“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.”

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.

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

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.

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

“Even in the middle of the 19th century, it was generally recognized that museums should isolate works of art on walls to avoid overcrowding and to accentuate quality for visitors,” Andrew McClellan, a professor of art history at Tufts University, told me. “It was recognized that crowded walls hampered proper appreciation of individual works of

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

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.