WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Everyone at the Clark Art Institute is excited about all the new things for visitors to see when the museum reopens on July 4. But part of the new experience will be the things one doesn't see.

"The quality of the glass ... it's the kind of effect people won't notice, but they'll perceive it," Kathleen Morris said in a recent tour of the Clark's 1955 "white building."

"The new cases are bringing the collection to the fore so it's not competing with reflections in the glass."

Morris' full title is the Sylvia and Leonard Marx Director of Collections and Exhibitions and Curator of Decorative Arts.

Essentially, she is the person responsible for the Clark's extensive collection of silver, porcelain and other works that do not go in a frame.

But that three-dimensional art does demand at least as much attention to how it is displayed. And when the Clark closed the original museum building for two years, Morris took advantage of the opportunity to redesign the decorative arts collection.

An integral part of its new and improved presentation is those cases, designed by the architect in charge of the white building's remake, New York's Annabelle Selldorf, and Frankfurt, Germany's Glasbau Hahn, who Morris described as "the premiere museum casework manufacturer working today."

According to Glasbau Hahn's website, its cases display works in museums from the National Museum of China in Beijing to the Indira Gandhi Memorial Museum in New Delhi to the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

In Williamstown, Glasbau Hahn's cases are designed to blend in to the existing architecture in the Clark's original home. The lines at the base of each case line up perfectly with the molding on the windowsills nearby, for example.

"The goal was to have the cases feel like they belong in the building but also be cases in which you could show anything," Morris said. "They create a neutral display ground."

The neutral glass is one of the key. It is Water White, glass its manufacturer bills as transmitting 98 to 99 percent of light with anti-glare and anti-reflective coatings.

In addition to the improved glass, the custom cases have an element the Clark's old cases lacked, "conservation chambers" that hold a silica gel that removes particles from the air that cause silver to tarnish.

"One of the things we did prior to installation was clean every piece of silver," Morris said.

That means the Clark's world-class collection of English silver shines like new.

And some of the works on display next month will be altogether new to the Clark. One of the highlights of the initial installation is a breakfast set from the early 18th century that the Clark acquired in 2012 but has not yet exhibited. Other works from the decorative arts collection will be shown for the first time in decades when the galleries reopen, Thompson said.

And the whole approach to showing the decorative arts has changed. Whereas in the past the cases have been used as accents to galleries featuring paintings, the decorative arts have been given more prominence in the 1955 building's new configuration, which in the initial installation has a gallery for silver, a gallery for porcelain and a gallery for a mix of both.

"We worked to completely redesign and reconceptualize how decorative arts are shown," Morris said. "[Senior Curator] Richard [Rand] and I sat down with a scale model of the building and figured out how the collection would be installed."

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