News: Arty Facts

The Royal Academy of Arts is 250 this year. Britain’s oldest art school – whereTurner and Constable learned to paint –is celebrating its birthday with a radically transformed interior that opens to the public in May.

The £50 million redevelopment connects the 18th-century Burlington House on Piccadilly with the Palazzo on Burlington Gardens. British architect Sir David Chipperfield’s practice is integrating the buildings with a Rialto-style bridge connecting the two edifices, as well as creating new gallery space and opening up public areas.

In Scotland, Dundee’s eagerly-awaited V&A Museum of Design opens on 15 September. The £80million museum designed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma will house a variety of iconic items such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s fully-restored Oak Room, the Christian Dior suit worn by actress, Marlene Dietrich, as she arrived in New York in 1950, and the painting Paquebot‘Paris’by leading USPrecisionist Charles Demuth.