Virtual Museums to Visit From Home
While we are in lock down, we’re sadly missing our usual cultural activities. Luckily we can still get the museum experience at home. Here are the best virtual museums to visit from home.
With museums’ and galleries’ closed for the ongoing lock down while we address COVID-19, you may feel at a loss as to your cultural education. However the situation is giving us a great variety of new ideas and suggestions that will help to satisfy our creative cravings. Our usual gallery stroll has temporarily moved online, in line with the current mood to #stayathomesavelives. At the same time, online initiatives give ultimate access to precious archives and art exhibitions specifically curated for the web. The creation of online interactive spaces has meant that galleries and museums around the world that we might otherwise have never visited are now open to all. You can even visit the Hermitage in Russia, enriched with ad hoc performances for each room and time period. We might be hopeless optimists, but this crazy time could bring us insight into what the future of the art world may look like. We have listed our favourite ones, and in some cases, they show never seen before masterpieces from all over the world, from the comfort of your living room.
V&A, Elsa Schiaparelli
“In difficult times, fashion is always outrageous.” Elsa Schiaparelli. Who better than the master surrealist to guide us in such an unprecedented time? Her repertoire is also refreshingly maximalist. While we’re surrounded by the same four walls and often not exciting news, it’s a breath of fresh air to indulge in some eye candy design, and sophisticated irony.Royal Academy, Picasso and Paper: virtual exhibition tour
The RA, like any other museum, is temporarily closed but is offering a digital tour of its stunning ‘Picasso and Paper’ exhibition. Showing the (controversial) cubist from home, in this video tour of the galleries. Picasso didn’t just draw on paper – he tore it, burnt it, and made it three-dimensional. From studies for Guernica to a 4.8-metre-wide collage, this exhibition brings together more than 300 works on paper spanning the artist’s 80-year career.
Monet’s house in Giverny
This one’s a gem. In this virtual tour, you can explore the painter’s summer retreat, located only one hour from Paris. Claude Monet’s residence in Giverny, surrounded by lush greenery that inspired some of his best-known paintings. Flowers such as; rose bushes, peonies, water lilies and geraniums, but also incredible design. The Sunny yellow dining room and the all blue kitchen look like the dreamiest impressionist setting.A one-take journey through Russia’s iconic Hermitage museum
This dreamyinsightful tour of one of the world’s largest museums, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia, was shot in one take on an iPhone. You can explore the work on display through the 45 halls and 2.5 million square feet of the Hermitage. Including some 600 works by Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Rubens, and others, as well as staged visitor scenes, custom choreography, and a set by Russian composer Kirill Richter.
Faces of Frida
The artist and icon Frida Kahlo is now more relevant than ever. Her self-portraits, often taken during her days spent at home, due to her chronic illness, are part of our contemporary art imaginary. Google Arts & Culture have collected an incredible archive of her legacy together in one place: Faces of Frida, which includes her paintings, artworks and artefacts that are rarely found on public display.All Creatures Great and Small, Pace Gallery
All Creatures Great and Small at Pace Gallery features works by Yto Barrada, Alexander Calder, Alex Katz, Kiki Smith, and many others. This digital exhibition displays works of art that “evoke the marvellous vitality, as well as vulnerability, of our planet’s flora and fauna”. Borrowed from Kiki Smith’s work on view, the exhibition’s title also cites the opening verse of the nineteenth-century hymn “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” which describes the genesis of the world in all its astonishing diversity.
