Wes Anderson fans will be in heaven this winter at the Design Museum in London which is showing more than 600 items from the US filmmaker’s various films and projects. Wes Anderson: The Archives (21 November-26 July 2026) will include relevant ephemera, from polaroids, sketches and props to the director’s own spiral-bound notebooks, following a broadly chronological survey of his distinguished career.
Wes admirers will have the opportunity to relish a candy-pink model of the Grand Budapest Hotel, bringing to life the 2014 film of the same name which proved a visual feast. One eye-catching object from the film made an impact on art fans: Boy with Apple, the “priceless Renaissance portrait” that is unexpectedly inherited by Ralph Fiennes’s eccentric character Gustave H—“the rest of his shit is worthless junk”, he quips.
The “painting” even appeared in an auction catalogue during a pivotal moment in the film, complete with caption, fuelling the mythology around its genius creator, Johannes Van Hoytl the Younger. Esteemed critics even praised the work.
“Boy with Apple is a quintessential product of the Czech mannerist, Habsburg high Renaissance, Budapest neo-humanist style,” wrote Jonathan Jones in The Guardian in 2014. But Jones was in on the joke—the painting is infact a 2012 work by British artist Michael Taylor and was commissioned by Anderson especially for the film.
