OXFORD.- The Ashmolean Museum has won Apollo Magazine awards for both Book of the Year and Acquisition of the Year. Apollo Magazine announced the winners of its 2014 awards on 3 December 2014.

The Apollo Book of the Year Award was this year awarded to the Ashmolean for its book Medieval and Renaissance Sculpture in the Ashmolean Museum, written by Jeremy Warren. The three-volume catalogue covers the Ashmolean collection of European sculpture dating from 1200 to around 1540, and follows in the footsteps of Nicholas Penny's acclaimed 1992 catalogue of later European sculpture held by the Museum.

The Apollo Award recognises publications that have contributed significantly to their field, both advancing scholarly research and extending its public reach. Apollo Magazine said of the book: "For all that catalogues are not really designed to be read from cover to cover, this one is hard to put down."

The Apollo Acquisition of the Year Award, which recognises the most noteworthy addition to a museum collection, was this year given to the Ashmolean for a bequest made by the late Professor Michael Sullivan (1916-2013). The Sullivan Collection of Modern and Contemporary Chinese Art comprises more than four-hundred works of art amassed by Professor Sullivan and his wife, Khoan, from the 1940s, and represents works by the principal artists of late-twentieth century and contemporary China. A large part of the collection had never been exhibited in public.

Apollo Magazine said of the acquisition: "The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford has now become the major centre in the west for the study of 20th-century Chinese painting, thanks to the bequest late last year by Michael Sullivan of some 400 works that he and his wife, Khoan, had assembled over more than 60 years. [...] In the years to come, the display of this great collection on rotation in the Khoan and Michael Sullivan Gallery at the Ashmolean will reveal for the first time in the west the range and quality of art achieved in China over the past century, often under the most challenging circumstances imaginable."

Dating back to 1992, the Apollo Awards celebrate major achievements in the art and museum worlds. They have seen significant development in 2013–14 with the introduction of new awards categories (Artist of the Year and Digital Innovation of the Year) and an annual dinner in London.

Other awards were this year given to: the Factum Foundation (Digital Innovation of the Year); The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (Museum Opening of the Year); Nicholas Penny (Personality of the Year); Anselm Kiefer (Artist of the Year); and the Palazzo Strozzi (Exhibition of the Year for Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino: Diverging Paths of Mannerism).