Editorial from Exhibo and official announcements from Musée du Louvre.
Editorial coverage on Exhibo
How nineteenth-century European painters built an “Orient” of harems, mosques and deserts, and how Said and museums rewrite that gaze
Orientalism in Western art names European pictures of North Africa and the Middle East shaped by empire, travel and studio fantasy. This guide traces Ingres, Delacroix, Gérôme and Matisse through dated museum works, then follows Said, Nochlin, and museum debates on display, provenance and restitution.
Ordinary people in ordinary rooms: how genre painting stages everyday life from Bruegel’s barns through to Hopper’s diner.
Genre painting pictures unnamed people at work, play, or rest rather than saints, monarchs, or battles. This guide defines the type against the other academy ranks, shows how painters build a scene, reads six named works from 1568 to 1942, and maps how contemporary painters still use kitchens, bars, and living rooms.
Mirrors, signatures and a free model: how painters made themselves the sitter from van Eyck’s 1433 panel to photography
A self-portrait is a likeness the maker produces of their own body, often with a mirror, a signature and a claim on professional status. This history follows that practice through oil, print and camera, four visitable works, and the critics who treated the genre as vanity, workshop drill or autobiography.
Istoria at the academy’s summit: Bible, myth and recent events as large pictures meant to instruct through human action.
History painting is the academic genre of serious narrative: Bible, myth, literature and public events staged as moral action, not a documentary of dates. This guide defines istoria, maps Félibien’s hierarchy, walks through studio method, reads six named canvases from Raphael to Géricault, and shows how later painters still use the form.
Academy, myth and the life room: how Western art treated the unclothed body as a learned form from marble workshops to Manet
Search results mix fertility figurines, Salon scandals and studio drawing. Art history uses a narrower term: the nude as a trained convention, with myth, athletics and academy rules supplying the alibi. This guide follows that convention through named, visitable works and the arguments that later stripped the alibi away.
Court, civic, donor and group likeness from Roman Egypt to oil’s golden centuries, and how painters answered the camera
Portraiture is the craft of making a specific person recognisable and useful to the living: as ancestor, donor, ruler, spouse or citizen. This guide follows those paid jobs through panel, fresco and oil, then the decades when photography cheapened the face without ending the painted court and civic commission.
Breakfast tables, flower pieces, and kitchen pictures: how still life painting works from Haarlem specialists to Cézanne and Cubism.
Still life painting treats arranged objects as the subject, from Dutch ontbijtjes and floral bouquets to Chardin’s kitchens and Cézanne’s apples. This guide maps types, technique, six named works, contemporary practice, and how to tell the genre from vanitas, genre scenes, and decorative flower studies.
How Abu Dhabi took one of the West's most contested ideas — the museum that claims to hold all of humanity — and moved the question of who gets to frame the world
A portolan chart in the floor, three ewers without a hierarchy, and a $450-million Leonardo no one has seen since it was bought. The Louvre Abu Dhabi is a French–Emirati experiment in what the universal museum becomes when it is rebuilt from a different centre — and whether that moves the centre, or merely moves the Louvre, is the question the building leaves open.
Age cracks, drying cracks and impact webs: how craquelure forms in oil, tempera and ground, and how to tell it from craft crackle
Conservators read craquelure as a map of how paint, ground and varnish have shrunk, flexed or taken a blow. Age, drying and mechanical webs look different under raking light; Italian panels crack unlike Dutch canvases. Six museum pictures show the types. Craft crackle glaze is a different object.
Rome and Florence at the peak: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and Bramante, c.1490–1530, between Early Renaissance and Mannerism
Papal Rome and republican Florence funded a brief peak of Italian art around 1500. This guide defines the High Renaissance, names the patrons and workshops behind it, reads four landmark works in marble, oil, fresco and stone, and tracks how critics invented the “peak” label after the Sack of Rome in 1527.
Paris salons to European courts: the light, ornamental language of furniture, porcelain, painting and church interiors.
Rococo began as private luxury in early eighteenth-century Paris and then travelled widely. This survey covers interiors and craft as much as painting, introduces Watteau, Boucher and Fragonard, tracks the style’s European afterlives, and names the museum rooms where its pastel wit still reads clearly.
Feeling before classical calm: revolution, the sublime and personal vision in European painting, about 1780 to 1850.
Romanticism put emotion, imagination and the artist’s stance ahead of academic restraint. This guide explains the sublime and contemporary history as subjects, follows Géricault, Delacroix, Goya, Friedrich and Turner, and shows how the movement left Realism and later modern painting its restless inheritance.
Greek and Roman virtue revived: hard contours, civic drama and marble calm from the 1760s into the early nineteenth century.
Neoclassicism returned Western art to antique form and moral language. This survey maps dates and academies, the painters and sculptors who set the look, defining works from David to Canova, and how the style dressed Europe’s public face before Romanticism and later classicism answered back in force.
A landmark survey brings twenty-six iconic Islamic artefacts from Paris to Washington, exploring craftsmanship, diplomacy, and cross-cultural exchange.
As temperatures soar across the continent, a stark divide has emerged between institutions that can keep cool and those left sweating
A record-breaking heatwave has exposed how unprepared many European museums are for climate extremes, with smaller institutions forced to close rooms while larger ones become de facto cooling centres.
