Apollo Art Awards 2020: winner of the Exhibition of the Year

The Annunciation, Jan van Eyck, c1425. 

National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Apollo is proud to announce the winners of its annual awards. Dating back to 1992, the Apollo Awards celebrate major achievements in the art and museum worlds.

Short list of best galleries

1.Aberdeen Art Gallery
Reopened November 2019

A renovation & expansion costing £34.6m almost doubled the number of permanent galleries and allowed 3 times as many objects to go on display. The history & wealth of Aberdeen’s civic collections, from founding collector Alexander Macdonald’s Victorian portrait gal­lery to recent acquisitions of Scottish silver, are now hand­some­ly presented.

2.The Box, Plymouth
Opened September 2020

One of few capital projects to have steamrollered its way through the pandemic this year (at a cost of £40m), the Box draws together the old civic art museum and library, their renovated buildings linked by a large extension that includes on-site collection storage in the box that caps off the structure.

3.British Galleries, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Reopened March 2020

The renovation of these galleries, the Met’s flagship project in its 150th year, has involved a reconsideration of the global contexts of six centuries of British decorative arts. Around a quarter of the objects here were acquired with the new display in mind.

4.Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden
Reopened February 2020

This €50m project has done much to improve facilities, but has also reintegrated sculpture and painting in the galleries and increased the sense of spectacle in the display of these great collections. Extensive conservation has been carried out on some 200 paintings and 300 frames.

5.KBR Museum, Brussels
Opened September 2020

This new museum for the Royal Library of Belgium, displays manu­scripts from the collection of the dukes of Burgundy. c100 of them are shown across two floors, alongside armour, prints, sculpture and paintings, with the appreciation and interpretation of manuscript illumination at the heart of the museum’s mission.

6.Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art, Ibeju-Lekki
Opened October 2019

The first dedicated university art museum in Nigeria is named after Prince Yemisi Shyllon who has donated c1,000 works it – a founding collection that ranges from pre-colonial objects to modern and contemporary works by Ben Enwonwu, Nike Davies-Okundaye etc. Shyl­lon has also committed to funding the museum for at least 15 years.

Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent

Winning Exhibition 

by Thomas Marks, editor of Apollo

Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution
Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent

Ambition and intimacy are not the most natural of bedfellows. But the achievement of Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution was that its curators realised the grandest imaginable exhibition on its subject, in scope and scale, while allowing visitors a beguiling proximity to so many paintings by Jan van Eyck. Of 22 works ascribed to him, 13 were on display here; anchoring portraits and devotional works on loan from European and American collections were the eight restored outer panels of the Ghent Altarpiece, as well as the Adam and Eve from the upper register of its interior (the versos of the central outer panels).

Through 13 galleries, the exhibition provided what Apollo’s reviewer described as near perfect conditions for close looking. In splitting up the panels from St Bavo’s Cathedral, and displaying them at eye level, it gave visitors the chance to scrutinise Van Eyck’s sur­fac­es, his feeling for light and his mastery of de­tail, and to revel in the honest humanity of his vision. While the dis­play con­textualised Van Eyck with contemporaneous objects and Italian paint­ings, it mis­sed no trick in creating moments of intense drama in the juxtaposit­ion of his works: the two versions of St Francis Receiving the Stig­mata shown side by side; The Annunciat­ion from Washington, with its jazzy archangel, in the same room as the cor­responding pan­els from the Ghent Altarpiece; and, in the penultimate gallery, five of Van Eyck’s portraits with the panels depicting the altarpiece’s donors.

Beyond that drama was a sense of integrity, of an exhibition in the right place at the right time. Since 2012, the MSK Ghent has hosted the restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece. In parallel with that proj­ect, the Closer to Van Eyck website has gathered and made publicly available high-resolution images, including those using scientific imaging techniques, of most of the artist’s works. In this context, Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution felt like the dividend of local and international collaboration: several loaned paintings had been newly conserved for the exhibition; its robust catalogue contains 19 essays by leading Van Eyck scholars.

130,000 people could visit the exhibition before it closed due to the pandemic, halfway through its scheduled run in mid March. For many of them, the memory of it will have provided much consol­at­ion in the months that followed.