Taxpayers’ money spent on decolonising museums to address history ‘written by white men’
Taxpayers’ money has been spent on decolonising England’s museums to address history “written by white men”. Millions of pounds have been given by Arts Council England to…
The show to make you fall in love with architectural drawings
When Sir John Soane – architect of the Bank of England and collector extraordinaire – died in 1837, he had something like 30,000 architectural drawings tucked into…
Neil MacGregor interview: ‘Why don’t we have a Museum of England?’
Neil MacGregor studied many cultures of the world while director of the British Museum, but it is the English he finds the most perplexing. “Why is there…
Museum grapples with legacy of British Empire by decolonising… a stuffed echidna
A stuffed Australian mammal has been swept into a museum project to tackle the legacy of the British Empire because colonial explorers made it “look comical”. …
Faceless painting worth £750k ruined after ‘bored’ security guard draws eyes on it
“The person who drew the eyes on the figures in the painting of Anna Leporskaya has been identified: This is an employee of a private firm that…
Italy’s artefact return to Athens adds pressure on UK to give back Elgin Marbles
The return of a key fragment of the Parthenon to Athens from Sicily shows “momentum is building” toward the eventual repatriation of the Elgin Marbles, the Greek…
What Vera Lynn was really like behind closed doors
Above: one of Lynn’s sketchbooks from the 1930s. She was taught by Arthur Segal, a Romanian artist who fled Nazi Germany. His school in north London encouraged…
‘We’ve no intention of removing anything from display’
Yet, for Finaldi, although providing context about the source of its sitter’s wealth is interesting, it is “not necessarily the most important thing to say” about the…
‘Like the Loch Ness monster’: how Richard Rogers’s Pompidou Centre shocked Paris
Soon after the opening of the Pompidou Centre in 1977, Richard Rogers, who died at the weekend aged 88, was standing outside, looking up at the spaghetti…
Treasures of the Al Thani Collection, review: new Paris exhibition showcases 6,000 years of history
If you’ve ever wondered what a 212-carat emerald looks like (whopping), or how the Ancient Egyptian queen Hatshepsut played board games at court (with a piece of…