Blog

The hotly anticipated Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers show at the National Gallery in London is now open. It is the first major exhibition at the National Gallery to be devoted to Van Gogh and its staging marks the gallery’s bicentenary.  The show...

Described in a recent Sunday Times interview as ‘Modern Britain’s answer to Leonardo da Vinci’, Devlin's work includes concert tours for Beyoncé, U2 and Adele,  award-winning sets for opera and theatre as The Crucible and The Lehman Trilogy, the AI-influenced ‘Please...

The Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum is a hot ticket. After it was announced in 2021, the Rijksmuseum declared the show the “first and last” retrospective for the artist and the most comprehensive show by the 17th century master ever....

The Art Newspaper has published its Visitor Figures Survey for 2022 which shows that museums are struggling to regain visitors after the Covid closures. Some 141 million visits were made to the world’s top 100 art museums in 2022, which is double the number...

According to the curators of the Rijksmuseum's Vermeer exhibition, the artist’s main patron was probably a woman - one Maria de Knuijt, the wife of Pieter van Ruijven. For decades it has been assumed that Van Ruijven, a wealthy Delft citizen,...

In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine,1900–1930s published by Thames & Hudson accompanies an exhibition which is currently at the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid and moves to Museum Ludwig in Cologne in June. Co-edited by Konstantin Akinsha, Katia...

Earlier this month, the Rijksmuseum, the Netherlands’ national museum of art and history, Vermeer exhibition opened. The first retrospective exhibition of Johannes Vermeer in the history of the Rijksmuseum, it has some 28 paintings – from seven countries around the world – making it...

Congratulations and thank you to Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum who teamed up with Kyiv’s National Art Museum of Ukraine to secretly bring dozens of Ukrainian 20th century avant-garde artworks and host an exhibition of those works. Installation view  © Museum Bookstore The show,...

If you haven't yet been, you have only a couple of days to go to catch the British Museum's exhibition, Hieroglyphs: unlocking ancient Egypt. The show traces the story of the race to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs, from initial efforts by medieval...

The hotly anticipated Vermeer Show at the Rijksmuseum is now open. It is the Rijksmuseum's first retrospective exhibition of works by the Dutch master Johannes Vermeer and the most complete ever mounted with 28 of his 37 paintings. It includes the Rijksmuseum's own Vermeer...

In 1882, Archer M. Huntington, the son of an American railroad tycoon, made his first visit to Europe and found a book about Spanish gypsies in a Liverpool bookshop. “Spain must be much more interesting than Liverpool,” he wrote in his diary....

The V&A's exhibition examining the popular culture of South Korea is a fun and high energy show and is well-worth visiting if you are in London. Hallyu: The Korean wave explores the global impact of Korean culture through some 200 objects ranging from clips of Psy's Gangnam Style...

This autumn, the Royal Academy will present the first ever UK exhibition spanning performance artist, Marina Abramovic's life’s work.  The show, which was originally due to open in September 2020, was first postponed to autumn 2021 due to the pandemic, before...

The upcoming Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum has become the museum's biggest ever presale with over 100,000 tickets sold and a month to go before the doors open. The exhibition is the museum's first ever retrospective exhibition on the 17th-century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer...

Next month sees the opening of Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance at the V&A in London. The show is the first major UK exhibition to explore the exceptional talents of the Renaissance master Donatello (c1386-1466). Over 130 objects will be on show - many have never been seen in the UK before.

Edvard Munch's The Scream is definitely having a moment. The image of a pale, hairless figure holding its head in its hands and howling has grown to permeate every aspect of popular culture, from film and TV to memes and tattoos....

Back in the early 1990s, the British art world changed forever thanks to the YBAs. Nearly 30 years on, and the likes of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin remain some of the leading lights in contemporary British art. A new...

Art historian and Museum Bookstore friend, Jean Marie Carey offers a comprehensive and nuanced review of the publication, Bauhaus Imaginista - the companion book to an ambitious international exhibition project about the global influence of Bauhaus. Written and edited by Marion von Osten...

Medieval Bodies: Life, Death and Art in the Middle Ages is a compelling and, at times, gruesome read that explores the Medieval world through the body.  This beautiful book is published by the Wellcome Collection and written by art historian, Jack Hartnell....

'Whosoever plants a tree, winks at immortality' - Felix Dennis At the end of last year Kew’s Library, Art and Archives took delivery of the first of ten very large scale drawings by artist Mark Frith from the estate of the...

At a time when museums face the challenge of reassessing their collections for the global age, the centre of gravity still lies in Western Europe and North America. Below, art historian and author of germanmodernism.org, Jean Marie Carey PhD reviews the exhibition catalogue, Hello...