In Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800–2000, Charlotte Klonk traces across three urban centers—London, Berlin, and New York—changing exhibition displays in gallery interiors in relation to shifting aesthetic ideals and their public, as well as larger historical and scientific dialogues. This well-illustrated study seeks to address the phenomenon of the modern gallery space, defined as the white cube, and how it differs from “powerful alternatives” (6) that existed historically. Chapters examine the formation of the National Gallery in London; the German museum reform movement around 1900; German exhibitions in the 1920s; their influence and cooptation in the foundation of the Museum of Modern Art in New York; and Documenta in Kassel as a site of transformation of the white cube approach.

One of the chief contributions of Klonk’s book rests in its investigation of how gallery and museum administrators take their cues on interior display from studies of “subjective experience” (3). In this context, Klonk does an admirable job of discussing different color theories and their presumed effect on the viewer, as well as scientific and psychological work on perception as it relates to the gallery visitor. However, beyond the promise of her introduction she does not offer quantitative or qualitative analysis of the gallery visitor and her or his experience. She begins with illustrations and accounts of people using the nineteenth-century art gallery as a space for “amorous encounters” (1), but then mostly drops the subject. Thus, she does not consider some of the classed and gendered issues of a nineteenth-century audience that others have addressed, such as Paula Gillett in Worlds of Art (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990) or her essay on “Art Audiences at the Grosvenor Gallery” (in The Grosvenor Gallery: A Palace of Art in Victorian England, Susan P. Casteras and Colleen Denney, eds., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996, 39–58). Instead, Klonk searches for how “experience itself” is “subject to social and historical forces”; within this she focuses “on the concepts of experience that informed those in charge of the museum displays” (9). Here too, though, she neglects other important scholarly contributions such as Gordon Fyfe’s thorough study of gallery experience, “Art Exhibitions and Power during the Nineteenth Century” (John Law, ed., Sociological Review: Monograph 32. Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge, London: Routledge, 1986: 20–45), where he considers the motivations of gallery administrators and the impact of exhibition display on the viewer. Other sociological texts on the subject, notably Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Trans. Richard Nice, London: Routledge, 1984), study the class from which gallery visitors come, and why that knowledge might influence and/or inspire the gallery administrators to take such pains with their interiors.

Klonk attempts to justify her lack of focus on the individual responses of gallery-goers to such spaces by stating that her interest lies in a “history of . . . collective experience” (10), but that proves difficult to pin down. She turns to studies of perception to determine “how people conceptualise subjective experience,” and refers to the marketplace as a similarly “powerful space in which people undergo visual experience” (10). At this point in my reading I thought she would examine the significant work on the stellar, nineteenth-century intervener in London gallery spaces, James McNeill Whistler, such as David Park Curry’s “Total Control: Whistler at an Exhibition” (Studies in the History of Art 19 (1987): 67–82) and Deanna Marohn Bendix’s Diabolical Designs: Paintings, Interiors and Exhibitions of James McNeill Whistler (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995). Although she does not build on this study and others (such as those mentioned above), this research is important to Klonk’s purpose of tracing interventions within and alternatives to the white cube space, along with the history of display. Similarly, the development of the commercial interior display is essential. Although Klonk spends some time in her introduction on marketable display, she states that its influence is not always germane to her chapter topics (11). Yet Erika Rappaport’s Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), among other works, suggests the broad-ranging relevance of the theme.

Each of the studies I have cited addresses Klonk’s focus on mapping an audience’s experience of the gallery interior and how, in our twenty-first-century moment, we have reached the point of the spare, white cube interior. Nineteenth-century forces, including changing economics, the growth of cities, and women’s increasing access to the public seem pivotal topics. A person’s experience of an art gallery, in the nineteenth century and today, is just one of many spectacles that the person must process, and how a person responds is rooted in her or his gender, class, and race.

Beyond the studies I mention above, Klonk could have considered the work of other contemporary art historians who address the aesthetics and perceptions of exhibition creators. For example, Klonk cites Stephanie Barron’s scholarly work on the Nazi-sponsored Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937 (Stephanie Barron, Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991), but does not acknowledge her curatorial reconstruction of this historical exhibition, called Degenerate Art (Los Angeles County Museum/Art Institute of Chicago, 1991), or the installations for the Charles Rennie Mackintosh exhibitions of 1997–98 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which included a reconstruction of Kate Cranston’s Ladies’ Luncheon Room from her Glasgow establishment. Both of these exhibits introduced contemporary viewers to the experience of historical viewers, which would address Klonk’s goal of documenting audience responses to gallery interiors. James Putnam, in Art and Artifact: The Museum as Medium (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2001), discusses artistic intercessions in modern gallery spaces; his book might have better informed Klonk’s observations on the influx of new media into the gallery space; she declares that the white cube “remains unchallenged by the inclusion of new media [specifically video art] into the gallery space. The lights are merely switched off and those spacious white rooms become black boxes—while the spectator experience intended remains the same”(14–15). Yet one of Putnam’s aims is to show how contemporary artists have both acknowledged and challenged museum and market displays by imitating them and mocking them and, hence, resisting and critiquing the notion of the white cube and its commercial alternatives.

In her concluding chapter Klonk argues that despite the influx of new media into the gallery space the interiors have remained unchanged since the experiments of the 1930s. Such a conclusion may be one truth, but it does not take into consideration all types of media and how they influence the visitor, even within a conventional white cube setting. Take performance art as one example. Even though the Museum of Modern Art was one of the last hold-outs against such intervention in the museum space, it recently housed a Marina Abramović performance art retrospective. If there is a space and an experience for the contemporary viewer, it is such a performance piece. The gallery visitor can sit across a table from the artist and hold a silent dialogue with her while being viewed by other museum-goers and filmed, so that the visitor becomes the art object. Or one can experience the fashion designer William Tempest’s new media installation at Kensington Palace, which Pam Kent describes as a stimulating encounter with “soundscapes, film projections, interactive theater and dramatic sets” (“Unleashing Secrets at Kensington Palace,” The New York Times, May 4, 2010).

Klonk succeeds in explaining how and why the museum has ceased to be a “sanctuary for private contemplation” (10), but she is not as convincing at providing active, participatory alternatives for the gallery visitor. She remarks that despite many museum attempts to mold “the perception, behavior and aesthetic . . . judgment of spectators” (11), such efforts have been unsuccessful. The fact that they did not succeed would seem to be a fruitful avenue to follow. Her book is valuable as a starting point for a study of gallery and museum interiors, but the other sources I list here are important in rounding out her examination.