Armchair Culture: gallery-going from your own front room
Inside the Guggenheim Museum NYC
Museum and art gallery doors may be closed, but there are plenty of online resources for Armchair Gallery-Going. And as the curator of 16th century art at The National Gallery, Dr Matthias Wivel points out, ‘Art provides a solace, helps distract you a bit when things are really difficult, and helps us think about the fundamental concerns of being human.’
Take your mind off grim reality with our selection of virtual tours, websites and TV programmes. Here’s where to find the best Armchair Culture:
Now’s the time to catch-up with Bridget Riley
Visiting the main London galleries has never been easier. First stop the National Gallery’s glorious Titian exhibition which opened and then closed within three days. Love, Desire, Death unites the artist’s seven masterpieces for the first time in three centuries (there’s a brilliant tour with curator Matthias Wivel on Facebook HERE). Then off to the Design Museum to listen to Design Dispatches – this week the museum’s director Tim Marlow is in conversation with fashion designer Bella Freud. And there are some great resources on the Tate Galleries website, including podcasts and playlists, the kids section has lots of at-home projects such as How to paint like Frank Bowling and How to weave like Anni Albers. While art-loving fans of Bill Nighy will enjoy the actor’s short tour of the Courtauld Gallery. If you missed the recent Bridget Riley retrospective, now’s the time to catch-up. The South Bank Centre’s website features talks and written articles on the Great British artist. For more Women in Art, click over to the wonderful Great Women Artists website created by art historian Katy Hessel – there are over 20 podcasts to listen to, or for a quick art fix have a scroll through the Great Women Artists on Instagram.
How about taking this opportunity to see the Mona Lisa without crowds at The Louvre in Paris? Or click on over to Amsterdam for a spin around the Van Gogh Museum – watch David Hockney discussing landscape painting and the Dutch artist’s colourful work on YouTube,’ or browse Van Gogh’s collection of Japanese prints HERE. Then take a tourist-free trip across town to the Rijksmuseum to view the great Rembrandts and Vermeers in Masterpieces Up Close.
Photo: Guggenheim
Cross the Atlantic from your couch and visit the National Gallery of Art in Washington for a tour of the Degas exhibition and then scoot on over to the west coast for the Michaelangelo: Mind of the Master exhibition at The Getty Center in LA. We love the museum’s art challenge on Twitter and Instagram – The Getty invited people to recreate a masterpiece at home and the response has been phenomenal (check out the David Hockney). No need to pay that pricey admission fee at famous New York establishments when you can enjoy video content, artist’s profiles and virtual tours at the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA has an excellent Distance Learning section) and take the splendid podcast tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s beautiful building with Roman Mars (host of 99% Invisible) with the Guggenheim at Home.
The Hermitage in St Petersburg is a vast site with stunning gilded palaces and incomparable collections containing over three million works of art and artefacts, this could take a few days…. Always crowded, this incredible place is now yours to explore from the comfort of your own front room.
It’s certainly not the same as wandering through the lovely grounds but even a quick glimpse of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park can lift the spirits. And we’ll end this global tour by heading back to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford ( part of the University of Oxford) for a virtual tour of the galleries and spot of online artefact browsing.
Finally, our fabulous BBC has responded to the crisis with an ‘online festival,’ Culture in Quarantine. Here you’ll find some of the best art critics and broadcasters covering major exhibitions; plus, music, theatre and dance. More Armchair Culture can be found over on BBC4 where film critic Mark Kermode discusses Secrets of Cinema, and writer and broadcaster Waldemar Januszczak uncovers hidden meanings in four world famous paintings, in The Art Mysteries. Though it’s no longer on iPlayer, it is still possible to head east for the BBC 2017 series The Art of Japanese Life with Dr James Fox, on YouTube. And if you haven’t watched it already, we highly recommend Secrets of the Museum about the V&A, on BBC2.
Compiled by Alyson Walsh and Antonia Cunliffe
Discussion (17 Comments)
Mrs Tonia says:
It was fun to work on these ideas with Alyson for this post. There’s a wealth of stuff online, via the imbedded You Tube channels of the Museum and gallery websites.
Explore where you haven’t been and enjoy what’s on offer. The best critics/broadcasters have some super series On BBC Four right now with more in the pipeline. Alastair Sooke, one of my favourites will be covering Andy Warhol at the shuttered Tate Modern, Simon Schama will cover Young Rembrandt at Ashmolean in Oxford. And there’s Art Nouveau and Aubrey Beardsley out there already.Antonia Cunliffe
Lorraine Matthews says:
We ‘visited’ the Rijksmuseum today and the Musée d’Orsay last weekend. One of our favourite places online is the Curator’s Corner at the British Museum where people who are passionate about the objects they care for focus on one or two and bring them to life in a short talk.
Saba says:
Hello, thank you for this post. I sent the link to Van Gogh’s Japanese drawing collection to an artist friend who studies all things Japanese. He was thrilled. Unfortunately, our dingbat president here in the United States is not interested in the arts, and we have no access to some of the British content due to a lack of related trade agreements. A couple of the episodes of the tours of rooms in the Victoria and Albert Museum inaccessible to the public were posted on YouTube, however, and I still found plenty else in this post that I do plan to explore. Thank you, thank you.
Isobel Smith says:
WOW!!
Thankyou, you two, for all those links! And I’m starting with Bill Nighy! xxKaren says:
Thanks for these! I have discovered clothing company Toast’s podcasts. They are wonderful and can be found on their website. They feature creative, thinking people – mainly women. I’ve learned so much and they are so soothing.
Carey Barnes says:
Thank you so much for all these wonderful suggestions. I have been jotting things down as I see them, but to have everything all in one place is just great. Can now work systematically and purposefully through the list rather than waving my arms around in a hopeless indecisive fluster!
Another series which I have been watching on BBC 4, also available on I-player, is Age of the Image, by the art historian/broadcaster James Fox. Four parts in a series which covers the history of photography, cinema, print and digital media as well as the fine arts I would highly recommend this thought provoking series. There appears to be a tie-in with the distance learning Open University. Follow up http://www.bbc.co.uk/ageoftheimage/
I shall certainly look into this for my own enlightenment.
Best wishes to all TNMA readers.
AntoniaAnne Murphy says:
I’d fully intended to come down to London to see the Picasso & Paper Exhibition, it was not to be so was delighted to see it was ‘virtually’ there. Unfortunately a disappointment due to invasive & dreadful music & camera work distant from most of the paintings., I gave up,, others will no doubt disagree! On the positive side I watched a virtual tour of the Barnes exhibition in Philadelphia, I visit regularly when I go to see my daughter & family, it was a joy with curators giving the finer points of a number of their treasures….highly recommended.
Onward & upward…
Sarah says:
Thank you so much for this post Alyson. Am looking forward to making some virtual visits over the next few days .
Rach with an E says:
Thank you Alyson! So lovely to have all this information in one place and so excited to take a peek, though I am waiting until the evening so I don’t gorge on everything. I have watched The Art Mysteries and will try to persuade the daughter, who is doing art A level, to watch them too. Wish me luck!
TNMA is my daily dose of anti Covid-19 sanity medicine. Thank you!
Hilary 
Madelaine Leave a Reply
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What a brilliant post! Thank you for all the great ideas, just what we need in these grim times.