research: history of the white cube

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

In the 1950s and 1960s life in the bungalow appeared quite open because the situation in the Federal Republic itself promised to be open and democratic. Then, however, people noticed that the neighbours were also building new houses, and that these were coming closer and closer to their property lines. Seeing as there was no need to be quite that

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

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 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,