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Frank Whitford is an illustrator, art historian, critic, one of the leading British experts on German and Austrian art of the twentieth century. Over the course of many years of his career, he lectured at University College London and Homerton College, Cambridge, worked as an art critic for the Sunday Times and Cambridge Evening News, and authored books on art.

“The Museum Beyond Itself” is a manifesto against the dull uniformity and one-dimensionality that strict control and order consistently lead to, and at the same time a treasure trove of history and hidden facts. The reader is in for an extraordinary, fast-paced and educational journey: he will discover London in the early 19th century, Paris in the 1840s, and Las Vegas in the 1990s, and connect them with the experimental, astounding, moving art and architectural projects of the 20th and 21st centuries. He will come into contact with the dreams and incarnations of paradoxical creators: John Soane and El Lissitzky, Marcel Duchamp and Robert Filho, Carlo Scarpa and Christian Boltanski, Le Corbusier and Rem Koolhaas, Alfred Hitchcock and Joseph Cornell... He will see how multidimensional and unpredictable the streets, buildings, windows and entire blocks of modern cities. He will be convinced of the existence of something “that already exists, but remains unnoticed, as if existing in a parallel universe.” In short, the reader will have to reconsider his relationship not only with the museum, but also with the city, and, perhaps, with himself.