Museums

Tate purchases Constable for £23.1m

The Tate has acquired John Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, 1831, from the heirs of Lord Ashton of Hyde for £23.1m, considerably less than the £40m it may have cost on the... MORE

Published online: 23 May 2013

 
Recently published

Caligula reunited with his barges

Restored statue, broken by tomb robbers, to go on display at Roman ship museum

Published online: 23 May 2013

M+ gets a Tino Sehgal

Thirteen collectors and artists donate 280 works to the museum

Published online: 22 May 2013

Build first and find the art to fill them later

China’s public museums have grown by 1,000%—leaving their collections and staff development lagging behind

Published online: 22 May 2013

European paintings get (back) the space they deserve

The Met’s Old Masters galleries reopen in rooms lost in the 1970s when the era of the blockbuster began

Published online: 16 May 2013

When art fought the Cold War

A touring exhibition recreates the CIA’s 1946 secret weapon that scandalised conservatives

Published online: 16 May 2013

Gallery

Gallery:  Dia:Beacon turns ten

In celebration of its tenth anniversary, Dia: Beacon held a “community free day” for local residents on 18 May which featured the opening of a long-term installation of work by Alighiero e Boetti and a public reading of On Kawara’s One Million Years, a document containing the written number for a million years’ time. In this picture gallery, we take a look at some of the museum’s best-known works and performances over the years. Pac Pobric

Gallery:  Met’s Old Masters galleries reopen

When the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s galleries for European paintings made between 1250 and 1800 open to the public on 23 May, visitors will experience a collection transformed and refreshed, the result of two years of expansion and rethinking. The renovation of the galleries is long overdue, last undertaken in full in the early 1950s. When the Met’s then director Thomas Hoving inaugurated the age of the blockbuster in the early 1970s, one third of the space, then given over to Impressionism and contemporary art, was turned into galleries for temporary exhibitions. The impetus for the new, expanded galleries was the 2007 re-installation of the Met’s collection of ancient Greek and Roman art, which reclaimed space that had been taken from the collection in 1949 by the Fountain restaurant. “We felt that if [the] Greek and Roman [collection] could get [its] old space back, we hoped for an arrangement to get some of our old space back," says says Keith Christiansen, the chairman of the European paintings department. "But when we approached our director, Tom Campbell, he said: ‘Why don’t you just take it all?’”

Stormin Norman

One of the art world's most distinguished and colourful characters has been caught on canvas. The Spanish artist Daniel Quintero has...

A truth too far for the Met

The Metropolitan may be hosting a major show on punk, but the museum appears to have little time for the woman who helped to dress the...

Out of the ashes

After the disastrous fire at the Cuming Museum, in south London, in March, there had to be a hurried change to the programme. “Baptized by...

Rijksmuseum celebrates reopening with flashmob

Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum reopens at long last after a ten-year renovation. To celebrate, the museum staged a flashmob in a local shopping mall, dramatically recreating one of the museum's most famous paintings, Rembrandt's The Night Watch.