A Little History of the Salon Hang

Immediately following the invention of Cubism in the early 20th century, paintings, drawings, and sculptures made in that trailblazing new style were often displayed in dense installations—stacked cheek-by-jowl almost to the ceiling—in artists’ studios, collectors’ homes, and annual exhibitions. Known colloquially as a “Salon hang,” this mode of display actually harks back to one of the most traditional modes of exhibition in 17th-century France, and the invention of the public art museum. And yet MoMA’s first exhibition of Cubism a few decades later, in 1936, embraced the simplicity of a single row of works, which had already become the Museum’s standard mode for viewing modern art.

The Museum’s newly installed Gallery 503: A Cubist Salon returns to the “Salon hang” style of exhibition, and offers us a chance to explore the unexpected history of this mode of display, which was tied both to the most traditional academy of art and the most cutting-edge artwork.

Installation view of A Cubist Salon in MoMA’s fifth-floor Collection Galleries

In France, the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, founded in 1648 under the aegis of Louis XIV, began organizing an annual exhibition in 1667. Because the recurring location for this event was the Louvre’s Salon Carré, the presentation became known simply as the Salon. The room led to the palace’s Grande Galerie, and its walls were tightly packed in order to accommodate the many compositions submitted by artists eagerly seeking honors and patronage. Works were hung from eye level to the upper moldings of the lofty space. The Academy observed a strict hierarchy of genres that dictated the placement of submissions: history paintings, considered the most elite and realized on monumental scales, enjoyed pride of place, while smaller portraits, landscapes, and still lifes hung below.

Pietro Antonio Martini. View of the Salon of 1785. 1785

K. Lucjan Przepiórski. The Salon Carré in the Louvre. 1875

This design became a norm for museum collections. The Musée du Louvre, born in 1793 out of the French Revolution, adopted this installation strategy from the beginning. Practically, it allowed curators to maximize the displays of the collection and create an environment in which visitors were immersed among the Old Masters. But not all works received an advantageous placement.

Artists, particularly those in Paris who flocked to the Louvre and to the Salon, were attuned to the advantages and pitfalls of this display style. Those who came to the Louvre to copy works as a way of studying art complained about the inaccessibility of some works positioned so high on the walls; still others had similar complaints about the yearly Salon. In 1870, Edgar Degas penned an open letter encouraging the Salon’s jury to embrace new approaches, chief among them a simplification of the hang to two rows only. Artists in Degas’s immediate orbit, like Frédéric Bazille, were already organizing works along these more relaxed measures in their studios.

Frédéric Bazille. L’Atelier de Bazille (The Studio of Bazille). 1870

By the close of the 19th century, the Academy’s Salon ceased to be the dominant stage in Paris. Installations were reimagined at new exhibitions that proliferated in its wake, often outside of institutions and organized by artists: the Salon d’Automne, the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, and the Salon des Indépendants, among others. In 1904 and in a dedicated retrospective in 1907, the Salon d’Automne reintroduced the work of Paul Cézanne to many artists who would go on to engage with Cubism. The simplified presentation enabled a close contemplation of the French painter’s groundbreaking work. Cézanne “was my one and only master!” Pablo Picasso once declared. The forebear’s meditations on space, solidity, and color—and the possibilities for their manipulation and abstraction that the act of placing pigment on canvas introduced—informed Cubism’s break with tradition.

View of the Cézanne Room at Salon d’Automne, 1904

And yet, in their personal working spaces, these artists often embraced a multitude of references and media, filling every available inch with art. Picasso’s studio on the boulevard de Clichy in Paris, one of the proving grounds of Cubism, was not only a site of profound innovation, but also a space of unexpected juxtapositions of art and objects. A snapshot of one corner, featuring Picasso’s friend and fellow artist Ramon Pichot, captures one such crowded wall. In the upper right, Henri Matisse’s portrait of his daughter, Marguerite, rests on a ledge; below, Cubist drawings and a postcard are tacked into the wall under a landscape, a framed abstract composition, and a mask. A mandolin rests at left next to a composition with flowers.

Ramon Pichot in Picasso’s studio at 11 boulevard de Clichy, Paris, 1910. Archives Picasso, Musée national Picasso – Paris

Leo and Gertrude Stein’s apartment on the rue de Fleurus. c. 1910. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

Collectors of Cubism also embraced the visual paradox of modern painting in a salon hang evocative of tradition, likely for reasons of pure practicality and decoration. At their small, shared apartment on rue de Fleurus in Paris, siblings Gertrude and Leo Stein, among the first collectors of Cubism, filled the walls with works by the Paris School. The art hanging on the walls contrasted in style, size, and even framing, creating a lively space for gatherings of artists, writers, and critics.

Francis Picabia’s The Spring at the Salon d’Automne exhibition, Grand Palais des Champs Elysées, Paris, October 1912

By the time the Salon d’Automne opened in 1912, Cubism had emerged as a galvanizing idea for many artists active in Paris. The “Salle des Cubistes” that year was both a testament to the movement’s impact and to the long shadow cast by the Academy’s Salon the century before: Francis Picabia’s monumental The Spring is flanked by other large canvases, which rest above smaller compositions. Sculpture by Amedeo Modigliani, captioned in L’Illustration as a “decorative ensemble,” punctuate the spaces against the walls between paintings. The Salon hang of these exhibitions linked the Cubists’ avant-garde project to the former establishment.

By the start of the 1920s, the presentation of art was changing in France and elsewhere in Europe. In Germany, for example, the young art historian and curator Alexander Dorner reimagined the galleries at the Niedersachsiches Landesmuseum, Hannover, in 1922. Educated in Berlin by scholars like Erwin Panofsky, who were cultivating art history as a rigorous academic discipline, Dorner adopted a new approach. For the reorganization of the collection, he turned to a “single hang,” in which paintings were installed in a row and spaced apart. Not only did this pared-down display invite close analysis, it also distinguished the museum space as different from collectors’ residences and temporary exhibitions.

Alexander Dorner’s reorganization of galleries of the Niedersachsisches Landesmuseum, Hannover. c. 1920

Installation view of the exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art at The Museum of Modern Art, March 2–April 19, 1936

Influenced by Dorner’s example, which he saw firsthand during travels throughout Europe, Alfred H. Barr Jr. emulated this simpler model in the galleries of many of the first exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art. Symmetry and simplicity characterize Barr’s early approach. “Hanging pictures is very difficult, I find, and takes a lot of practice,” he commented to a friend in 1934. “Heretofore I followed perfectly conventional methods, alternating light and dark, vertical and horizontal.” Two years later, Barr organized the landmark exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art. There, visitors found Cubist paintings in a single line hung at standard eye level—the museum presentation standard that endures today.

A Cubist Salon is currently on view in MoMA’s fifth-floor collection galleries.