How to give back looted art

Plus: At Warsaw's Museum of Modern Art

Get more great writing every day – from just £1 a week

It's time for the UK to act on restitution, writes Tristram Hunt

This year began with the announcement of another artefact from a UK museum being returned to its country of origin. After detailed provenance research, pointing to the object being looted from a temple in Tamil Nadu in 1957, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford received permission from the Charity Commission to repatriate the 16th-century bronze statue of Saint Tirumankai Alvar to India. The successful transfer highlights the contradictory state of the restitution debate in Great Britain: on the one hand, a quickening rhythm of returns from university and regional museums and on the other, continued confusion around deaccessioning contested objects from national collections such as the V&A and British Museum. It is going to take a clear, political decision to end what, for national museums, is debilitating stasis.

Read the full article

Anna McGee finds Wolfgang Buttress making a buzz in Liverpool

Wolfgang Buttress is not the first contemporary artist to look to bees for inspiration: Mario Merz's favourite material for his Arte Povera sculptures was beeswax, intended to represent the natural in contrast to the human-made; in Joseph Beuys's Honey Pump at the Workplace at Documenta in 1977, liquid honey flowing in rubber tubes around a gallery space evoked the shared bloodstream of social organisation; more recently, in 2016, Terence Koh created a Bee Chapel, in which the visitor could meditate to the buzz of bees kept in a hive above their head. In all these cases, artists employed bees and their products as metaphors for some aspect of human society, politics or religion. Buttress's apian artworks, on the other hand, push humans aside and focus on the ingenuity of bees in their own right.

Read the full article

Rod Mengham on the Charles Dickens Museum at 100

The Doughty Street house opened as a museum in 1925 and is this year celebrating its centenary. It seems miraculous that it should contain articles of furniture that the author possessed and that the most personal of these – a bed – shows signs of actually having been used. Read Dickens's biography or his own letters and you cannot imagine him ever asleep. We are used to the idea of museums being housed in the actual homes of the famous and we are also used to them feeling not quite right – either too much like a home, which makes us uncomfortable (we weren't invited), or too much like a museum, which dispels the ambience of a home and the spirit of whoever it was who lived there.

Read the full article

Michael Delgado visits Warsaw's new Museum of Modern Art

In October last year, a building that is in almost every way the architectural opposite to the Palace of Culture and Science opened right next door on the Plac Defilad: an elegant white concrete box, designed by the American architect Thomas Phifer, with a thin belt of windows running all the way round its midriff. The building, which cost the city of Warsaw some £145m, houses the city's Museum of Modern Art (MSN), an institution that was founded in 2005 but has until now been as much a planning committee as a museum, with a scant collection and no permanent home. When I visit in January, the ground floor of the building is open to the public but the galleries have not yet been unveiled; the grand opening is scheduled for late February. But that this building has opened at all could be regarded as a feat of similar magnitude to the construction of the palace.

Read the full article

Samuel Reilly looks forward to Asia Week New York

Since the city's dealers in Asian art first joined forces in 2009, Asia Week New York (AWNY) has been distinguished by its emphasis on connoisseurship – and by the number of curators from museums across the United States, Europe and Asia it attracts. For Brendan Lynch – of the London-based dealership Forge and Lynch, and now overseeing his second edition as chairman of AWNY – a key part of his remit has been capitalising on this strength, developing AWNY into a kind of 'year-round cultural hub'. It publishes webinars, 'an active media programme in Chinese and English' and a weekly newsletter with 5,000 subscribers, appealing not only to 'curators actively building collections' but also to connoisseurs and non-specialist audiences.

Read the full article

Deborah Nash on the artist creating a new kind of protest art

The works include Velázquez's Rokeby Venus, which was targeted with a safety hammer in the National Gallery in 2023, and the Mona Lisa, which in 2022 was pelted with cream cake. In the case of the former, the activists were repeating the action of the suffragette Mary Richardson, who in 1914 used a meat cleaver to slash the canvas in protest at the arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst. The blows delivered in 2023 have been painted back on to a replica, a constellation of nine pressure points and fissures. When it comes to the Mona Lisa, Arden has recreated both the action and the reaction in triptych form: the smearing of cream cake over the bullet-proof glass in the first canvas and its removal through panicked wiping by gallery staff in the second and third. Unlike at the National Gallery or the Louvre, the visitor here is able to get up close and absorb these ephemeral effects reproduced on unglazed canvases.

Read the full article

In the current issue…

Tessa Hadley is drawn to Bellini's eerily calm depiction of a murder

In this moment of our politics, I find myself seeking out certain images of cruelty in art, as if I need to look straight at it and into it. Cruelty is everywhere in Renaissance painting: in its crucifixions, flagellations, massacres of the innocents, martyrdoms of the saints. Like theologians and philosophers, artists are drawn to these knots of suffering, the conundrum of the deliberate infliction of pain. And here is this astonishing painting by Giovanni Bellini, from around 1505–07, so gravely measured and beautiful with its limpid, equable light. (There's a more muddled workshop version in the Courtauld.) The painting ought not to feel measured – something horrible is happening, and in any case, quite apart from the murders, the scene is busy with activity; woodsmen, who haven't noticed yet the drama unfolding on the path, are at their work among the trees. Yet even the violence appears stately, rhythmic. For a moment you might think that there are four murders here rather than two, punctuating the picture across its space like music: Saint Peter fallen to his knees, a woodsman raising his axe to a tree in the wood behind, Saint Peter's companion attacked, another woodsman about to bring down another axe.

Read the full article

In the next issue…

More from Apollo

Current issue | Advertise | Podcasts

View this email in your browser

Follow us

Apollo Magazine, 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP.
All Articles and Content Copyright © 2025 by Apollo Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
If you no longer wish to receive these emails, you can unsubscribe at any time.
To ensure our emails are delivered to your inbox, please add Apollo to your email address book and safe-sender list.

ALL NEWS MAG

How to give back looted art

Commentaires

Enregistrer un commentaire

Posts les plus consultés de ce blog

Jolly guy's laugh is so contagious that even chickens had to join in

Kid draws a hilarious family portrait, featuring his mother on her period

Chris Froome sends out strong message to his rivals as he storms back to win Criterium du Dauphine for the second time