A satirist of his time – and ours

Plus: Monet makes a splash in Paris ͏‌        Get more great writing every day – from just £1 a week     George MacBeth on the strangely topical satire of Honoré Daumier A keen observer of the turbulent Pax Britannica that just about held in Europe between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War, Daumier cuts an alarmingly contemporary figure in 2026. While this survey sticks to his work across sculpture, caricature and painting, and avoids didactically pointing out present-day parallels, several resonances inevitably come to mind when encountering Daumier’s gallery of political grotesques. For instance, his ‘pear-shaped’ caricatures of Louis-Philippe I recall Chinese netizens using Winnie-the-Pooh as a stand-in for Xi Jinping, while his gouty, corpulent bronze July Monarchy busts evoke recent fat J.D. Vance memes.   Read the full article       Catherine Bennett visits Rome’s first photography museum Former slaughterhouses make for excellent exhibition venues. These post-industrial spaces, with their high ceilings and large volumes designed for the dispatch of hundreds of animals a day, are the ideal size for installations and monumental artworks. Across Europe, disused abattoirs have been adapted for cultural use, from Les Abattoirs in Toulouse to the Matadero in Madrid or the new Plato Contemporary Art Gallery in Ostrava in the Czech Republic. Rome is the latest city to catch on as it converts its huge Mattatoio complex into a cultural centre, with a new museum dedicated to photography at its heart.   Read the full article       Anna Brady finds Monet in high demand in the Paris auctions In May, the ‘giga-week’ sales of modern and contemporary art kick off in New York. Those auctions can suck the oxygen out of the market at the top end, but not every seller wants to consign their works into that vast milieu. This is especially true of European, and specifically French, works, which often do better in their home market.   Read the full article       Catherine Ince on how Ray and Charles Eames changed ideas of home For a special issue of Architectural Design devoted to the work of American designers Charles and Ray Eames in 1966, the British architects Alison and Peter Smithson wryly titled their essay on Eames aesthetics ‘Just a few chairs and a house’. For the Smithsons, this seemingly modest body of work represented a seismic shift in the ‘design climate’ of the 1950s. The Eames’s fibreglass shell chairs were an almost immediate success, covered by international press and furnishing homes, school halls and offices across America and beyond. Their upholstered Lounge Chair followed in 1956 and still represents the epitome of mid-century modernism as a signal of taste, sophistication and ‘good’ design. But what about their architecture?   Read the full article       Emma Crichton-Miller on the popularity of early American photography Photography became the medium through which the nation began to confront itself. Daguerreotypes, the cheaper, quicker tin-types, ambrotypes, platinum prints, silver albumen prints, silver gelatin prints, stereographs and cyanotypes were produced all over the country; subjects ranged from individual and family portraits to the spectacular landscapes of the Western states, the bloody battles of the Civil War, the brutalities of slavery and the displacement of Native Americans. And while the medium became a vital instrument of scientific enquiry, it increasingly shone as an art form.   Read the full article     In the current issue…     Benjamin Markovits on a Cornish scene where nothing happens but the details are full of life It was an engagement present from my in-laws-to-be, from a gallery in London that specialises in Bloomsbury artists. Our painting is obviously later but maybe the colour palette is similar: a sort of richness or depth of drabness. I tend to like paintings with these colours, it doesn’t really matter what they’re about. And not just paintings – novels or stories in which nothing much happens, and nobody’s particularly happy or miserable and yet there’s still somehow (or because of that fact) a reality or depth of feeling. One of my first memories is looking out of a second-floor window in London, on a rainy day, as a bus went by. I was eating a pot of yoghurt with a spoon, and the metal clinked against the glass. This has a similar feel, although of course the subject is very different.   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.