future

The Gilded Age institution renowned for its Eurocentric holdings is re-evaluating its history and winning over a wider audience

27 Jun 2022