A little over a year ago, I arrived in Paris to begin a 78-day trip through nine countries, visiting sixty-six of Europe’s museums. Traveling on a Eurail Pass (first class, 3-month Seniors pass with unlimited use), my mission was to undertake background work to improve my role as Editor of Museum Spotlight Europe (MSE).
Our writers are our superstars. These writing superstars need knowledge and credibility to help them give you their best. To supply our team with what they need, I spent time on the ground in Europe, combing museum halls, climbing museum steps, talking with museum staff, scribbling (or typing) notes and taking photos.
We’re proud of the results. We think our website gives our readers the insight to travel abroad to Europe’s outstanding museums, and the enjoyment of exploring museums while being at home in the States.
Where should you start exploring on our website? Consider “Exhibits At A Glance,” curated by Amy Roost. She’s built a comprehensive calendar of the leading exhibits throughout Europe in the coming months. You’ll discover beyond the Louvre, the Rijksmuseum, and the Prado, and find exhibits in Eastern Europe, on college campuses, and in corners that you didn’t know existed. MSE is devoted to showcase museums and exhibits that are iconic, niche and compelling; Amy has helped accomplish this.
From Exhibits At A Glance, you can either dive right into our focused articles, or you can find one of our seasonal preview articles written by Cindy Brztowski. Cindy lives in Berlin and highlights the exhibits that are creating a buzz on the Continent. She travels frequently throughout Europe—sometimes on the back of a motorcycle!—and keeps us ahead of the crowd when it comes to exhibits.
We try our best to give you articles that track the calendar. Joan Gannij wrote our Vermeer article, a true journalistic feat. The Vermeer exhibit, staged at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, sold 450,000 tickets this spring and counting. Joan somehow got early access after the opening and dashed off a fantastic article. We’ve also published her article on Helsinki’s new national art museum (she loved the city so much that she included tips on dining and hotels near the museum).
Sometimes we have periods where we pivot to covering certain museums regardless of any current exhibit they may be hosting. Or, we focus on a particular artist or on a particular collector who created the museum. For those assignments, Dean Gregory has been outstanding: read his piece on Giacometti, or on the Ludwig Museum in Cologne. His writings explore a breadth and depth of his subject matter that easily could be twice the length of what we publish.
Susannah Edelbaum just welcomed a baby boy into her family, and we’re looking forward to more great contributions from her. She wants to roll up her sleeves and get back to writing about the latest exhibit openings—like Cindy, she lives in Berlin, where there’s an outstanding roster of the classic and the off-beat.
Krystin Arneson is in Madrid, where to our embarrassment, we’ve not had a strong focus. Madrid alone has three of the best museums in Europe: the Prado, the Thyssen-Bornemisza, and the Reina Sofia (home to maybe the greatest piece of anti-war art ever, Picasso’s “Guernica”). Spain’s Naval Museum is outstanding. And outside of Madrid is Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum, San Sebastian’s Chillida-Leku Museum, and Barcelona’s Museum of Catalonia (to name too few).
I’ve most certainly left out other authors who have contributed over our brief existence, and we hope to post their writings again. In particular, we were grateful for a piece on the Uffizi by author Claire Marti, who usually can be found writing books. She was scheduled to submit a piece on wine museums, but between Covid and juggling her travel calendar, we literally had to take a “rain check” on that article. We look forward to Claire’s perspective on our site again.
Here at headquarters, we have a terrific co-Editor, Lindsey Keith. Lindsey brings an educational background in both journalism and art, with plenty of expertise in communication thrown in. She helps keep the assignments straight, leads our on-line presence, and interfaces with our authors. Our website mastermind is Gus Leyva—he’s responsible for our current look-and-feel on-line, and is constantly taking us to the next level in bringing our world to our readers.
It’s both an opportunity and a responsibility to work with such talent. But the real opportunity and responsibility is toward our readers. We all take that seriously. We hope our enthusiasm for our subject and our skill is conveyed to you; We strive to be worth your time on our site.
