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28 Min Read What’s common to Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and The National Gallery in London? Well, all of them display the work of Artemisia Gentileschi. But if you wanted to dive into the work of the Italian Baroque painter, you wouldn’t need to visit either of these. You could just whip out your phone, open Instagram, and—right at the top, in the stories, section, you could find one by The National Gallery, taking you through the self-portraits of “the Beyonce of art history”, including a recently acquired Gentileschi work known as Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria.
However, the London museum is not the only one with a robust social media presence to house the precocious artist’s work. Florence’s famous Uffizi Gallery and New York’s grand Met Museum do it, too, in addition to their own remarkable resident pieces. While the Met houses art pieces and sculptures that art aficionados wait all their livesi to see, the Uffizi Gallery is where local luminary Botticelli has his painting, The Birth of Venus, displayed, along with those by Leonardo da Vinci and Caravaggio.
Both names are part of a new, upcoming wave of famous museums and art galleries upping the ante on their social media, catering to a much wider audience base all around the world. Since much before Covid-19 struck the world, these museums have turned into hep, artsy versions of their otherwise academic institutional selves. They have turned contemporary portals to a woke and broke generation that feeds on pretty sights for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Read: 5 Virtual Museum Tours You Can Take from Home
While the Uffizi Gallery regularly unearths treasured Renaissance-era gems and latter-day exhibits from art movements in and around Florence accompanied by in-depth captions, the Met is the quintessential feed-blesser. From Spanish Renaissance greats such as El Greco, cubist aesthetes such as Jacob Lawrence, and Mughal-era paintings to mixed media art pieces, vintage curiosities and lithographic prints, their Instagram account keeps buzzing all day. They also have regular museum tours, just like this silent gallery tour.
The Met, MoMA and Maps
When in Big Apple, those short on time often find themselves picking the Met over the other famous art museum located three miles away—the MoMA, or The Museum of Modern Art. On Instagram, however, stuff is different. I was blown away by And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur by the Mexican surrealist Leonora Carrington, shared on World Mental Health Day.
Read: 5 Iconic US Museums
MoMa Instagram is also your gateway to the museum’s informative multimedia experiences—they have series such as MoMA Virtual Views and guided visualisations as well. Just check out this stunning painting by Frida Kahlo, called Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair!
Another US museum that has made our (not exhaustive) list is The Art Institute of Chicago. The museum has over 30 of Monet paintings, and they regularly feature in the museum’s feed. One can also watch videos breaking down classic works of art such as Picasso’s The Old Guitarist and a Buddha sculpture from India. They also do special series talking about upcoming artists’ work—and fun interactive posts such as the one about their 1914 London map, and the puns and jokes in which will crease you up completely.
Cartophiles will do well also to check out the thought-provoking Tribal Map of the United States installed at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, created by visual artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.
Tip: Right across the Pacific, in Russia’s Saint Petersburg, lies the stunning State Hermitage Museum, with an Instagram feed that’ll have you smashing the follow button in no time (eye-popping, ornate religious paintings; unbelievable lithographs; and stunning portraits, and these adorable felines below).
All the van Goghs for Us Vincent Bros
No other name invites affirmative laymen nods as much as van Gogh, and the Instagram page of the iconic Amsterdam museum named after him is a sensation. Posts featuring his best-recognised works including Bedroom in Arles, The Sower, Wheatfield With Crows, The Garden of Saint Paul’s Hospital and Window in the Studio among others are a regularity—but the ones really worth following this page are the beautiful drawings on the back of frequent postcards the Dutch artist wrote to his brother Theo, his letters to his friend Bernard describing his brothel excursions, and informative videos for the van Gogh cult.
The vast body of life work van Gogh left and the general curiosity around his struggles with mental health and penury evidently render him a very real icon for any generation. Apart from the Van Gogh Museum, you may find the Postimpressionist’s works featured on the Instagram of Kröller-Müller Museum (the second-largest collection of Van Gogh’s works) in Netherlands’ Otterlo.
Speaking of Dutch museums, following Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum and The Hague’s Mauritshuis (the latter is home to the iconic Girl with a Pearl Earring) may deliver priceless Vermeers and Rembrandts to your feed, along with the engrossing stories behind the work featured. The folks at Mauritshuis do their informative videos and painting breakdowns quite well, too. You could even get some beard inspiration from Rijksmuseum’s posts (visual below).
Paris is six hours south of Amsterdam and when it comes to the City of Love, could one keep a Francophile away from the Louvre? Their feed is particularly easy on the eye—one might as well close their eyes, click, and find an arresting Renaissance portrait of an old man with a disfigured nose or Poussin’s vision of the enchanting countryside through the seasons. Or just go on a tour of the Tuileries Garden!
Read: These Italian Museums Will Take You by Surprise
At the Instagram page of the Musée d’Orsay, you can amuse yourselves with sketches by resident artists featuring Proust and Monet, break the proverbial fourth wall looking at James Tissot’s London Visitors, or decode the cute monsters of Leopold Chauveau.
The London Circuit
London, too, is home to several must-visit museums, and in addition to some really informative posts the National Gallery is doing on Artemisia Gentileschi as part of the ongoing exhibition, there is a lot to see and be fascinated by on their Instagram. Their love of outdoor spaces when it comes to the subjects of their exhibits is evident, as seen in Alexandre Calame’s Swiss landscapes, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s depiction of Coubron near Paris and the Italian countryside, Camille Pissarro’s Late Afternoon in our Meadow and others. Oh, and by the way, it is at the prestigious National Gallery that the best-known of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers series paintings is housed.
For portraits (photographs and otherwise) like Justin Mortimer’s striking rendering of playwright Harold Pinter, head to the National Portrait Gallery (also in London), which is shut until the spring of 2023 as it undergoes a major revamp.
The other excellent art museum accounts we would recommend are the Tate Galleries page, with its stimulating mix of experimental works of art and lesser-known masterpieces from the 20th century, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. The museum also hosts free VR events and the next one is less than a week away (October 22).
Avid outdoorists will find much joy in the bright landscapes on Museo Sorolla’s Instagram page. Otherwise a relatively small museum in Madrid, their Instagram posts are highly engaging and uplifting. In Madrid, too, is the Museo Nacional del Prado, and these are kind folks that do not just video tours (and quite a lot of them) but also Flamenco performances!
Read: Spain: Day and Night in Costa del Sol
The Spanish capital also has the Museo Reina Sofía, and their Instagram page is a mixed bag, with posts ranging from surrealist paintings, abstract expressionist work, antique photographs, works by Dali and Remedios Varo, and interesting latter-day takes such as Argentine cartoonist Quino’s reinterpretation of Guernica by Picasso. In case you want even more of Picasso, Barcelona’s Picasso Museum has a feed that is full of the works of the famous Spanish artist.
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Offbeat destinations
