You explain that the white cube was initially only a variance of a rich tradition of differently coloured rooms in museums around 1900.

And when does this cleansing process, leading us to the idea of the gallery as ‘white cube’, begin?

*Charlotte Klonk

*The disciplining began at an early stage with the design of reverential entrance halls and exhibition rooms. They were sumptuously decorated, but weren’t intended to distract from viewing the art.

Then in the 1920s discussions in which white received connotations of infinite space started to emerge, mainly among Constructivist artists and architects. This coincided with temporary exhibitions becoming increasingly important in the museum, and with them the moveable partition wall and flexible groundplan.

On the one hand, of course, the conditions of perception are more consciously acknowledged in environments created by artists, but on the other hand the framework of the exhibition space itself is pushed further into the background. For functional reasons, the artistic interventions make the neutral museum-container even more necessary than before.

a place free of context, where time and social space are thought to be excluded from the experience of artworks. It is only through the apparent neutrality of appearing outside of daily life and politics that the works within the white cube can appear to be