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Eric Fischl's work has fallen in and out of fashion, but his belief in painting has never faltered. He talks to Apollo about the problems that only art can address [...]

Enrico David's enigmatic sculptures resist literal interpretations, allowing viewers to understand them in different ways. He talks to Apollo about the darker side of play and the importance of being [...]

In its bicentenary year, the director of the Prado explains why the museum's collections are synonymous with the history of Spain--and how its outstanding Old Masters can appeal to new [...]

It is too little understood in England,' wrote the art historian William Gaunt in 1927, 'that the preparation of food is an art in itself,' An exception was X, Marcel [...]

Ferrara is a world unto itself. At dusk on a hot evening in July, the medieval ramparts reverberate with cicada song so exuberant that it feels as though a belt [...]

Patrick Caulfield (1936-2005) was at home in bars and restaurants. More than any other British painter of the post-war period, perhaps, he took up public dining rooms and their attributes--the [...]

Few films have provoked such revulsion as La Grande Bouffe (1973; Fig. 1). In the wake of its premiere at the Festival de Cannes, which took place so years ago [...]

Food was a priority for the men who dreamt up the Barbican. In an initial proposal for the site, which they submitted to the Corporation of the City of London [...]

'I've had a good time. I'm perfectly happy to take a break.' So says Charles Saumarez Smith, who steps down as secretary and chief executive of the Royal Academy of [...]

The triforium at Westminster Abbey has been transformed with the installation of new galleries. Stuart McKnight of MUMA, the architects responsible for the exhibition design, tells Thomas Marks about the [...]

For more than five decades, Giorgio Griffa has been exploring the relationship between painting and knowledge. He talks to Apollo about music, poetry and the unfinished nature of his art [...]

The 17th century was long on lemons. That, at least, is the impression handed down by its art. A pudgy Spanish variety is a staple of bodegon still lifes, those [...]

Skilful carving makes for better eating. That at least was the opinion of one 17th-century authority on the subject, who argued that the clumsy slicing of meat might cause offence [...]

The Gourmand's Egg. A Collection of Stories & Recipes One of the first dishes cooked on television was an omelette. On the evening of 21 January 1937, for the first [...]

Taco Dibbits talks to Thomas Marks about the Rijksmuseum's year-long celebration of Rembrandt, and why he is encouraging audiences to make subtle connections between the artist's life and work The [...]

The first time I met Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, we had just been bundled into the back of a Land Rover outside Leeds. Between selecting the winner of the inaugural [...]

Sometimes, miracles do happen.' So said Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, director of Castello di Rivoli, Turin, at a press conference in July to unveil what is, by any institution's standards, a transformative [...]

Eike Schmidt is the most high-profile of the new directors appointed to run Italy's leading museums. He talks to Apollo about his sensitive reforms of the Uffizi and keeping up [...]

Ernest Hemingway preferred Cezanne on an empty stomach. 'I learned to understand Cezanne much better [...] when I was hungry,' he wrote. 'I used to wonder if he were hungry [...]

In the window of Kulu Kulu, a conveyor-belt sushi joint on Brewer Street in London, the sushi boxes are ever tempting. There are little bricks of nigirizushi, topped with translucent [...]

Every house museum needs a hero. That usually means a writer, artist or composer; occasionally a politician makes the grade. An outlier is Auguste Escoffier, who is celebrated at the [...]

French lessons at school made me hungry. The classroom had a poster that depicted the country as a great gathering of cheeses; a fantasy fromagerie in which every wheel and [...]

Some cookery books are as much chronicles as they are practical manuals. None more so, perhaps, than Claudia Roden's The Book of Jewish Food (1996), at once an expansive history [...]

The Apollo Awards celebrate outstanding achievements in the art and museum worlds, recognising success and rewarding ambition across historical and contemporary fields. Since the inauguration of these awards in 1992, [...]

This year, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna celebrates its 125th anniversary. Its director-general Sabine Haag talks to Apollo about the museum's founding and its rich collections--and why the audience always [...]

