MoMA’s Eleonore Hugendubel tells the story of the museum’s walls:
In the 1930s, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., MoMA’s founding director, tirelessly scoured the front and back spaces of commercial galleries, artists’ studios, and museums, … keenly observing display and installation methods. … Barr had MoMA’s walls lined with plain beige monk’s cloth, a cotton fabric that, according to Philip Johnson, who founded the Department of Architecture and Design in 1930, was “the most neutral thing he could get.” … The cloth soon gave way to white wall paint, although in Johnson’s opinion “the beige color was far better for painting than white.”
Decades later, a similar debate occurred at another iconic New York gallery; Frank Lloyd Wright was furious at the proposed colour for the Guggenheim’s walls:
S.O.S.! … A picture-hanger (named Sweeney) is authorized … to barge in on the architect of the museum and paint the interior dead-white – thus tearing the inside from the outer walls of the organic building. … ¶ A pity to have a masterpiece (it is) daubed to death at the end to gratify a metempsychosis for the white-sepulchre for a museum.
Watching paint dry is not so dull after all.