Spaces of experience
Subtitle: art gallery interiors from 1800-2000
By: Charlotte Klonk.
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: New Haven
Language: eng
Number of pages: 305
ISBN-13: 9780300151961
Subjects: Art -- Exhibition techniques -- History -- 19th century; Art -- Exhibition techniques -- History -- 20th century; Visual communication -- Social aspects -- History -- 19th century; Visual communication -- Social aspects -- History -- 20th century
Description: This study of art gallery interiors examines the changing ideals and practices of galleries in Europe and North America from the eighteenth to the late twentieth century. It offers a detailed account of the different displays that have been created - the colors of the background walls, lighting, furnishings, the height and density of the art works on show - and it traces the different scientific, political and commercial influences that lay behind their development. Charlotte Klonk shows that scientists like Hermann von Helmholtz and Wilhelm Wundt advanced theories of perception that played a significant role in justifying new modes of exhibiting. Equally important for the changing modes of exhibition in art galleries was what Michael Baxandall has called 'the period eye', a way of seeing informed by the impact of new fashions in interior decoration and by department store and shop window displays.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: The spectator as citizen: the National Gallery in London in the early nineteenth century; title: Interiority and intimacy: colour vision and the display of art in German museums around 1900; title: Exteriority and exhibition spaces in Weimar Germany; title: The spectator as educated consumer: the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the 1930s; title: The dilemma of the modern art museum: showing art at the end of the 20th century; title: The museum and the new media.