Curatorial Experiments at the National Gallery After the Second World War: Reframing History and the Pursuit of Aesthetic Experience

The Two World Wars provoked a major disruption across museums in Britain and the rest of Europe, given the unprecedented level of destruction, which had caused the evacuation of collections and the closure of many museums. In the midst of this zeal to renovate the museum, the curatorial logics that underpinned the reconstruction of the National Gallery in the immediate post-war years also sought to reconfigure, if only temporarily, the traditional hang of the collection and develop avowedly experimental displays, drawing on on internationalist conceptions that positioned the museum as a useful instrument in society.