Whenever I see paintings or early pictures of galleries and exhibitions, I’m struck by how crammed those spaces used to be. Paintings on top of paintings on top of paintings. Then I start to...
Whenever I see paintings or early pictures of galleries and exhibitions, I’m struck by how crammed those spaces used to be. Paintings on top of paintings on top of paintings.
Then I start to wonder, what would the artists of the time think of the way we hang their works today in largely empty, minimalistic, sterile museum spaces. Would it be just as alien to them?
And going further back, before exhibitions were really a thing, when someone like El Greco painted one of his works, what did he have in mind for the environment in which it would hang? How often were artists in fact painting (on canvases) just targeting some specific spaces at their patrons’ houses? What is lost when paintings are removed from their intended locations?
Whenever I see paintings or early pictures of galleries and exhibitions, I’m struck by how crammed those spaces used to be. Paintings on top of paintings on top of paintings.
Then I start to wonder, what would the artists of the time think of the way we hang their works today in largely empty, minimalistic, sterile museum spaces. Would it be just as alien to them?
And going further back, before exhibitions were really a thing, when someone like El Greco painted one of his works, what did he have in mind for the environment in which it would hang? How often were artists in fact painting (on canvases) just targeting some specific spaces at their patrons’ houses? What is lost when paintings are removed from their intended locations?