The Barnes Foundation is a traditional art collection and it is one of a kind as for the assorted hanging of the paintings. The sophisticated wall compositions by Albert Barnes were created as a tool for art education, and they have not been altered since 1951. Today, we are interested whether Barnes’ taste withstood the test of time. We asked participants in an online study to create their own hangings on five of the original gallery walls, and also tested whether beholders are able to identify a missing painting from a selection of suitable alternatives. Results show that Barnes’ motifs are reproduced by a significant number of participants and that experts produce more Barnes-like displays than naive participants. We conclude that Albert Barnes based his choices at least to some degree on universally valid visual aspects that are still understood today, especially by people trained in the visual domain.

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美术馆、博物馆的画作摆放是否有永恒的真理？对巴恩斯收藏的实验研究

巴恩斯基金会是一个传统的艺术收藏馆，其各种绘画作品的悬挂也是独一无二的。阿尔伯特·巴恩斯 (Albert Barnes) 创作的精致墙壁作品是作为艺术教育的工具而创作的，自 1951 年以来一直没有改变过。今天，我们感兴趣的是巴恩斯的品味是否经受住了时间的考验。我们要求在线研究的参与者在五面原来的画廊墙上制作自己的挂画，并测试观看者是否能够从一系列合适的替代品中识别出丢失的画作。结果表明，大量参与者再现了巴恩斯的主题，并且专家比天真的参与者产生了更多类似巴恩斯的展示。我们得出的结论是，阿尔伯特·巴恩斯至少在某种程度上基于普遍有效的视觉方面做出的选择，这些方面今天仍然被理解，尤其是受过视觉领域训练的人们所理解。