Visual Resources

ISSN: 0197-3762 (Print) 1477-2809 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gvir20

Alexander Dorner's Atmosphere Room: The

Museum as Experience

Curt Germundson

To cite this article: Curt Germundson (2005) Alexander Dorner's Atmosphere Room: The Museum
as Experience, Visual Resources, 21:3, 263-273, DOI: 10.1080/01973760500166673

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01973760500166673

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 Routledge
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Visual Resources
Vol. X X I , No. 3, September 2005, pp. 26S273

Alexander Dorner's Atmosphere

Room: The Museum as Experience
Curt Germundson

Alexander Dorner rearranged the collection of the Landesmuseum in Hanover, Germany

in the 1920s, changing the museum from a "treasure vault" to an educational institution,
putting emphasis on evolutionary changes in spatial conception and perception. Dorner
brought these ideas with him when he came to the United States. At the Rhode Island
School of Design from 1938 to 1941, Dorner served as museum director and set up five
evolutionary atmosphere rooms that displayed works within the context of their time,
original function and conception. The walls were painted in evocative colors; the Medieval
room, for example, was purple. Dorner restored works, clarifiing what their original
function and context might have been, going against the romantic notion of the fragment.
Dorner questioned static ideas of the museum by using transparencies, reproductions, and
other educational elements, arguing for a dynamic and progressive experiential space.
Keywords: Dorner, Alexander, 1893-1957; Atmosphere Room; Rhode Island School of
Design Museum, Providence, Rhode Island; Evolutionary Arrangement of Museum
Rooms; Art Education; Museum as Experience

Museum director Alexander Dorner rearranged five exhibition rooms in the Rhode
Island School of Design Museum between 1938 and 1941. These so-called
"atmosphere rooms" displayed works within the context of their time, emphasizing
the educational value of the museum-going experience and devaluing the idea of the
museum as "treasure vault." In 1937, the Museum of the Rhode Island School of
Design (from now on referred to as RISD Museum) filled a vacancy by hiring
Alexander Dorner as its new museum director. Dorner had worked as the director of
the Landesmuseum in Hanover, Germany, where he became known for re-installing
the galleries in terms of art history and cultural progression; the culmination being
the installation by El Lissitzky of the Room of Abstract Art (Figure 1).
This room displayed abstract works by artists such as Mondrian, Archipenko,
and Lissitzky in a way that emphasized the new active spatial conception of
the contemporary age. Three-sided metal strips, painted a different color on each
lSSN 0197-3762 (print)c;2005 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/01973760500166673
264 Germundson

Figure 1 View of Room of Abstract Art at the Landesmuseum, Hanover, 1927. (Photo:
Sprengel Museum Hanover. 0 2005 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New YorkIVG Bild-
Kunst, Bonn).

side-black, grey, and white-made the walls change their appearance as the visitor
crossed the room. Display cases demonstrated that abstract art was part of everyday
life by showing its influence in such diverse fields as fashion design, graphic design,
and even funerary monuments. A room by Laszlo Moholy Nagy, displaying
contemporary art and media such as film projections, was left unfinished because of
financial problems and political pressures. Dorner claimed he left Germany in 1937
because the National Socialist regime made it impossible for him to continue his
work. He saw his hiring at the RISD Museum as a chance to develop the ideas he had
worked on in Germany.
The RISD Museum opened its Neo-Georgian-style building in Providence in 1926.
A speech by the school's President, Mrs. Radeke, given at the opening, exemplifies the
view of the museum as an uplifting element for the individual:
Here in this new temple of art we gladly acknowledge the claim of the human mind
that works with beauty to create all the inspiring arts that add to the happiness of
our homes and lives. Art is beauty, but beauty wrought upon the creative
spirituality and selective hand of man. ... In the thronging years before us may we
come into this quiet place out of the rush and hurry of the world, and commune
here with beauty as with a friend.'
 Alexander Dorner's Atmosphere Room 265

