The year ahead in anniversaries

There’s no contest for the most important art anniversary of the coming year – this April, it will be 100 years since the very first issue of Apollo appeared. Watch this space for the upcoming celebrations over the next 12 months. In the meantime, here are some other significant milestones being marked in 2025…

J.M.W. Turner
If you live in Edinburgh or Dublin, the coming of each new year is likely to be accompanied by thoughts of the ‘father of modern art’ (as Turner was dubbed by Ruskin). This is thanks to the collector Henry Vaughan, who divided his outstanding collection of Turner’s watercolours between the national galleries of Scotland and Ireland in bequests that stipulated that they be shown only in the month of January ‘when the light is at its weakest’ – a tradition still upheld. To mark the 250th anniversary of his birth, the galleries this year have arranged a swap – one which means that Turner’s stormy panorama of Edinburgh from below Arthur’s Seat (1801) is shown for the first time in the city it depicts. Later in the year, major Turner surveys are taking place in New Haven, where the Yale Center for British Art – home of the finest holding of Turner’s works in the United States – is presenting ‘J.M.W. Turner: Romance and Reality’ (29 March–27 July), while in London, Tate Britain pits him against his greatest rival: ‘Turner and Constable’ runs from 27 November–12 April 2026, and since Constable was a year younger it ticks off two 250s in one. A smaller show at Harewood House in Yorkshire pairs Turner with an exact contemporary: ‘Austen and Turner: A Country House Encounter’ considers how the novelist and the painter helped to shape, in their own ways, our understanding of the role of the country house in Regency England (2 May–19 October).

Art deco
‘We consequently resolved to return Decorative Art, inconsiderately treated as a Cinderella or poor relation allowed to eat with the servants, to the important, almost preponderant place it occupied in the past, of all times and in all of the countries of the globe.’ So did Frantz Jourdain, a key member of the Society of Decorative Artists, describe the impetus behind the ‘Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes’ which took place in Paris from April–October 1925. It was a gargantuan, state-sponsored affair – some 16 million people visited 15,000 exhibitors from 20 countries, who in pavilions on both sides of the Seine presented architecture, furniture, jewellery, perfume and more besides. The principal criterion for inclusion was that it had to be modern and so the exhibition became an opportunity to gauge the prevailing stylistic predilections of the era: a love of ornament, a taste for the exotic, and the incorporation of principles from avant-garde movements such as Fauvism or Cubism which, though controversial when they first appeared, were by now palatable to upmarket consumers. Not only did the exhibition define this style – known as the ‘Exposition Art Déco’ for short, it also gave it a name. The Musée des Arts Décoratifs presents a focused look at the exhibition from 21 October–29 March 2026 – coinciding with a major reinstallation of its prodigious Art Deco collections.

View at night of the glass fountain designed by René Lalique standing in the Esplanade des Invalides in Paris during the International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts in Paris in 1925. Photo: adoc-photos/Corbis via Getty Images

Amsterdam
Seven hundred and 50 seems rather young for a major European capital – a couple of thousand years shy of the she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, at any rate. But it was in 1275 that construction was likely completed on a dam at the mouth of the river Amstel. On 27 October that year Count Floris V of Holland granted a toll exemption to the citizens of the fledgling fishing village of ‘Amstelredamme’: the earliest appearance of the name in writing, and a significant boon to trade. Now, the city is celebrating with a year-long birthday party – and fittingly, given the city’s recent efforts to clean up its reputation (and obviate British stag-dos), most of the festivities are cultural. The Rijksmuseum offers an hour-long tour through the history of the city (until 26 October); the H’Art Museum (formerly the Hermitage Armitage) shows works by 75 artists, past and present, that reflect on the city in some way (until 16 March); and the Stedelijk has packaged up its impressive new sculpture hall as a ‘gift’ to the city on its birthday.

The Town Hall on Dam Square, Amsterdam (1693), Gerrit Berck Heyde. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Robert Rauschenberg
The American artist was never one to stay still, creatively or geographically – and the exhibitions marking the centenary of his birth are an apt reflection of his protean career and his penchant for globetrotting. In Germany, the Museum Brandhorst in Munich and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne are presenting a two-leg look at the relationships between Rauschenberg and fellow post-war pioneers John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly, with some 150 works of art, musical scores, stage props and costumes and live performances of works by Cage and Cunningham (10 April–17 August and 3 October–11 January 2026). The Museum of the City of New York looks at Rauschenberg’s complicated relationship with photography (13 September–22 March 2026) – as does the Fundación Juan March in Madrid (3 October–18 January 2026). In Houston, the Menil Collection focuses on his fabric works of the 1970s (19 September–1 March 2026). And in Hong Kong, M+ explores the products of his extensive travels in Asia, which culminated in the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange programme he developed after visiting China in 1982 (opening November 2025).

Robert Rauschenberg in front of his work at MoMA as he appears on the show ‘Museum of Modern Art Reopened’ in May 1964. Photo: CBS Photo Archive; © CBS Broadcasting via Getty Images

Barbara Hepworth
It might sound counterintuitive, but perhaps Barbara Hepworth’s ubiquity in the United Kingdom explains the lack of institutional shows marking 50 years of her death – that is, museums simply don’t need the prompt of an anniversary. It’s a different story in France, where her reputation has been overshadowed by male contemporaries such as Henry Moore and Francis Bacon, and where the Fondation Maeght in Saint Paul de Vence is the only institution to house her sculptures. In the summer, the museum is hosting what is only her third survey in the country; in London, meanwhile, Piano Nobile gallery offers a look at Hepworth’s stringed sculptures, spanning three decades (6 February–2 May).

The Conjurer (1775), Nathaniel Hone the Elder. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

Other anniversaries to watch out for…

Jean Tinguely was born a hundred years ago this May, and his kinetic contraptions are celebrated in a wide array of exhibitions in his native Switzerland and beyond. Michelangelo was born 550 years ago – celebrations in Italy are understated, perhaps again because the artist’s legacy is everywhere, but there’s a special birthday tour at the Casa Buonarroti on 6 March, while the film ‘Michelangelo: Love and Death’ will return to cinemas throughout the UK. A free display at the National Galleries of Scotland celebrates the centenary of Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006), the belligerent genius behind Little Sparta, while at the National Gallery in London another free display marks 150 years since the death of Jean-François Millet. Lastly, one that won’t be marked in any explicit sense, but of which the legacy will be kept alive in innumerable exhibitions across the world: it is 250 years since Nathaniel Hone the Elder painted The Conjuror, a satirical attack on Joshua Reynolds that was rejected by the Royal Academy. In protest – and to prove that his reputation remained intact despite the censure – Hone mounted a show of works completed throughout his career: the first-ever single-artist retrospective.