“Vienna 1900” has become both a travel destination and a widely known body of research. In each instance, it is subject to a variety of clichés, “either as the . . . glamourous city purveyed by the tourist industries or as Broch's ossified imperial capital” (204). With this in mind, author Tag Gronberg (Reader in History of Art and Design at University of London) attempts to breathe new life into Vienna's old bones by recasting some of its well-known figures into a discussion of performance, gender, and the panoramic view.

This book is a series of five case studies in which Gronberg reexamines some of the important personalities of Viennese modernity: Carl Moll, Peter Altenberg, Adolf Loos, Gustav Klimt, and Emilie Flöge. Although the artists and events described in each case study are well known, Gronberg draws attention to the common element of performance at the heart of their work. In so doing, Gronberg reconsiders Carl Schorske's notion of the retreat into aestheticism as a distinctive of Viennese modernity (Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, 1980). Instead, Gronberg writes, Vienna was “a city obsessed by theatre and the theatrical” (34). This obsession with theatricality meant that artists were continually reinventing themselves before the Viennese public, even in their private lives and retreats. In the introduction, Gronberg introduces the idea of performance by using Hermann Broch's metaphor of the imperial theater box (always empty but omnipresent in theatres throughout the Habsburg lands) symbolizing both the all-seeing emperor and the void at the center. In addition, Gronberg makes use of Walter Benjamin's panoramic view as a defining element of modernity. Gronberg uses this dual perspective—theatre box and panorama—to analyze Otto Wagner's design for the Imperial railway station in Hietzing (1898). Unused, mostly empty, but with a sumptuously decorated interior, its main feature is a panoramic painting of Vienna's new railway system; it is the view from a distance that begins from within a little jeweled box.

Gronberg's greatest contribution is linking panorama and performance with questions of gender, and Gronberg acknowledges the significance of recent research, such as David Luft's Eros and Inwardness in Vienna: Weininger, Musil, Doderer (Chicago, 2003) to this project. The first three case studies (chapters 1–3) discuss the supposed opposition between the masculine public sphere and the feminized private sphere. In chapter 1, Gronberg traces the unlikely connection between new definitions of masculinity and domestic/interior space. Gronberg compares and contrasts Carl Moll's evocation of the bourgeois interior and Peter Altenberg's rejection of that same domestic interior, but suggests that both artists, despite their obvious differences, appropriated the interior as a masculine space for public view. In the case of Moll, it was the male intellect orchestrating the Gesamtkunstwerk of family life. For Altenberg, it was the male flâneur—receptive to the innocence of the prepubescent female while articulating a feminized maleness into old age: slender, agile, and fit. Both men, however, treat their personal domestic interiors as an active realm of male performance, not an escape from public life.

In chapter 2, Gronberg interprets Adolf Loos's Café Museum (completed in 1899) as a masculine public space, but goes on to describe how he subverts the project with the adjacent Gibsonzimmer decorated with images of the Gibson Girl, a symbol of modernity. This constituted a feminine challenge to the masculine space. In addition, Gronberg discusses how Loos's modernity was ambivalently gendered. Despite his public persona of trim, English masculinity, Loos endorsed what he believed to be an indigenous Austrian style in the Biedermeier era, a style normally associated with the feminine domestic interior. The Biedermeier (feminine) becomes the instrument of masculine design. Proof, Gronberg writes that “the binary oppositions so important to Loos's polemic are constantly threatened and undermined” (90). Chapter 3 continues this theme in a case study of Loos's publication of images of his wife Leni's bedroom in 1903.

Chapters 4 and 5 question the binary opposition of city/country in Viennese modernity. Using the cases of Emile Flöge and Gustav Klimt in the countryside (chapter 4) and Peter Altenberg's extended stay in Semmering in 1912 (chapter 5), Gronberg discusses how these artists constructed their country retreats into artistic performances. In the case of Flöge and Klimt, the published photographs of their holidays (regardless of the personal or sexual ambivalence of these images) provided them with strategies of representation for the “mutual enhancement of their professional identities” (144). These images, supposedly captured in moments of leisure are, in Gronberg's analysis, skillful performances of private life for the public. Chapter 5 discusses Peter Altenberg's visit to Semmering and the literary project it engendered, Semmering 1912. Here, Gronberg returns to the panoramic view as a symbol of Fernliebe, love from a distance. In the panorama, by now a medium of mass entertainment at the Prater, “the object of the audience's gaze was necessarily untouchable” (182). So it was with Altenberg's passion for prepubescent girls.

The book's title is unfortunate, for it obscures the author's theoretical approach to the subject. In addition, modernity is notoriously difficult to define and its use sometimes appears circular: “Vienna 1900: City of Modernity reconsiders the ways in which Vienna's art and design . . . were presented as distinctively modern” (30). Nevertheless, Gronberg's discussion of gender in each case study is provocative. The introduction and conclusion have the feel of having been grafted on to the case studies, and some elements of their arguments are not fully developed. This is a lesser concern, however, because the structure of the book allows each case study to be read on its own. Readers already familiar with “Vienna 1900” will appreciate the gendered rereading of well-known artists, whereas students are likely to enjoy the book as an introduction to these personalities. For both groups of readers, however, Gronberg hopes to provide a theoretical roadmap that is more relevant to the twenty-first century and its “preoccupation with celebrity and the performativity of daily life” (204), a guide that will help future scholars to navigate between the nostalgia tourism and museumification of “Vienna 1900.”