Whither the white cube?

In a slightly mad rush around New York last Thursday afternoon, I visited two very different museums. The first, the Frick Collection, has joined the ranks of my favourite house museums. Within a New York brownstone mansion, hangs a spectacular collection of European paintings, set against furniture and decorative arts, laid out largely in the manner that Henry Clay Frick himself chose. In that sense it is very like the Isabella Gardner in Boston (about which I blogged earlier this month): a house museum that was arranged specifically as a public museum space by its owner and occupant, in comparison to most English house museums which preserve the domestic space of their one-time owner.

The second visit that I made was to MOMA (the Museum of Modern Art) which was dramatically renovated in 2002-4 and now represents the ultimate in paired-down, minimalist art display with large white galleries and glass staircases that allow you to see through the building space at strategic points. It is big, flashy and, on a Thursday evening with bars and live music, heaving with people. In comparison to somewhere like the Frick, the collections at MOMA, as with most large national museums, are curated by time period and school, or individual artist, to give a narrative of historical development. Works are displayed with large amounts of white space around them as individual items to be contemplated.

Yet, paradoxically, I found I looked much less carefully at works in MOMA than at those I saw in the Frick. I don’t think I have ever visited these two types of museum in such quick succession before so the contrast interested me, especially as the Frick collections include works as modern as Degas and Monet, which also appear in MOMA. I found that the white spaces of MOMA desensitised me to the works, where as the individual, intimate rooms at the Frick made me look at their paintings with a new eye. Maybe I am merely a jaded too-frequent gallery visitor who needs new stimulus to capture my attention, but I noticed visitors similarly flitted through the MOMA galleries where they stopped and gazed at the Frick.

These days, when we are constantly bombarded by image and information in every possible setting, and are used to engaging with life in moving, mad technicolour, I wonder if the white space of modernism has had its day?