We should really focus our discussion on the architecture and the light, so we can elaborate on what has driven our thinking about this installation.

Yes. The Pulitzer's building by Tadao Ando can be seen as a sculpture of light, where the changing position of the sun and the atmospheric factors of clouds, mist, and rain have a dramatic impact. Given the arrangement of the spaces around the Watercourt and the orientation of the windows and walls, daylight enters in the most unexpected ways, mostly as a reflection. Additionally, the galleries themselves capture different intensities of illumination, which change in the course of the day.

This situation contrasts greatly with that of traditional museums, where curators are working with stabilized light conditions. Wherever possible, any lateral influx of light that is subject to the changing position of the sun is usually replaced with lights from the ceiling. A milestone in that development was the refurbishment of the Grande Galerie of the Louvre. Following the French Revolution, the building was transformed from a palace housing the royal collection to a museum for the public. The artist Hubert Robert, whom the Revolutionaries elected as curator of paintings, proposed a combination of lateral and ceiling light in the Grande Galerie. Shortly thereafter Sir John Soane designed the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, one of the first museums built specifically for the exhibition of paintings. Soane banned lateral light altogether and created the effect of an astoundingly stabilized ambience generated by lantern-topped domes (see Ill. 2).

And under the auspices of electric light, this principle has been perfected even further, be it in the new wings of the Louvre or in Berlin's recently constructed Gemäldegalerie, both of which are basically windowless spaces. At the Saint Louis Art Museum, like almost all museums, we install the Old Masters with focused light (even spotlights) which makes the pictures look great, often keeping the rooms dim overall. That allows the paintings themselves to be highlighted and, in the end, better apprehended since details and even brushwork can be seen.

Already in the eighteenth century, tourists on their Grand Tour complained about the bad viewing conditions they encountered in European buildings, mainly churches. Modern travelers often share that grievance, although they now have the occasional help of electric light. Most of the historic rooms in palaces are equipped with modern lamps and an increasing number of old churches offer timed light mechanisms for tourists willing to toss a coin into them.

From my own experience, I recall my initial discomfort as a young student looking at original works of art during my travels. I was accustomed to looking at photographs first; they seemed so much easier to comprehend as they allowed me to access the visual information of the work all at once. When looking at originals, particularly in dark spaces, it took me quite some time to appreciate how the eyes adapt and how the mind anticipates details before they are visually revealed.

The phenomenon you are describing, art experienced in dark spaces, I would call the slow look. Looking slowly changes everything. This is exactly what is demanded of the viewer in Ideal (Dis-) Placements. When you approach the Entrance Gallery, which can be quite dark, the seventeenth-century paintings emerge slowly, just as they once did in dark Italian side chapels or dimmed Mediterranean interiors. The paintings we have installed in this gallery are distinguished by stark contrasts of light and dark: these works were made precisely for such an ambience. In the dark, the viewing process is actually set up in sequences, encouraging both eye and imagination to explore, beginning with those elements that are most easily discerned, such as the breast and knee of Potiphar's wife or Mary Magdalene's face. Like the pilgrims who originally came to light a candle in front of these paintings, today's viewers can be deeply affected by allowing the play of light and darkness to guide their viewing.

That experience also resonates with the gold-ground paintings installed in the Cube Gallery. That space only receives light through its narrow entrance. Depending on the moment, there is sometimes a glimmer of light from the Water Court, the reflection of which is uncannily like the flicker of candlelight. Walking from the Main Gallery towards the Cube, visitors make out from afar the silhouette of the Saint Louis Art Museum's Madonna with Child by Vivarini. As one approaches, one sees the fine points of the work more clearly and the subtleties of the gilding. If we switch the gallery lights on, an interesting change occurs in all the paintings in that gallery. The contrast is subdued between the burnished and tooled gold, and the muted "shadows" of the pictures painted in tempera are less substantial. The tensions between the material and the immaterial are restrained. The subtlety of their interplay is effectively lost.

The Main Gallery of the Pulitzer offers a different situation. Here light pours upward into the room from floor-level windows, but also down from the Mezzanine, which filters light from above. In this way, two architectural traditions are alluded to: the Grande Galerie with its lateral sources of light, and the cupola of a church, whose windows illuminate the main altar below. In that sense, our installation is a departure from traditional museum lighting, which presupposes that there is only one ideal light for viewing Old Masters.

It is also a departure from the traditional museum narration based on an understanding of chronological development or the predominance of geographical groupings. I think we can be proud of the Main Gallery, where the paintings are arranged in medallions, based on princely display practices: it makes use of the space and the arrangements to reveal aspects of connoisseurship and power. It is a grouping that allows the viewer to identify more formalistic elements like line and color, or it is an opportunity to consider how compositional configurations differ. Grouped in conversational juxtapositions, arrangements like these offered parallels and contradictions for the honored visitors of the prince. Talking to one another, they could perform, showing off their knowledge and exercising their keen eyes.

And yet, it almost seems that the very moment you see a painting as the expression of an artistic style, or of an individual or national style, or as part of a taxonomic system, you no longer look at the work's poetry, or what is really represented, nor do you feel the impact it was meant to have in its totality.

Our exhibition at the Pulitzer is primarily about the experience of viewing rather than about questions of style, iconography, or other themes traditionally associated with Old Master paintings. Here, we have set up an experiment about looking. Most museums compose their installations with the aim to educate the viewer and satisfy the connoisseur; works of art are arranged to teach about the history of art, styles, movements, and the Masters within them—teaching the eye to recognize the detail, identify relevant characteristics, swoon over the mastery.

Obviously, it is impossible to bridge the gap between exhibition goers of the early twenty-first century and late medieval seekers of religious icons or the courtiers in a princely gallery. But this doesn't mean that questions about historic viewing conditions should be abandoned altogether. Rather, this disparity opens up lines for further thinking and questioning. And this is precisely the point of Ideal (Dis-)Placements: Old Masters at the Pulitzer.

Without being so aware of it, perhaps one of our endeavors in this installation has been to seek a balance between the connoisseurial gaze and an original viewing experience. Because the Pulitzer has virtually no permanent collection and because it can take certain liberties with its installations, we actually have the opportunity to gratify the inclinations of imagination and the yearnings for tactility, while also satisfying the expectations of the connoisseur.