Crowded Walls: Twentieth-Century Nostalgia for Nineteenth-Century Installation

The surprising nostalgia for densely hung exhibitions that developed among some French museological circles in the 1920s and 1930s has much to tell us about interpreting display practice. In this lecture, Martha Ward, Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago, considers nostalgic critical commentary and exhibition practice in relation to new methodologies at the time, especially as concerned with the role of attention, memory, and materiality.

This lecture is supported by the Dr. S.T. Lee Fund for Historical Studies and is part of the series Art and Its Spaces, cosponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study and the Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University.