This quote conveys the idea of the museum as a temple of beauty, removed from the
everyday. Dorner's rather different opinion concerning the role of the museum can
be ascertained from a January 1938 speech he gave at Harvard at the invitation of
Paul Sachs, the teacher of the museum's course, shortly after becoming the director of
the RISD Museum. This speech was called "My Experiences in the Hanover Art
Museum: What can Art Museums Do Today?" and outlines Dorner's views
concerning the role of the museum as he began to rearrange the galleries of the RISD
Museum. According to Dorner: "People no longer desire an accumulation of works
of art, divided from us by time and space, clinging to us on all sides as ivy does on
romantic buildings, but instead they want to know what direct active bearing these
things have on our times."* Dorner used Alois Riegl's ideas concerning the changes
and progression of "human conceptions of the world." According to Dorner, "it is a
new way of looking upon history and art history. It is modern in its best sense, as it
does not seek to grasp the so-called eternal elements in each artistic period, but the
changing ones. It replaces the absolute with the relative, that which is immovably
static with the freely functioning dynamic idea."3 One method that Dorner used to
convey this new way of looking at art is to paint the walls of the various exhibition
rooms in different colors, emphasizing that these so-called "atmosphere rooms" are
NOT imitations of historical rooms (period rooms), for that would be passively
romantic. Instead, Dorner wanted to focus on the active emphasis of the impression
and the experience the museum visitor gains from the period in question.
The following will show how Dorner applied his ideas to the rearranging of the
RISD Museum during his tenure as director from 1938 to 1941. He had five rooms
available in which to show the "development from the ancient Orient to 1500 AD."^
According to Dorner, "the idea was to convey to the visitor the feeling and
understanding of the special trend of each period and the general evolutionary trend
which grows through the succession of the culture^."^ Starting with the room of
Babylonian and Egyptian art, whose rearrangement was completed by October 1939,
we see that Dorner did NOT display the fragment of the Ishtar gate within a frame,
for the concept of "framing" was foreign to the Babylonians (Figure 2). The pattern
of the relief itself is extended onto the wall, emphasizing the way the piece is flatly
integrated into the rest of the wall, without being "framed." Gordon Peers, who was
an instructor of painting and drawing at RISD, painted a transparency depicting the
Ishtar Gate. The transparency serves multiple purposes. For one, it covers up a
window that offered a distracting view to a courtyard outside. Furthermore, the
transparency creates the context for the Ishtar gate fragment, which is on the wall
behind the visitor looking at the transparency. The label underneath the transparency
asks the viewer to turn around and look at the relief.
Figure 3 shows "before and after" photos of an Egyptian wooden tomb statue from
the XIth dynasty (c. 2100-2000 BC) owned by the RISD Museum. Dorner sent this
work to Boston for restoration, where the eyes and the arms were added. The right
image conveys the appearance of the restored work. This is an example of the way
that Dorner emphasized the function of a particular piece and rejected what he called
"the romantic obsession with fragments." It is important to note here that Dorner
266 Germundson

Figure 2 Lion Relief from Ishtar Gate at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, c.
1939. (Photo: Rhode Island School of Design Archives).

did not want to "fool" the viewer, for it becomes clear what parts of the piece were
restored, for the restored parts have a slightly different color. Dorner was criticized
for the restoration, the secretary of the director claiming for example that the piece's
value decreased from about US$1,000 to about US$100, destroying its value as an
antique. Another member of the Museum's administration accused Dorner of having
no love for the objects and having no aesthetic sense.
The issue of restoration is one that Dorner faced before. In 1929-30, he had a
lengthy debate, spread through several issues of the German periodical Der Kreis,
with Max Sauerlandt from the Kunstgewerbe Museum in Hamburg. Dorner argued
for restoring works as closely as possible to their original appearance. Dorner thus
confronts the issue of the original and its aura and the contention shared by many
museum officials until this day that a restoration would hurt the aura of the master
work and damage the trust the public puts into the museum as a collection of
priceless originals. Dorner would go even hrther with this move away from the aura
of the original in favor of its educational value by recommending in 1950 the
establishment of a facsimile museum.
The placement of the restored statue within the Egyptian room is important too,
for it emphasizes its angularity and planarity, foregrounding its function within
 Alexander Dorner's Atmosphere Room 267

Figure 3 Egyptian Tomb Statue, c. 2100-2000 BCE., before and after restoration. (Photo:
Rhode Island School of Design Archives).

