Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
Judith Mann, curator of European Art to 1800 at the Saint Louis Art Museum (slam.org), told us how to pick out a set of wall colors to enhance some of the world’s most famous works of art.
“Our former director felt very strongly that everything should be a standardized gray. It was really only when our current director came in 1999 that we started rethinking color.”
“I spent some time looking at other museums’ European collections, and I paid attention to the colors in galleries and at dealers that sell works of art. Little by little, I began to realize that this kind of medium-level green for old-master paintings tended to make them look just wonderful. We’ve had patrons phone us and ask for the formula.”
“We decided not to have everything the same color, so we chose this blue that we used during the [Federico] Barocci exhibition—a little deeper shade of it, but a blue that we also felt made the golds come alive.”
“In some of the modern galleries, the curator there, Simon Kelly, was particularly attentive to finding colors that would have been used in the 19th-century art salons.”
“For my collection, which really spans the medieval through the 18th century, the walls were usually not a uniform color. They were covered in fabric. They were very complicated, with lots of mirrors and gilded decorations, so we realized we probably couldn’t replicate a period color.”
“In the case of modern architecture, it’s different. In the east gallery expansion, they didn’t want us to use any color, but for contemporary art, white really works the best.”
COLORING YOUR WALLS
Go big. “Get big samples and test it out. We made a big sample board, and we took it around and tested whether it made the paintings come alive.”
No matching. “If you have a painting or a few paintings, try to avoid matching any specific colors, because sometimes it looks like you have a hole in your painting.”
A good painter makes a difference. “We have this marvelous painter, [Craig Overy], and I described to him the kind of green that I’d seen in galleries, and he, based on my verbal description, came up with this just perfect green.”
White isn’t always a safe bet. “Some museums use too bright a white and your eye can’t really take in the painting, or they use too intense colors around the paintings that have a fairly subtle palette.”
Your art matters. “For paintings from the 16th through the 19th centuries, darker colors do enhance the artwork, but once you get to art of the 1940s, ’50s, and later, a neutral, paler color is best.”
