Apollo October 2025

In mid September, I attended ‘Colour and line: Watteau drawings’ in its final days at the British Museum. It was a happy reminder of the many narratives that are contained within the BM. Any encounter with Watteau (1684–1721) naturally contains ambiguities. On display in the exhibition was a drawing of a Savoyarde (a woman from Savoy) in Paris. At the time the drawing was made she was a poor immigrant, to one independent state from another. Today, the historical Savoy region is split between France and Italy. It was a reminder that even to state Watteau’s nationality is ambiguous. He is technically a French artist, but his native city, Valenciennes, was part of the Habsburg Netherlands until seven years before his birth. And it is, perhaps, Watteau’s Netherlandish inheritance that…

1 1925–2025: One Hundred Years of Art Deco Musée des Art Décoratifs, Paris22 October–26 April 2026 In April 1925, decorators, artists, designers and the like descended on Paris for the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes, an event organised by the French government to promote the very latest in luxury style. This show marks the centenary of the movement that became known as art deco with a colossal display of more than 1,000 objects. 2 Suzanne Duchamp Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt10 October–11 January 2026 Bringing together some 70 works, this is the first major retrospective dedicated to the French painter, collagist and sculptor, whose contribution to the Dada movement has long been obscured by the artistic success of her brothers, Marcel Duchamp in particular. 3 Royal Bronzes: Cambodian Art…

Art Basel Paris has been in a process of reinvention. The fair began in 2022 with a hastily organised event as Paris+ par Art Basel and held its first two editions in the Grand Palais Éphémère, a temporary space used while the Grand Palais itself was being prepared to host the Olympics. Last year’s fair was the first to take place in the Grand Palais and this year’s will do so too, even though renovations are not fully complete. More change is on the way: the fair’s director since 2022, Clément Delépine, recently announced that he is leaving the role after this year’s edition. ‘It’s been a ride,’ he tells me when we speak in late August, but ‘this is as close as it gets for a normal edition for…

Dear London Art October, I need some time apart. It’s been intense (how can I forget your immaculately groomed openings? your shapely sales figures? your unhinged deadlines?). Still, I’ve started to wonder whether the buzz I feel when you come near me is excitement or churning panic. For years I’ve barely questioned what our relationship was doing to my other months. Already, in August, I’d be thinking about you: my body in one month, but my head in another. August is when the art magazines and highbrow glossies get in touch asking me to write about you. Naturally, whatever I write will be little more than guesswork. How can I really know how you’ll have changed from one year to the next? Whether you’ll surprise me? What we’ll talk about…

It’s 8.30 in the morning in the Valley of the Kings and, along with the temperature, anticipation is rising among our small group of journalists. We are at the entrance to one of the 62 confirmed royal tombs in these arid hills on the west side of the Nile, the necropolis of ancient Thebes. Since the 19th century the tombs have been numbered in order of their (re)discovery – ‘KV62’, the burial place of Tutankhamun, being the last to be uncovered, in 1922. This one, ‘KV57’, unearthed in 1908 by Edward Ayrton, was made for the pharaoh Horemheb (reigned c. 1319–1292 BC), who had been the boy king’s general. Only a handful of these tombs are open to the public at any one time; Horemheb’s has long been closed for…

It started off, appropriately enough, with an unexplained phenomenon. In 1862, the Boston jewellery engraver and amateur photographer William H. Mumler took several self-portraits, and upon developing them discovered in one a diaphanous hint of a second figure – even though he had been entirely alone in his studio. His first instinct was that he had not thoroughly cleaned the glass photographic plate before reusing it. Entirely plausible, and almost certainly the case; but Mumler then consulted a leading advocate of the popular Spiritualist movement, who assured him that he had succeeded in photographing some sort of spectral emanation. Thus ‘spirit photography’ was born – not quite the material of autumnal fireside ghost stories, but pleasingly uncanny and unsettling in its own way. Mumler and his numerous imitators soon set…