The hidden costs of ending free museum admission

Plus: how to take restitution into your own hands ͏‌

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Edward Behrens counts the cost of UK museums bringing back entry fees

It was under the Blair government that free entry for museums became part of the cultural conversation for the first time since the 1980s. For the Secretary of State for Culture, Chris Smith, free entry to museums became something of a personal crusade. At the end of 2001, after much pressure, campaigning and manoeuvring with the Treasury, he was able to find the money to support free entry. And, by being allowed to reclaim VAT on goods and services, museums had a much-needed source of extra funds. The showier aspect of the policy was the increase in grant-in-aid, by which the government provided direct support to 20 institutions around the country. In the golden age of the early millennium, this was not particularly controversial.

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Michael Armitage talks to Arjun Sajip about taking the long view

Michael Armitage has been thinking about time. About two weeks before I meet the painter at his studio in Bali, in the forested slopes north of the town of Ubud, the oldest cave art to be found so far has been discovered on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Faintly visible behind some slightly more recent paintings of a hunting scene are small, pale handprints surrounded by dusty red, thought to have been made some 68,000 years ago. 'There's something chilling about being able to put your hand in the exact same place where 70,000 years ago, somebody did the exact same thing and then blew ochre over their hand to leave an imprint,' Armitage says.

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Apollo rounds up the month's most impressive museum acquisitions

Caravaggio's portrait of a future Pope, a mannerist painting for the Met, the first-ever Superman comic for the Smithsonian and new additions to the Hirshhorn's sculpture garden are among the most important works to have entered public collections in March.

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Gabrielle Schwarz on a focused show of Frank Bowling in Cambridge

How do you sum up the life's work of a still-working artist? At the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, 'Frank Bowling: Seeking the Sublime' spans the more than 60-year career of the Guyanese-British artist who, in the past decade, has come to be recognised – after a much longer period of critical and institutional neglect – as one of the foremost painters of his generation. But this is not a completist project. The entire show consists of only 11 works, 10 of them confined to the space of a smallish gallery with eight walls. The last painting is hung a few rooms away in the museum's permanent collection, alongside a work by Bowling's contemporary and compatriot Aubrey Williams. The effect is striking: less a survey than a synthesis.

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Tom Wilkinson on how São Paulo has regained a great public space

Lina Bo Bardi's MASP building of 1968 is one of the greatest examples of its kind, with a unique silhouette: the main gallery is an oblong box squatting beside Avenida Paulista, the city's main thoroughfare, on four red legs. This created an open patio at ground level – the famous 'vão livre', or free space – beneath which the rest of the museum is buried. Sacrificing the ground floor to the public was a remarkably generous gesture, but one which left no scope for expansion: if future curators wanted more room, it would have to be accommodated in a discrete structure.

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Mateusz Mayer of the Kunsthistorisches Museum talks to Apollo about Bernardo Bellotto's views of Vienna

In Vienna Bellotto perfected the art of rendering lively, convincing human figures (known as staffage) in paintings dominated by buildings. But we should keep in mind that these pictures were made for aristocrats and, as such, may contain certain distortions of reality. This painting of the Dominican Church presents Vienna as a functioning commercial centre, implying that Maria Theresa oversaw a flourishing economy. There is no hint of the famines that took place under her reign – except perhaps the woman at the far left of the painting. Does the empty bucket on her back suggest that she has sold all her wares? Or did she have nothing to sell in the first place?

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The hidden costs of ending free museum admission

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