Spaces of the Art World
Art that pictures the places where art is shown, stored and looked at, from crowded 18th-century picture rooms to museum photographs.
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Artists have long pictured the rooms where art is shown and seen. Johann Zoffany's The Tribuna of the Uffizi (1772–77) packs an octagonal room in Florence with paintings, sculptures and English travellers admiring them, and Giovanni Paolo Panini's paired canvases Ancient Rome and Modern Rome (1757) imagine vast halls hung with views of the city's monuments. Engravings of the Paris Salon in the 1780s show walls covered from floor to ceiling, and Honoré Daumier later caricatured the crowds pushing through it.
In recent decades photographers have made these spaces a subject in themselves. Thomas Struth's Museum Photographs, begun in 1989, catch visitors standing before famous paintings, so that viewers and viewed mirror each other. Candida Höfer photographs empty public interiors in precise, frontal views, and Louise Lawler photographs artworks in storerooms, homes and corridors, showing how placement changes meaning. Andrew Grassie paints exact records of exhibitions as they were installed.
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