Art World Museum

Millions of people climb the grand marble staircase to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art every year. But only a select few have unrestricted access to every nook and cranny. They’re the guards who roam unobtrusively in dark blue suits, keeping a watchful eye on the two million square foot treasure house. Caught up in his glamourous fledgling career at The New Yorker, Patrick Bringley never thought that he’d be one of them.

The Louvre is the most famous museum in the world, attracting millions of visitors every year with its masterpieces. In Adventures in the Louvre, Elaine Sciolino immerses herself in this magical space and helps us fall in love with what was once a forbidding fortress. Exploring galleries, basements, rooftops, and gardens, Sciolino demystifies the Louvre, introducing us to her favorite artworks, both legendary and overlooked, and to the people who are the museum's lifeblood.

Venice, 1958. Peggy Guggenheim, heiress and now legendary art collector, sits in the sun at her white marble palazzo on the Grand Canal. She’s in a reflective mood, thinking back on her thrilling, tragic, nearly impossible journey from her sheltered, old-fashioned family in New York to here: iconoclast and independent woman. Rebecca Godfrey’s Peggy is a blazingly fresh interpretation of a woman who defies every expectation to become an original. The daughter of two Jewish dynasties, Peggy finds her cloistered life turned upside down at fourteen, when her beloved father perishes on the Titanic.

The fascinating and little-known story of the Louvre, from its inception as a humble fortress to its transformation into the palatial residence of the kings of France and then into the world's greatest art museum.

From the national bestselling author of Banyan Moon, a captivating, evocative story of two estranged sisters on a quest to find a painting by a forgotten Vietnamese artist that holds the truth of their family’s fractured past. Aside from the fact they are sisters, Vivi and Calla Nguyễn...

Discover the History of the Perfect Crime What do an outlaw train gang, a team of diamond thieves, and a group of hackers working from a café all have in common? They changed the way the world thinks about crime. From the dusty rails of Victorian England to the glowing screens of the digital age, The Art of the Heist traces the breathtaking evolution of theft — and the brilliant, reckless minds who dared to pull it off. Discover: 🚂 The Great Train Robbery – a near-perfect crime that shocked post-war Britain. 💎 The Antwerp Diamond Heist – where cunning and patience defeated ten ...

Art looting is commonly recognized as a central feature of Nazi expropriation. After the war, the famed Monuments Men (and women) recovered several hundred thousand pieces from the Germans' makeshift repositories. Well-publicized restitution cases, such as that of Gustav Klimt's luminous painting featured in the film Woman in Gold, illustrate the legacy of Nazi looting in the art world today. But what happened to looted art that was never returned to its rightful owners?

The intimate, inspiring memoir of a “curator extraordinaire” (The Guardian)—part unputdownable coming-of-age story, part insider’s tour of the contemporary art world, part user’s manual on how to live a life driven by curiosity, conversation, and coincidence “A few years ago...

The Louvre. The very name conjures up scenes of art and elegance, and of long halls filled with beauty and people strolling through them whispering quietly among themselves about the glories they are witnessing. Even those who have never been to the Louvre know some of its most prized possessions, from ancient statues to Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa. As the world's largest museum, the Louvre is the cultural highpoint of Paris, a city that has long been considered the cultural center of Europe.

Elena Serrano has spent her career mending what time tried to erase. As a museum conservator, she brings fractured paintings back to life—steady hands, invisible presence, unshakable control. Until the day her quiet expertise collides with Lucas Harrington, the museum’s new director and the living embodiment of every reason she’s learned to stay invisible. When a priceless portrait arrives damaged and expectations tighten around her like varnish, Elena’s world shifts. Lucas isn’t what she expected—he’s careful where others command, patient where power usually presses. Together...

A powerful art dealer who presents a convincing portrait of international success pulls an idealistic young gallery assistant into his web of lies. This sharp, edgy social thriller explores the price of ambition in the decadent underbelly of the high-end art world. Nobody knows quite who...

Scandal, shock, and rivalry all have negative connotations, don't they? They can be catastrophic to businesses and individual careers. A whiff of scandal can turn a politician into a smoking ruin. But these potentially disastrous "negatives" can and have spurred the world of fine art to new heights. A look at the history of art tells us that rivalries have, in fact, not only benefited the course of art, from ancient times to the present, but have also helped shape our narrative of art, lending it a sense of drama that it might otherwise lack.

One Marine's Passion for Ancient Civilizations and the Journey to Recover the World's Greatest Stolen Treasures. A blend of treasure hunt, police procedural, war-time thriller, and exposé of the international black-market in stolen art, told in the voice of a truly remarkable man: a soldier, a...

Although he is one of the world's most popular authors who continues to thrill and chill readers and listeners of all ages, Edgar Allan Poe's life is as enigmatic as his sudden, unexplained death. In a quest for solutions to the mysteries surrounding the poet's life and work, a group of Poe devotees founded the Poe Shrine in 1922. This body included the world's most prolific Poe collector, a psychiatrist who believed Poe was clairvoyant, and the grandson of Poe's worst enemy.

When Claire Bennett, curator at the Willow Creek Museum, discovers inconsistencies in a prized painting donated by wealthy collector Edward Langston, she's drawn into a dangerous world of art forgery and high-stakes secrets. Teaming up with the enigmatic art restorer Liam Hart, Claire must navigate a treacherous landscape of lies, power, and corruption to expose the truth. As they dig deeper, Claire and Liam uncover a vast conspiracy reaching far beyond a single forged masterpiece. With a mysterious symbol connecting multiple fraudulent works and a cunning gallery owner named Margot Vance ...

Catherine the Great ushered in the Russian Enlightenment. She had an unmatched passion for the arts, and she began a private art collection that would eventually evolve into galleries upon galleries of historical treasures shipped in from all over the world. This fabled museum was none other than the Hermitage, located in the heart of Saint Petersburg, a city founded by the imperial empire's very own Peter the Great.

Here can be no doubt that the Chinese exhibition at the Royal Academy in London is more than a merely artistic event. It represents a new stage in the burgeoning relationship between contemporary China and the West. The opening, originally scheduled for January, was brought forward to coincide with a State Visit to Britain by the Chinese president, Hu Jintao. The "Three Emperors" of the title were the second, third, and fourth rulers of the Qing Dynasty, and their period in power spanned nearly a century-and-a-half, from the mid-17th century until the end of the 18th.

Forgotten Empire, the new exhibition in London devoted to the great realm that Alexander the Great destroyed, is an openly political occasion, designed to stress links in the present as well as to revive interest in a part of the past that has more or less sunk into oblivion. It stresses the fact that, despite the tensions that now exist between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Western Europe, a degree of cultural cooperation is still possible.

"Citizens and Kings", the new blockbuster show at the Royal Academy in London, contains an almost overwhelming number of celebrated paintings and sculptures, even if one or two of them, such as Jacques-Louis David’s Marat Assassiné, turn out to be studio versions rather than the real thing. The show aims to trace the shift in attitudes towards the human personality that was set in motion by the American and French Revolutions and the wars associated with these great political and social upheavals.

The term avant-garde continues to be used, in my opinion with far too much frequency, in discussions of contemporary art. It derives, of course, from military terminology, and implies that the art to which it is applied is somehow ahead of the game. It’s worth taking a look at how this assumption works in practice. Essentially, Western and now world art has witnessed the emergence of a series of avant-gardes since just before the third quarter of the 19th century.