The White Room Is Not Empty

Look at a painting of an exhibition at the Paris Salon in the nineteenth century, or at the Royal Academy in London, and the first thing you notice is that you cannot see the walls. Pictures cover them from just above the floor to just below the ceiling, frame touching frame. The favoured works hang at eye level, on the line, as the phrase went. The rest are skied, pushed up towards the cornice where nobody can see them properly, and a painter whose canvas went up there knew what the hanging committee thought of it.

A visitor to such a room was not expected to contemplate. They were expected to search, compare, argue and choose. The hang was a crowd of pictures competing for a crowd of people, and the noise was part of the experience.

Now walk into almost any museum of modern art, or any commercial gallery, built in the last hundred years. The walls are white or nearly white. The works hang in a single line at eye level with generous space between them. The light is even and comes from above. There are no windows, or the windows are covered. There is nothing to sit on, or one bench. The floor is polished wood or concrete. The room is quiet.

This arrangement feels like the absence of a style: a neutral container that simply lets the work be seen. That feeling is what Brian O'Doherty set out to take apart in three essays published in Artforum in 1976, later collected as Inside the White Cube.

His argument was that the white room is as much a constructed setting as a church, and does something comparable. It removes every sign of time: no clock, no daylight that changes, no view of the street. It removes every sign of use: nothing in the room is for anything except looking. And by removing those things it confers a status on whatever remains. An object placed in the white cube under good light becomes something to be looked at as art, whatever it is. It is the logic the readymade depends on: a urinal in a plumber's showroom is a urinal.

So the white wall is not neutral. It is a historical style, it arrived with modernism, and it flatters the art that grew up with it. A Mondrian or a minimalist box needs that room and loses something outside it, because the room and the work were developed on the same assumptions: that the object stands alone, that its meaning is in its form, that context is noise.

Those assumptions suit some objects and not others, and museums hold both kinds. An Orthodox icon was made to be kissed, lit by lamps and seen among other icons in a church. A reliquary was made to hold something. A Kongo power figure was made to be used, and the nails driven into it are the record of that use. Placed on a white wall under a spotlight, each becomes a sculpture, to be assessed for its form, and the setting that told you what it was for has gone.

At least one great collection refused the whole idea. Albert Barnes, a chemist who made a fortune from an antiseptic, bought Renoirs, Cézannes and Matisses in the early twentieth century and hung them his own way: dense, symmetrical wall arrangements in which paintings sit beside wrought-iron hinges, keys and latches, furniture and ceramics, grouped by line, light and colour rather than by school or date. He called them ensembles, he meant them as a teaching instrument, and the terms of his trust required that they not be changed.

When the collection moved from suburban Merion to central Philadelphia in 2012, after a long legal fight, the new building reproduced the old galleries at the same proportions and the walls were rehung as he had left them. A hang was treated as a work in its own right, which is exactly what O'Doherty had been arguing every hang is.

None of this means the white cube is wrong. It is a good room for some art and a poor one for other things, and it is never no room at all. When you walk into one, the useful question is the one the room is designed to stop you asking: what would this look like anywhere else?