From the January 2022 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here. Many – if not all – artists eventually acquire origin stories, formative experiences to which all their subsequent artistic ...

From the November 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here. It feels like a long time that we’ve been without the Studio Museum in Harlem. Founded to address the lack of New York City ...

In 1781, the sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736–83) cut a strange figure. A decade before, he had been an artist at the heart of Viennese high society. Poised to become professor of sculpture at ...

Read an introduction to the Apollo 40.

From the January 2026 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here. The long-anticipated opening of the first exhibition at the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA) in Benin City, in Edo State, southern ...

We have all become suddenly more aware of the moments when we cannot avoid touching elements of public buildings. Architecture is the most physical, most imposing and most present of the arts – you ...

Last week, the BBC aired what’s likely to be the final instalment of its coverage of what has been called the biggest dig at Pompeii in a generation. Two years ago, excavations began at a block on Via ...

‘Mercilessly death reaped the ranks of the first pioneers. Never will we pay enough tribute to their memory.’ So reads an inscription in the Memorial Hall of the Africa Museum (formerly the Royal ...

Sometime during his last decade on earth while shooting a movie that he’d been planning to make for 40 years, the Indian film-maker Satyajit Ray had a heart attack. The doctors advised him to refrain ...

In the early 16th century, a Roman coin bearing the image of a crocodile chained to a palm branch was unearthed at Nîmes in the south of France. On the obverse were profile portraits, back to back, of ...

The grotesque is a slippery category, which may have originated in Renaissance notions of Roman painting but soon came to denote hybrid forms and artistic licence. Does it best describe a playful ...

Apollo supports open access to images of artworks that are out of copyright. Below is a list of museums and other archives that provide unrestricted downloads of high-resolution images. This list will ...