What can we expect from the US Pavilion at Venice?

Caravaggio's victorious Cupid ͏‌

A New Year's resolution you'll want to keep – subscribe and get six months for half price

Jonathan Griffin defends Alma Allen, the US pick for the Venice Biennale

It can be grating to hear people proudly declaring they've never heard of an artist, as if ignorance proves that person's irrelevance. It is especially annoying when – as with Alma Allen, who was announced in November as a surprise pick to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale – it is someone you've been following for years.

Read the full article

Will Wiles declares his love for a once-loathed modern building

Completed in 1968, the History Faculty Building at Cambridge has been plagued by functional problems ever since, all of which I enjoyed first hand as a student in the 1990s. This had made it, for some, an emblem of the failings of modern architecture in general, and in 1985 it had escaped demolition by one vote in the University Senate. But now £60 million has been pledged towards a major refit. At last, the History Faculty might be able to put its troubled past behind it.

Read the full article

Edward Behrens announces the first winner of the Apollo Prize for Drawing

Edward Behrens introduces the Apollo Prize for Drawing

Last year was not only Apollo's centenary but also the 25th anniversary of the Royal Drawing School. To mark these great events, we have established the Apollo Prize for Drawing and are also funding a scholarship, for one pupil annually, to take up the Drawing Year. The scholarship is fully funded, so that background does not determine entry, while the prize is a £1,000 award to enable an artist who completes the course to continue their practice.

Read the full article

Yosola Olorunshola finds Otobong Nkanga joining the dots

The motif of sharp lines piercing, holding and suspending things in place runs through the exhibition, be it in works on canvas, monumental tapestries or floor-based installations. Similarly, traces of her drawings appear in later works that are more ambitious in scale. The glimmering tapestry series Unearthed (2021) depicts undersea worlds that are simultaneously enchanting and unsettling. Transformed by the triangular slave trade, mining exploitation and climate change, the aquatic world becomes a punctured and entangled space in Nkanga's imaginary, a deep-sea burial ground where mechanised human limbs sink and fuse with plant matter.

Read the full article

Breeze Barrington on Caravaggio's portrait of a triumphant Cupid

For all the naturalism of the work, it is also a piece of theatre – for example, the eagle wings on Cupid's back, so skilfully painted, playfully brushing against his thigh, were a stage prop, borrowed from Caravaggio's friend and fellow artist, Orazio Gentileschi. Even the presentation of the painting when it was hung in the gallery of the Palazzo was a theatrical event: concealed behind a green curtain which could be dramatically opened to reveal the risqué work behind.

Read the full article

In the current issue…

How did 'the most imperious woman in 19th-century Britain' come by some her dazzling jewels? Emma Edwards of the V&A explains

How did 'the most imperious woman in 19th-century Britain' come by some of her dazzling jewels? Emma Edwards of the V&A explains

At the coronation of the 20-year-old Queen Victoria, in Westminster Abbey in 1838, an older woman caught the eye of Benjamin Disraeli. Clad in ermine-trimmed scarlet robes and bedizened with jewels, she looked, he wrote, 'like an empress' as she 'blazed among the peeresses'. This imposing figure was Frances Anne Vane, the Marchioness of Londonderry, who left rather an impression on the future prime minister. 'She was a tyrant in her way,' he wrote in 1874, after assuming office for the second time, 'but one remembers only the good in her.'

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 © 2026 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

What can we expect from the US Pavilion at Venice?

Commentaires

Enregistrer un commentaire

Posts les plus consultés de ce blog

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

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

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