Dealing in antiquities in a galaxy far, far away

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Will Wiles on why the antiquities trade matters in Andor

Architectural metaphors run through the heart of Andor – and so does art. Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), the eponymous focus of the show, is brought into the rebellion by the enigmatic Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård). They are from different worlds, not just literally: Cassian is a rough-edged petty criminal from the backwoods, while Rael is – of all things – a dealer in antiquities. Rael's showroom on the Coruscant equivalent of Pimlico Road, a purpose-built set by production designer Luke Hull, has display plinths of scored stone and a vaulted ceiling of what looks like marble cross-bracing, through which comes diffuse light of the sourceless kind John Soane called lumière mystérieuse.

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Francesca Wade on Gertrude Stein's museum of modern art

The Steins' Left Bank apartment was, in a sense, the first museum of modern art. Word quickly got out that these eccentric American siblings opened their doors each Saturday night to anyone who wanted to see their collection of works by vanguard contemporary artists making radical experiments with form: many visitors were deeply affected by what they saw. Leo Stein remembered Picasso staring so intently at Cézanne's portrait of his wife, hung above Gertrude's desk, that he feared the painting would dissolve under the scrutiny: the artist later attributed to Cézanne's example some of the aesthetic breakthroughs that led to the origins of Cubism (Gertrude, too, revealed that Cézanne's approach to space and form had been a formative influence on her writing).

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Fiona Tan talks to Arjun Sajip about the appeal of museum archives

This is the first time the Rijksmuseum has invited an artist to curate a show based on its collection. A number of Tan's works explore the nature of collections and archives, or are explicitly museological. Inventory (2015) is a series of shots of the collection of the John Soane Museum in London, filmed on six different cameras; her project Shadow Archive (2019) centred around the Mundaneum, a purported archive by the Belgian lawyer Paul Otlet (1868–1944), who sought to collect and catalogue all human knowledge on index cards.

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Stephen Patience pores over a century of ads in Apollo

Under the editorship of Denys Sutton, the adverts increased exponentially, such that by December 1964 the reader was obliged to traverse the foothills of some 138 pages of commerce before arriving at the Kathmandu of the Contents. Noticeably, the trade in Meissen cats, Syro-Hittite bronzes and so forth was now augmented by the likes of Kandinsky, Matisse and Epstein – an indication of a subtle change in focus both in the magazine and the international art market since the 1920s. More telling were ads viewing the past through a psychedelic prism: a campaign for the Victorian Society features an engraving of an elaborate carved chair in a fuchsia tone that evokes Terry Gilliam; a sale of Tiffany glass at Lillian Nassau in New York is heralded by the sort of curvilinear art nouveau script otherwise found on LP sleeve art. By 1973, an art deco lacquer table is hawked by Galerie Maria de Beyrie in Paris with full-on Biba typography – a retro vision quite distinct from the stuff that would have been found in Apollo's pages the first time around.

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Zachary Ginsberg on the long-suffering subjects of Georges Rouault

An exhibition organised by Skarstedt in collaboration with Shin Gallery, the first in New York since a retrospective at MoMA in 1953, displays the full range of Rouault's empathy. His favourite subjects, aside from religious ones, were prostitutes and professional clowns – figures firmly on the margins of society. His paintings seem to include every layer that complicates a person's life: sometimes creating a finely delineated portrait, at other times an indecipherable mess.

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In the current issue…

Sarah Howgate explains how Jenny Saville turns paint into a person

Jenny Saville's Reverse (2002–03) is based on her own face, but it's no self-portrait – at least, not in the conventional sense. She may have used herself as a model and a reference, but as in so much of her work, she has distorted herself beyond easy recognition. What we're seeing is not simply a head but a condition – something under the skin. What's fascinating about this is that while it is clearly true – the shine of her eyes, her parted lips and her plaintive yet defiant expression convey a well of repressed feeling – the skin is the first thing we notice. Saville had been spending time watching a cosmetic surgeon at work, moulding and sculpting faces; that might explain the sculptural, three-dimensional nature of Reverse, in which the artist pushes paint until it becomes flesh.

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Dealing in antiquities in a galaxy far, far away

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