Understanding artworks requires multi-step reasoning over visual content and cultural, historical, and stylistic context. While recent multimodal large language models show promise in artwork explanation, they rely on implicit reasoning and internalized knowledge, limiting interpretability and explicit evidence grounding. We propose A-MAR, an Agent-based Multimodal Art Retrieval framework that explicitly conditions retrieval on structured reasoning plans. Given an artwork and a user query, A-MAR first decomposes the task into a structured reasoning plan that specifies the goals and evidence requirements for each step. Retrieval is then conditioned on this plan, enabling targeted evidence selection and supporting step-wise, grounded explanations. To evaluate agent-based multimodal reasoning within the art domain, we introduce ArtCoT-QA. This diagnostic benchmark features multi-step reasoning chains for diverse art-related queries, enabling a granular analysis that extends beyond simple final answer accuracy. Experiments on SemArt and Artpedia show that A-MAR consistently outperforms static, non-planned retrieval and strong MLLM baselines in final explanation quality, while evaluations on ArtCoT-QA further demonstrate its advantages in evidence grounding and multi-step reasoning ability. These results highlight the importance of reasoning-conditioned retrieval for knowledge-intensive multimodal understanding and position A-MAR as a step toward interpretable, goal-driven AI systems, with particular relevance to cultural industries. The code and data are available at: https://github.com/ShuaiWang97/A-MAR.

Real-world multimodal knowledge graphs (MKGs) are inherently heterogeneous, modeling entities that are associated with diverse modalities. Traditional knowledge graph embedding (KGE) methods excel at learning continuous representations of entities and relations, yet they are typically designed for unimodal settings. Recent approaches extend KGE to multimodal settings but remain constrained, often processing modalities in isolation, resulting in weak cross-modal alignment, and relying on simplistic assumptions such as uniform modality availability across entities. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offer a powerful way to align diverse modalities within a shared embedding space. We propose Vision-Language Knowledge Graph Embeddings (VL-KGE), a framework that integrates cross-modal alignment from VLMs with structured relational modeling to learn unified multimodal representations of knowledge graphs. Experiments on WN9-IMG and two novel fine art MKGs, WikiArt-MKG-v1 and WikiArt-MKG-v2, demonstrate that VL-KGE consistently improves over traditional unimodal and multimodal KGE methods in link prediction tasks. Our results highlight the value of VLMs for multimodal KGE, enabling more robust and structured reasoning over large-scale heterogeneous knowledge graphs.

Visual art understanding requires joint modeling of multiple perspectives and contextual inference rooted in cultural, historical, and stylistic knowledge. Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) demonstrate strong performance in generic captioning, primarily based on object recognition and training on large-scale generic data. They struggle in providing captions incorporating the multiple perspectives that fine art demands. In this work, we introduce ArtRAG, a novel training-free framework that integrates structured knowledge into a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline for multi-perspective artwork explanation. ArtRAG automatically constructs an Art Context Knowledge Graph (ACKG) from domain-specific textual sources, organizing entities such as artists, themes, movements, and historical events into a rich, interpretable knowledge graph. At inference time, a multi-granular structured context retriever selects semantically and topologically relevant subgraphs to guide explanation generation. This approach enables MLLMs to produce contextually grounded, multi-perspective descriptions. Experiments on the SemArt and Artpedia datasets demonstrate that ArtRAG outperforms existing heavily trained baselines. Human evaluations further confirm ArtRAG's ability to generate coherent, informative, and culturally enriched interpretations of artworks.

We propose ArtSAGENet, a novel multimodal architecture that integrates Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), to jointly learn visual and semantic-based artistic representations. First, we illustrate the significant advantages of multi-task learning for fine art analysis and argue that it is conceptually a much more appropriate setting in the fine art domain than the single-task alternatives. We further demonstrate that several GNN architectures can outperform strong CNN baselines in a range of fine art analysis tasks, such as style classification, artist attribution, creation period estimation, and tag prediction, while training them requires an order of magnitude less computational time and only a small amount of labeled data. Finally, through extensive experimentation we show that our proposed ArtSAGENet captures and encodes valuable relational dependencies between the artists and the artworks, surpassing the performance of traditional methods that rely solely on the analysis of visual content. Our findings underline a great potential of integrating visual content and semantics for fine art analysis and curation.