Taking note of these criticisms, the National Gallery in London began to experiment with picture placement in the mid-1800s. Instead of forcing visitors to crane their necks or crouch down to see the art on display, director Charles Eastlake began to hang the works at eye level. “This resulted in the gallery wall suddenly being emptier and its own

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,

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

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

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

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 1909, Boston’s Museum of Fine Art moved into a new Beaux Arts building that displayed only the most significant artworks, with lesser ones stored in the basement and accessible only to scholars. The galleries were well-lit and generously sized. While paintings were still stacked on top of one another in symmetrical arrangements, the MFA limited

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.”