Gilman also recommended avoiding the “perpetual variety of wall coloring, found in many newer museums” in favor of a uniform light gray-brown or dull yellow-gray.

For one, museums hadn’t considered the problem of storage when they were first built, which meant there was no place to put the art except the walls. Then there was the question of selection—who would be responsible for deciding which works remained hanging and which did not? Professional curators didn’t exist in the 19th century; in fact, it was t

“If you look at the original installation shots of 1939 through the ’40s, you’re looking at a picture that could have been taken yesterday,” McClellan said. “It’s really not changed much since then.”

It was in 1936, with Barr’s “Cubism and Abstract Art” exhibition, that the white cube really came together.

This was epitomized by Benjamin Ives Gilman, the secretary of the Boston MFA from 1893 to 1925, who published the first empirical study of museum-going in 1918. He had a number of suggestions to combat what he termed “museum fatigue,” including changes in display that would keep visitors from crouching or bending over to see works clearly

Today, the history of the white cube and modern art are more or less inseparable. Formalist painting from the 1960s, for example, is “isolated from the world,” noted art critic David Carrier, on the phone from Berlin. “The work is complete in itself. You want it in that enclosed space, you don’t want to be able to look out the windows. It’s a very

In 1976, artist and critic

Brian O’Doherty

set the art world abuzz with a three-part essay published in Artforum . Titled “Inside the White Cube,” it gave a catchy new name to a mode of display that had long ago achieved dominance in museums and commercial galleries.

Major public museums began to spring up in the 18th century, most notably the British Museum in 1759 and the Louvre in 1793. These institutions had largely grown out of private collections, in which artworks were displayed in dense, symmetrical arrangements that connoisseurs believed allowed for a better comparison of styles and movements. They wer

it was MoMA’s first director Alfred Barr who finally cemented its strategy for display. That’s not to say that the New York museum was the first to pull together these various threads; as McClellan notes, the Harvard Art Museum and the Wadsworth Atheneum both mounted exhibitions in the early 1930s that utilized the white cube approach. “But MoMA, b