Egyptian society (Figure 4). In the article "Background of Egyptian Art," written for
the Bulletin of the Museum of Art (July 1939), Dorner discussed the statue as the
"eternal house" for the KA, the Egyptian life force:
Statues had certain vital tasks to fulfill and were therefore represented throughout
Egyptian history by a few definite types. The only way to produce security and
clarity was to hold them together by a series of plane views, which showed the
essential characteristics. ... To the Egyptian, space was an empty nothing.6
An important aspect of the five atmosphere rooms was to be the illustrated
booklets for each room. The booklets were to be read by the visitors while sitting on
the chair in the room. According to Dorner, "the books will give a short picture of
the cultural background, including the religious, political, and economical
conditions, literature, music, dance, etc., of the period." Dorner received a
US$2,800 grant from the Carnegie to be used for the publishing of five booklets, a
book on museums called Why Have Art Museums?, and the installation of sound
systems and headphones for the five rooms. Stickers on various issues of the
Museum's Bulletin of Art indicate that the Bulletins were to serve as guides until the
publishing of the booklets.
In the January 1940 Report to the Board of Trustees, Dorner discusses the Greek
and Roman room: "In order to emphasize the different character of Greek art as
compared with Egyptian and Babylonian art, the exhibitions try to bring out in color
and arrangement the joyous character of Greek and Roman art, the confidence in
268 Germundson

Figure 4 View of installation of Egyptian Tomb Statue within Egyptian room at the
RISD Museum, c. 1939. (Photo: Rhode Island School of Design Archives).

physical life of the individual and the colorful atmosphere of the surrounding
landscape as well as of the art itself."' When comparing Dorner's Greek room
(Figure 5) with the arrangement of the Classical Room under director Rowe in 1926
(Figurefi), the differences become apparent. Dorner, for example, places less
emphasis on glass cases. The raised sarcophagus is meant to make the viewer think of
an acropolis, which becomes more obvious when seeing it against the blue walls of
the room, alluding to sky.
Just as he did in the BabylonianIEgyptian room, Dorner used a transparency
painted by Peers to cover the windows, and at the same time to show the context of
Greek sculptures. The transparency showed a temple upon an acropolis, with the
friezes in color. Dorner claimed that this is one of the first times that the original
color on Greek architectural sculpture is acknowledged in a museum. The
transparencies covering up the windows were important for another reason, for
Dorner wanted everything to be eliminated that could distract the visitors from the
experience of the galleries. Figure 5 shows a visitor perusing the issue of the Bulletin
of the Museum of Art, which served to give the viewer historical and cultural
 Alexander Dorner's Atmosphere Room 269

Figure 5 View of Classical Room at RISD Museum, c. 1939. (Photo: Rhode Island School
of Design Archives).

Figure 6 View of Classical Room of RISD Museum, 1926. (Photo: Rhode Island School
of Design Archives).
270 Germundson
perspectives for the various periods-in this particular case: Classical Greece. She is
in the process of listening to samples of Greek Classical Music through the
headphones. Another interactive element were buttons that when pressed would turn
several objects, including a bronze Aphrodite, to any side. In addition, Dorner asked
John Howard Benson to do the lettering of the various labels in the Classical room:
"This was somewhat of a problem, in as much as a type of lettering was desired which
expressed the classical spirit of Greek and Roman antiquity without imitating any
special Greek or Roman letter."8
In November 1940, the remaining atmosphere rooms were opened, dedicated to
Early ChristianIRomanesque, and the Gothic. In the 1941 Museums Committee
Report to the Trustee, Dorner stresses that "the idea of Christianity superseded the
idea of the individual City religion, the idea of the supernational feudal system the
idea of the City State. It was the philosophy of a mass movement more and more
organized as a gigantic construction oriented towards Heaven." Dorner used three
different wall colors in order to convey the three different stages of Medieval Art: The
Early Christian, the Romanesque, and the Gothic. He gave the Early Christian period
a beige background, while the Romanesque space was given a purple wall. In the
Gothic room, Dorner employed a transparency in order to reveal the interior of a
Gothic cathedral, while a stained-glass window next to it was meant to emphasize the
metaphysical and otherworldly light within cathedrals.
By the time Dorner left the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Art, he had
completed the rearrangement of five rooms: the Babylonian/Egyptian, the Greek, the
Roman, the Early Medieval, and the late Medieval. A pencil drawing by Dorner of the
museum's first floor gives us an idea of how he would have continued the
rearrangement of the galleries, making it possible for visitor to walk from period to
period, all the way to the end of the eighteenth century (Figure 7).
Another drawing conveys that on the next floor the progression would have gone
all he way to Dorner's own time, which is why he also purchased works by
contemporary artists (Figure 8).9 It is interesting to note that adjacent to the room of
"our own period," there is a space for "film," which is reminiscent of the plans for
the "Room of our Own Time" that Dorner had discussed with Laszlo Moholy Nagy
for the State Museum in Hanover. Dorner explained the long-term goal for the
Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design: "The natural and most
effective end of such a historical succession of Galleries would be a Room
representing 'Our Own Age' as the result of the drive of the past. It would make it
apparent that the meaning of our Age can by no means be a relapse into the past, but
again the stride for a new, a wider and more progressive conception of the w o r ~ d . " ' ~
In 1940, Dorner founded the educational department of the RISD Museum and
hired Carolyn MacDonald as its supervisor. MacDonald claims that Dorner gave her
a tour of the five completed rooms, during which she told him about American
pragmatists like John ewe^." The subtitle of this article-"The Museum as
ExperienceH-is a reference to John Dewey's 1934 Art as Experience. It needs to be
pointed out, however, that Dorner was not familiar with Dewey's pragmatism before
Carolyn MacDonald mentioned the similarity between it and what Dorner tried to
 Alexander Dorner's Atmosphere Room 271

