How the White Cube Came to Dominate the Art World

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

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

it wasn’t until the Third Reich took hold of the country during the 1930s that white became the standardized color for German gallery walls. “In England and France white only becomes a dominant wall colour in museums after the Second World War, so one is almost tempted to speak of the white cube as a Nazi invention,” Klonk said. “At the same time,

Today, New York’s Museum of Modern Art is widely credited with institutionalizing the approach in the 1930s. But the evolution of the white cube goes back much further, with MoMA representing the culmination of a long stretch of experimentation and debate by museum directors and curators spanning continents and centuries.

MoMA’s new 53rd St. building, which opened its doors in 1939, perfectly reflected this sensibility. Its design was commercial rather than monumental, taking cues from the department store with its glass-fronted first floor. Inside, the building featured small, intimate galleries that focused attention on the artwork rather than the architecture.

As English economist William Stanley Jevons put it in an 1881–82 essay, “the general mental state produced by such vast displays is one of perplexity and vagueness, together with some impression of sore feet and aching heads.”

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

So it was that Eastlake replaced an earlier grayish-green hue with red, based on the latest research into sensory physiology. “The interaction with the golden frames and the mainly cooler colours of the paintings themselves led, according to this research, to a harmonious effect in the beholder’s visual experience,” Klonk claimed.

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