White Cube

White Cube is a contemporary art gallery founded by Jay Jopling in London in 1993. It has two branches in London: White Cube Mason’s Yard in central London and White Cube Bermondsey in Southeast London. 

There are also White Cube galleries in Hong Kong, Paris, Palm Beach, and New York. 

The Bermondsey filial was opened on Bermondsey Street, in a formerly 1970s warehouse. It was converted into 58,000 square feet of interior space, making it, at launch Europe’s biggest commercial gallery. 

White Cube represents several living artists, including Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Anselm Kiefer, Dora Maurer, and Gilbert & George. 

The name alludes to the stereotypical appearance of an art gallery: four white walls, white ceiling, and white floor, as it was described by artist and critic Brian O’Doherty in his three-part essay “Inside the White Cube”, published in a 1976 issue of Artforum. 

When major museums began to open up in the 18th century, most notably the British Museum in 1759 and the Louvre in 1793. 

Artworks were displayed in dense, symmetrical arrangements, influenced by the Paris salons, where paintings would be hung on walls from floor to ceiling. 

Art museums became very popular destinations, and soon the museums of the Victorian era were dealing with overcrowding, in terms of both people and paintings. 

In the 19th century it was generally recognized that museums should isolate works of art on walls to accentuate quality for visitors. 

In the mid-1800s, the National Gallery’s director Charles Eastleke began to placing pictures at eye level. This made the colour of the gallery wall more important than before. 

Eastleke replaced an earlier grayish-green hue with red, which was supposed to interact nicely with golden frames and the mainly cooler colours of the paintings themselves. 

A problem that faced many museums who wanted to have fewer paintings on the walls was that there was limited storage space in the old museum buildings. 

The walls were in many cases the only place to store a painting. 

The job “curator” was invented, as late as the early 20th century, to solve this problem. 

In 1909, Boston’s Museum of Fine Art moved into a new Beaux Arts building that displayed only the most significant artworks, with the lesser ones stored in the basement. 

A few years later, in Germany, white was become the accepted wall colour for galleries. 

It was in line with the Bauhaus aesthetics, but served also as a neutral background that made it easier for museum workers to transition between temporary exhibitions. 

The white wall colour of art galleries became widely popular first in Nazi Germany. MoMA’s first director Alfred Barr found the style very effective, and decided that the museum walls should be white, which helped institutionalize the colour in this context. 

Specifically, Barr’s 1936 exhibition “Cubism and Abstract Art”. Walls and ceiling were painted white and the lighting was simplified, and there was a distinct lack of ornamentation. 

The new MoMA building, inaugurated in 1939, took its cues not from the monumental museums of the past but from the commercial spaces of department stores. 

From museums, the white walls spread to art galleries, and later, into the homes of the people who bought art, and who wanted their purchases to be displayed under similar conditions in their homes. 

White Cube galleries operate in this tradition, its name a clever play with the frame around the art that is the reason for the gallery’s existence in the first place. 

White Cube