The Two Exhibitions That Decided What Museums Look Like Forever
From the single-row hang to the choreographed Bauhaus show to a building that refused to play along.
In 1929, a 27-year-old museum director hung four paintings on a beige wall and changed museum history. Nine years later, a Bauhaus-trained designer painted footprints on the floor and changed it again. Together, they built the room you walk into every time you visit a museum.
Think of any gallery space that you know. Think of the color of the walls, how the paintings are hung or sculptures displayed, how much space is in between the objects, and how you move through the space. Odds are that you are imagining a modernist “white-cube” gallery with white walls, a single row of paintings at eye level or a scattering of sculptures on white pedestals, and in either case, generous breathing room between them. And major kudos if you are not.
More often than not, galleries and museum spaces are designed to be “neutral.” A tabula rasa for art to be displayed. It’s like display and exhibition design have no opinions.
I work at the Guggenheim, a building that is almost the antithesis of this neutral white cube. Every exhibition I work on has to work in harmony with our iconic ramp: its slope, its built-in circulation path, the way it makes “eye level” a moving target, and many, many other variables (stay tuned for a future post). I think about the politics of display as my career, and lemme tell you: the display always has opinions. The display is always doing something.
The white cube has become such a museum standard that we don’t even recognize that there is history and intentional decisions behind it. This is because two specific exhibitions in the early 20th century made their opinions so dominant that we stopped recognizing them as choices at all.
Those moments are MoMA’s founding hang in 1929, and the exhibition Bauhaus 1919-1928, also at MoMA in 1938.
Together, these exhibitions built the room you walk into every time you enter a museum. And neither of them was neutral for a single second.
