It wasn’t just artists who were fascinated by these institutions. Attendance swelled throughout the 19th century, with London’s South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria & Albert Museum) reporting 456,000 annual visitors in 1857, compared to over a million in 1870. Collections also grew over time, and soon the museums of the Victorian era were dealing with issues of overcrowding in terms of both people and paintings.

Martini, Pietro Antonio, Exposition au Salon du Louvre en 1787, 1787. Wildenstein Institute, Paris.
Martini, Pietro Antonio, Exposition au Salon du Louvre en 1787, 1787. Wildenstein Institute, Paris.

“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 art.” 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.”

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 colour scheme playing a more important role,” noted art historian Charlotte Klonk in an interview published by the Tate. “For the first time, the colour of the walls was explicitly up for discussion.”

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“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.” Instead, the white cube has widened its hold on the New York art world. “It’s become ubiquitous. By the time you get to the ’50s, if not earlier, there’s a complete crossover from the white cube at MoMA to commercial galleries in New York City, and then the apartments of the people who were buying the art from those galleries and then giving it to the museums.”

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 different sensibility from an Impressionist painting, which is connected to the world.” But even as we’ve moved beyond modern art into the 21st century, McClellan believes there’s still no viable alternative for displaying art in a gallery. As the 80 years since MoMA’s first revolutionary show make clear, it’s no easy feat to think outside the cube.