Eighty years on

This year APOLLO celebrates its eightieth birthday. The magazine's first issue, published in January 1925, priced at half-a-crown, gives very few explicit clues about its purposes. It is handsomely produced, in a large, rather square format with heavy, grey-green card covers; inside, there are tipped-in, well-printed coloured plates. But there is no announcement by its founding editor, R. Sydney Glover, of what the magazine intends to do; it begins, without any preamble, with a grippingly written article on the concelament of Van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece during World War I (an extract appears in 'From the Archives' on page 96). Although the magazine's focus is clearly the visual arts, it initially covered music as well. In other ways also it seems strikingly different from the magazine into which it has evolved: there are no footnoted articles for a start.

That of course is not surprising: in England and the USA, art history had barely emerged by 1925 as a subject for professional academic research. Instead, APOLLO was a magazine that aimed to provide news and well-informed articles for the connoisseur (a name bagged by its arch-rival), whether their interest was paintings, furniture, ceramics, silver or glass. In its first year there were many good belletrist contributions, ranging from Osbert Sitwell on the Courtauld collection to Desmond MacCarthy on John Lavery. Some articles were written by professional scholars and curators, including the young H.S. Ede's contributions, beginning (rather surprisingly for those who think of him solely as a modernist) with a piece on Piero di Cosimo, and Tancred Borenius on Vermeer's newly discovered Girl in a red hat, then still with Knoedler, but shortly to be purchased by Andrew Mellon. Knoedler's great rival, Duveen (prominently advertised on the magazine's back cover), also had a 'Vermeer' in stock, The laughing girl, which APOLLO in 1926 published with no less enthusiasm than it had accorded to Girl in a red hat. To modern eyes, it seems remarkable that anybody was taken in by this egregious fake (almost certainly by Theo van Wijngaarden, a collaborator of Han van Meegeren), but, like Girl in a red hat, it ended up in the National Gallery, Washington.

That story, like Martin Bailey's revelations about Van Gogh forgeries in this issue of APOLLO (pages 55-63), reveals that serious fakes were not uncommon in the 1920s, prompted no doubt by the large sums then being paid for works of art, surely one of the factors behind the creation of APOLLO. Prices were high not only for old masters but also for modern and contemporary art, which are prominent in the first issues, with Cezanne and Seurat both featuring in colour, for example. There are so few duds in APOLLO'S coverage that one would like to know more about who was guiding its taste. Could it have been Herbert Read, who wrote an article in 1925 on contemporary British ceramics, with high praise for Bernard Leach?

That article was prompted by the displays at the 1925 Paris Expositions des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels, from which Art Deco takes its name. The new style is not much evident in the magazine's first year, with the exception of a well-illustrated article by Sturge Moore on Sybil Pye's bookbindings. Her work suggests that Art Deco had origins in some aspects of the arts and crafts. The presentation of the style as a development of tradition, rather than a break with the past, may explain why there is no self-consciously avant-garde work in the early APOLLO. For any history of twentieth-century art, 1925 is the year of Picasso's Les trois danseuses, that great treasure of Tate. It has been argued that Picasso's painting, also known as La danse, was influenced by jazz; 1925 was, after all, the year of The Great Gatsby and Louis Armstrong's first recordings with his Hot Five and Hot Seven. In terms of the culture we inhabit today, it is arguable that the most significant artistic achievement of 1925 was not a painting but the showing of the world's first-ever in-flight movie.

To mark APOLLO'S anniversary we are not proposing to start film reviews, or to revive the tradition of music criticism. The magazine is, perhaps, more specialised than it was in 1925; it certainly has a more seriously academic bent. Yet the spread of its subject matter has hardly changed, notably in the coverage given to the decorative arts as well as to painting and sculpture. Architecture and interior design were covered in 1925 as they still are today. As in 1925, there is strong emphasis on news from museums and galleries, in particular new acquisitions. For the coming year, we are planning a number of special issues that look back over the art, collecting and art history of the past eighty years, but the best way we can celebrate the tradition of connoisseurship on which the magazine was founded is to continue to publish new research. With articles on new discoveries ranging from Michelangelo to eighteenth-century English furniture, we start the year as we plan to continue.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Apollo Magazine Ltd.
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