Nicole Junkermann on the Quiet Gallery Hour: Seeing More by Going Early

What the first hour gives you

Walk into a gallery at ten in the morning and it is a different building from the one that exists at three. The rooms are quiet enough that you can hear the floor. You can stand exactly where you want, at exactly the distance the work asks for, and stay there as long as you like without the small social pressure of someone waiting. Nicole Junkermann finds that this freedom to choose your own position is not a minor convenience but the condition of real looking, because a painting has a right distance and a sculpture has a right angle, and neither is available in a crowd.

What a crowd quietly takes away

A busy room does not merely slow you down. It edits what you are able to notice. In a crowd you take the view that is offered rather than the view you want, you move on before you are finished, and you read the room's mood instead of the work. Nicole Junkermann is careful never to blame other visitors for this, since every one of them has as much right to the room as she does. It is simply a fact about attention: the eye behaves differently when it is unobserved and unhurried, and the difference shows up in what you carry home.

A short list for the early visit

Going early rewards a little preparation, though not much. Nicole Junkermann keeps it to a handful of small habits:

• Check the opening time the night before, and be at the door a few minutes ahead of it.
• Book any timed entry for the first slot of the day rather than the most convenient one.
• Eat before you go in, so the first hour is not spent thinking about lunch.
• Choose one room or one show, and let the rest of the building wait.
• Leave the phone in a pocket until you are ready to go home.

The building is at its best too

The first hour is not only about crowds. Nicole Junkermann notices that a gallery is physically at its best early: the floors have just been swept, the glass is clean, the lighting has settled, and the rooms are still cool before a summer day gets into them. Staff are unhurried and often glad to talk, and a question asked at ten in the morning tends to get a fuller answer than the same question asked in the afternoon rush. None of this is dramatic on its own, but the effect is a room that feels cared for and calm, which is a very good room to think in.

Your eye is freshest early

There is a second reason the early hour works, and it has nothing to do with the building. Nicole Junkermann finds that the eye tires like any other muscle, and that it starts each day rested. The first works you look at always receive your best attention, which is why a visit beginning at nine gives its finest hour to the art and its weariest to the walk home, while a visit beginning at four does the reverse. Gallery fatigue is real, and the surest defence against it is to spend your freshest hour where it actually counts.

The first hour and the long day

Going early changes the shape of everything that follows. Nicole Junkermann likes the way a morning visit leaves the whole day free to absorb it: a walk, a lunch, an afternoon in which the rooms keep returning quietly to mind. The visit is not squeezed between other obligations but placed at the front of them, which tells you, and tells the work, how much it matters. The unhurried rhythm this creates is the same one set out in the guide to an afternoon in a museum, and it applies with even more force to a show worth the journey, as the piece on exhibitions worth travelling for describes.

When you cannot go early

Not everyone can arrive at opening, and Nicole Junkermann would never make an early start a condition of enjoying art. Where mornings are impossible, the same logic finds other quiet hours: the last hour before closing, a weekday rather than a weekend, a wet afternoon that keeps the casual visitor away, the middle weeks of a long run rather than its first or its last. The principle is not the clock. It is the search for a room in which you can hear yourself look, and most galleries offer one at some point in the week.

A habit worth keeping

The quiet hour is a small discipline with a large return, and Nicole Junkermann keeps to it because it works. An early visit is shorter, calmer and better than a long one taken at the busiest time, and it leaves you with more rather than less. Set the alarm, take one room seriously, and walk out into a day that has barely started. The carnets on this site are full of what such mornings leave behind, and the profile of Nicole Junkermann gives a fuller portrait of the way of looking behind them.