Displaying Art: From the Salon to the White Cube

Part I: The Salon

Charles Joseph Natoire, Life Drawing Class at the French Academy, 1746

Pietro Antonio Martini, View of the 1785 Salon, 1785

Terms: salon carré; livret

After Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin, Exhibition Room, Somerset House, from The Microcosm of London (1808)

Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Self-portrait with Two Pupils, 1785

Pietro Antonio Martini, View of the 1785 Salon, 1785

Term: prix de Rome

After Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin, Exhibition Room, Somerset House, from The Microcosm of London (1808)

Charles West Cope, J. M. W. Turner Painting in Somerset House, c. 1828

J. M. W. Turner, Helvoetsluys, 1832

Turner’s rival: John Constable

Manet, Olympia, 1863

Pietro Antonio Martini, View of the 1785 Salon, 1785

La Font de Saint-Yenne, Reflections on Some Causes of the Current State of Painting in France, 1747

Claude-Henri Watelet, La Font de Saint-Yenne

Louis-Léopold Boilly, Exhibition of David’s Coronation at the Salon of 1808, c. 1808

David, The Coronation of Napoleon, 1805-7

Louis-Léopold Boilly, Exhibition of David’s Coronation at the Salon of 1808, c. 1808

Salon livret

Louis-Léopold Boilly, Exhibition of David’s Coronation at the Salon of 1808, c. 1808

A. Niquet, Saturday at the Salon (Salon of 1819), 1819

Image from the Journal des Dames et des Modes, 1820s

From the Journal des Dames et des Modes, 15 Sept 1824: “We noticed at the Salon several fashionable women in embroidered black tulle dresses, decorated with three parallel rows of flounces ... between each flounce was a roll of ribbon. Some of these dresses had short sleeves; others had long, puffed out sleeves of embroidered tulle ...”

Part II: Impressionism and the Decline of the Salon

Monet, Impression: Sunrise, 1873

Nadar’s studio

First Impressionist exhibition held here in 1874; total of 8 Impressionist exhibitions staged 1874-1886

The Salon of 1861E. Bichon, Exhibition of Watercolors in the

Durand-Ruel Gallery, 1879

Term coined by Harrison and Cynthia White: “the dealer-critic system”

Part III: Displaying Modern Art at MoMA and Elsewhere

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917, photograph by Alfred Stieglitz

Exterior and Interior views of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1939

El Lissitzky, Abstract Cabinet, Landesmuseum, Hanover, 1927-28

Director of the Hanover (and later RISD) Museum: Alexander Dorner

Installation view of First Papers of Surrealism, 1942

Arnold Newman, Marcel Duchamp, 1942