The white cube and beyond Museum display

Our experience of visiting museums and galleries is traditionally characterised by the quasi-religious atmosphere: nothing is to be touched, one is rather quiet and reverent, nobody laughs, it is eerily still, nobody is allowed to talk loudly.

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

How were the unwritten rules of conduct in a museum developed and communicated? The answer I now give in the book is that it happened indirectly, through the interior design and layout of the rooms.

What is important in my opinion is that the room is honest, so there is no patronising.

*Niklas Maak

*When is a room honest?

*Charlotte Klonk

*Well, as soon as what is being aimed for becomes obvious to the viewer. What remains too subliminal, for example, are the colour nuances in the new display of the collection in the Nationalgalerie. If visitors a

Cognitive psychology is one of those fields of discussion which was, at least historically, of great importance for the exhibition of art. The first director of the National Gallery in London, Charles Eastlake, preferred hanging paintings against a background of red material, something he introduced in the middle of the nineteenth century (previous

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.

they were apparently used not only to cultivate relations with objects, but also with subjects. Schlittgen’s caricature from 1885 ridicules this. It shows a man in a gallery as he is approaching a young woman from behind. He obviously fears that the woman’s mother, who can be seen in the background sleeping on a sofa, could discover them. She, howe

I don’t think that’s pathetic at all, because if you try to understand what a new kind of experience is created by doing so, then it is not a romantic but a revolutionary gesture. What had previously been enjoyed only by the king and his entourage was now suddenly made accessible to all.

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.