‘Now you can gasp’, said the Chairman of the Trustees of the British Museum to guests at a recent fundraising dinner. He had just revealed the valuation of £1 billion for the magnificent collection of Chinese ceramics that has been given to the museum by the Sir Percival David Foundation. Munificence on this scale is normally only associated with the richest of American museums, so a new record seems to have been set in the European context by this extraordinary gesture.

A key architect of the history of Abstract Expressionism, its sources, development and legacy, David Anfam re-examined and extended our knowledge of a wide range of twentieth- and twenty- first-century artists. His expertise facilitated the establishment of the Clyfford Still Museum, Denver, and his approachable teaching and writing opened up new avenues for thinking about art.

In 2024, to mark seventy-five years since the artist’s death, four concurrent exhibitions dedicated to Ensor have been staged in Antwerp. The most substantial of these is In Your Wildest Dreams: Ensor Beyond Impressionism at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, which is the culmination of years of research into the museum’s collection of Ensor’s works – the largest in the world.