Sjarel Ex, the director of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, talks to Apollo about how the Dutch museum named after two historic collectors has bold plans to store and conserve [...]

The first caterers at the National Gallery were volunteers. In the early months of the Second World War. Lady Irene Gater realised, during one of Myra Hess's morale-boosting lunchtime concerts, [...]

Elizabeth David had little time for food photography. 'You can't do colour pictures of food,' she told Audrey Withers, her editor at Vogue from the mid 1950s: 'I think they're [...]

Jan Morris was no fan of Venetian cooking. Its mood was one of 'lofty frugality', she wrote in Venice (i960), complaining of the 'soporific sameness' of the restaurants and trattorie [...]

Few artists can match Giuseppe Penone in his deep understanding of artistic materials. The Italian sculptor tells Apollo how he has learnt through touch and repetition The first thing I [...]

At the new Whitney, the art begins in the elevators. Six in Four was created by the late Richard Artschwager, and consists of four elevator interiors reprising motifs that the [...]

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is an enterprising institution that combines popular appeal with groundbreaking research. Its director Axel Ruger talks to Apollo about drawing in the crowds and [...]

The Book of Citrus Fruits (Taschen) For a work of conceptual art, Roelof Louw's Soul City (Pyramid of Oranges) (1967) is unusually generous. Some 5,800 oranges are stacked neatly in [...]

The Food Museum As any museum visitor ought to know, eating and drinking--like heavy petting at the public baths--are strictly forbidden in the galleries. Perhaps that's why there are so [...]

Cutlery has defied artists to find new forms. For inventiveness in tableware, animation holds the key, writes Thomas Marks Disney's table dramas Modern artists never got far with knives and [...]

There's a memorable passage in Samuel Beckett's Molloy (1951), in which the vagrant narrator of the novel's first section ruminates on his method of sucking stones. The process of transferring [...]

As an exhibition of new paintings opens across two venues in the US, Christopher Le Brun PRA talks to Thomas Marks about the musical and mythological inspirations behind his work [...]

Ambition and intimacy are not the most natural of bedfellows. But the achievement of 'Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution' was that its curators realised more or less the grandest imaginable [...]

It is hard not to smile on first stepping inside the Box, an ambitious civic museum that opened in Plymouth, South Devon, in late September. For a start, it is [...]

They flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude'. Wordsworth, like many of his Romantic peers, was partial to being alone. Those lines--yes, on daffodils--hail its [...]

Speaking to curators, one often gets the impression that museums are in the throes of an acquisitions crisis. In this country at least, departmental budgets for new accessions have shrivelled [...]

Nicholas Penny's championing of scholarship and his personal commitment to research has made him an unusual figure among museum directors, but the National Gallery has thrived during his term. Our [...]

Palazzo Cini has reopened its doors, showcasing Vittorio Cini's collection of Tuscan and Ferrarese paintings in the building that was once his Venetian home. Luca Massimo Barbero, director of the [...]

The Mauritshuis reopens this summer, following an ambitious redevelopment that includes a new extension and a meticulous restoration of the 17th-century building. Apollo talks to director Emilie Gordenker about overseeing [...]

Martha Lloyd's Household Book: The Original Manuscript from Jane Austen's Kitchen (Bodleian Library) The great chefs learn to cook in Paris. The rest of us, alas, are reduced to Cooking [...]

Unlike, say, a computer game or the latest box set, art history cannot be completed. A perk of editing this magazine, one that I hope is shared with its readers, [...]

Museum of the Home, London Zaha Hadid had the kitchen in her flat in Clerkenwell removed. 'It was ugly,' she told the Guardian in 2010.1 used to have someone to [...]

After the fast, the feast. Announcements of the opening dates for revamped museums and, in some cases, entirely new museums or buildings, have begun to drop into my inbox with [...]

The Fasti Veneziani (Venetian Glories) of Antonio Guardi is a series of some 58 pen and ink drawings celebrating the history of Venice from its founding to the mid 18th [...]

The first visual artist invited by the BBC to give the Reith Lectures, Grayson Perry's investigations into the role of the artist today have seen him evolve into an incisive [...]