Placing the “democratic” turn in the museum

The museum has been recognised as a site of sensory and affective experience by scholars, and the chapter considers the reshaping of visitor experience in the art museum through the transformation of its built environment, drawing on London’s National Gallery after the Second World War. Specifically, the chapter examines the experimental suite of six galleries which Philip Hendy opened in the 1950s with the aim to increase accessibility to the collection through newly adapted interior environments. In these, the remodelling of the architecture and the paintings on display were joined by a series of technological innovations in lighting and air conditioning, all of which sought to provide a comfortable and intimate setting in which the general public could enjoy the Old Masters. The chapter explores how this project of reconstruction endeavoured to domesticate the museum as a familiar space for the visitor, but was simultaneously informed by professional discourses which highlighted the National Gallery as a distinctly aestheticised sphere. Thus, the chapter considers how the museum’s experimentalism in conception and practice to democratise access to their collections was simultaneously interwoven with a governmental logic rooted in the museum’s envisioned role as a socially reforming institution.