Figure 7 Dorner's plan for future rearrangments of first floor of Rhode Island School of
Design Museum. (Photo: Harvard Busch Reisinger Museum Archive).

do. It is fascinating to read through Dorner's manuscript W h y Have Art Museums?,

largely completed before 1940, and notice that certain passages are very close to
Dewey, without Dorner having known about pragmatism at the time. In the
following passage, Dorner questions ideas about eternal values that were still part of
the way people thought about museums, and instead emphasizes experience:
There is still the autonomous individual sitting in the center, judging the historical
styles with eternal aesthetic concepts. The static character is still there and a
timeless law is still ruling the history of art and it is this philosophy which runs our
art museums. What do we offer to the public in our activities? There is only one
way to get out of this dilemma: To give up the chimerical assumption that there
ever existed or ever will exist anything in the world, which is static and eternal and
that there are any concepts in the human mind which existed before all experience.
In 1947, Dorner published The W a y Beyond Art, in which he incorporated
pragmatism and elaborated on his ideas concerning the inter-relationship between
perceptual and cultural transformations. Fittingly, John Dewey himself wrote the
introduction to that book.
In conclusion, Dorner tried to get away from the idea that there is an "eternal"
character in art, which is why he disapproved of passive white walls. In a certain way,
Dorner's Atmosphere Room is a kind of compromise between the modernist white
walls and the idea of the period room. Dorner focuses on progression as a way to give
272 Germundson

Figure 8 Dorner's plan for future rearrangements of second floor of Rhode Island School
of Design Museum. (Photo: Haward Busch Reisinger Museum Archive).

the museum a meaning for the future: "Only by conveying the trend of cultural
evolution, can museums become active factors in the molding of the f ~ t u r e . " ' ~

Notes
Speech by Mrs. Radeke, given at opening of the new building of the Museum of Rhode Island
School of Design, published in Bulletin of Rhode Island School of Design XIV (1926): 14.
From page 5 of the transcript for "My Experiences in the Hanover Museum: What can Art
Museums do Today?", delivered at Haward on 27 January 1938. I want to thank Andrew
Martinez at the Archives of the Rhode Island School of Design for giving me access to this
document.
Dorner, "My Experiences in the Hanover Museum", 6.
Quoted from page 15 of the unpublished manuscript "Why Have Art Museums?" I am
grateful to Andrew Martinez at the RISD Archives for showing me this text.
"Why Have Art Museums?" 15.
Alexander Dorner, "The Background of Egyptian Art," Bulletin of the Museum of Art (1939):
12.
Quoted from the 10 January 1940 Report of the Museum Committee to the Board of
Trustees, located in the Archives of the Rhode Island School of Design.
Quoted from the 10 April 1940 Report to the Board of Trustees, located in the Archives of
the Rhode Island School of Design.
The pencil drawings are located in the Alexander Dorner Archive at the Busch Reisinger
Museum, Haward University, Alexander Dorner papers. Gift of Lydia Dorner, Box B, in the
folder labeled "American Wing." I want to thank Dr. Peter Nisbet for allowing me access to
this document.
 Alexander Dorner's Xtmosphere Room 273

[ l o ] Quoted from the Quarterly Report of the Museums Committee to the Board of Trustees, for
the period from 1 October 1940 to 1 January 1941. This document is located at the Archives
of the Rhode Island School of Design.
Ill] See Samuel Cauman, The Living Museum (New York: New York University Press, 1958),
141.
1121 Quoted from the unpublished "Why Have Art Museums?', located at the Archives of the
Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design.