Vilhelm Hammershoi: The Poetry Of Silence

Vilhelm Hammershoi: The Poetry Of Silence
28 June - 7 September 2008
Supported by Novo Nordisk and OAK Foundation, Denmark
The Royal Academy of Arts

This exhibition has been organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, the National Museum of Western Art and NIKKEI, Tokyo

On the surface, Vilhelm HammershØi (1864-1916) is a mass of contradictions. We accept him as a modernist painter, but he never painted in the bright colours of his contemporary impressionists, or fauvists like Henri Matisse. Even the red roofs of HammershØi’s exteriors are muted. His paintings are much concerned with architecture and building interiors but his renderings are vapid and misty, more akin to impressionism and pointillism than technical drawing. And his street scenes and building interiors are all but devoid of people. His painting Figures By The Window, 1895, is positively crowded by the presence of two women. But this did not mean that HammershØi could not render humanity.

On the contrary, he was an accomplished painter of portraits. The painting of his wife Portrait of Ida HammershØi (1907) is astonishing, the subject almost seeming to live on the canvas. This virtuosity elevates HammershØi to the level of the greatest of all portrait painters, Rembrandt Van Rijn.

HammershØi was born in Copenhagen in 1864. By the age of eight he was receiving drawing lessons provided by his mother who had already recognised his drawing talent. When he was fifteen he entered the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. He fell into the limelight in 1885 when his Portrait of a Young Woman featured in the annual spring exhibition held by the Academy in Charlottenburg palace. This portrait of his nineteen-year-old sister, Anna, was the artist’s entry for the Academy’s Newhaus prize, one that it failed to win. In an open letter, forty-one artists, including his teacher, Peder Severin KrØyer, demanded unsuccessfully that HammershØi be given the prize. But why was there such a storm of controversy over the painting?

The Portrait is a three-quarter-length painting of the young woman. One hand rests upon her lap and the other is placed rather awkwardly upon the chair or stool upon which she is seated. Anna stoops forward slightly. She does not look at us but directs her gaze at some place or time we cannot see. Neither can we see how far she is from the door behind her. A strange mist seems to hang over the entire scene, draining it of colour. Even Anna’s lips barely register as red.

To my eyes this is a fine, allegorical portrait of a young person on the threshold of her life and womanhood, her anxiety being registered by the awkward posture of her body. Her dress is plain, her person entirely free of ornament, not yet having acquired the badges and symbols of life and experience, e.g., rings and other jewellery. But in conservative, nineteenth-century Denmark, where pomp and grandiosity was the hallmark of successful portraiture, it failed to impress the establishment. Here, it is interesting to note that HammershØi had also attended the Independent Study Schools, which had been founded in 1882 by students dissatisfied with the traditional teaching offered at the Academy. Rembrandt is not the only Dutch artist by whom HammershØi had been influenced.

In 1901 HammershØi painted Interior With Woman at Piano, Strandgade 30. The title of the painting refers to the Copenhagen apartment in which he lived from 1898 to 1909 and the woman was his wife, Ida. There are striking similarities between this painting and A Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman, also called The Music Lesson, painted by Johannes Vermeer c.1662.

In both paintings we see a female figure, her back towards us as she plys the keyboard of her instrument. Both women have brown hair knotted loosely to reveal their graceful, swanlike necks. In the Vermeer painting, light filters through stained glass windows onto the left side of the woman. Though we cannot see the source of light in the HammershØi painting, we know it is there because of the pale disc cast onto the wall – again, to the left of the woman. In both paintings there is a chair and table standing between the music-playing subjects and us.

These similarities serve to heighten the differences. In the Vermeer painting, the table is covered in a cloth woven in rich reds and purples. The woman is dressed in a yellow blouse and a red skirt, and the virginal is elaborately inlaid and decorated. In the HammershØi painting, the table is covered in a white cloth, the woman is dressed in black and the remainder of the room bears the customary muted colours of his other works. But there is one more sly – almost humorous - pointer to the Vermeer painting. I mean the dish of pale yellow butter on HammershØi’s table, referring to the famous yellow of many of Vermeer's paintings. But in spite of these references to and influences by past masters, there is nothing vague or derivative about HammershØi.

As you explore the Vilhelm HammershØi: The Poetry of Silence exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, you become aware of his recurring themes; magnificent buildings in deserted streets, pale interiors either empty or peopled by one or two dark-clad subjects. This theme is particularly significant in the ‘Strandgade 30’ series, the paintings of his apartment interiors, done between 1898 and 1909. Yet there is nothing warm or welcoming about these images. The ‘silence’ of the exhibition title is not the calm of Zen philosophy but a dark and menacing nihilism.

All the while we feel shut out, or hemmed in, or trapped in some other way, observing but unable to engage. A clue to this feeling lies partly in the painting technique of HammershØi. I quote: In the foreground of the painting (Street in London, 1900) he uses the technique of scumbling, applying thin pigments with a dry brush so that the ground on the canvas shows through. This technique makes the foreground indistinct, creating distance between the viewer and the subject. The painting is at once mysterious, haunting and uncanny, evoking sensations shared by many of his other architectural paintings. (Helena Bonett, Education Department, Royal Academy of Arts.)

Looking at the paintings of HammershØi is like watching one of those frightening movies where the chief subject returns to his home town after being away a long time, only to either find the place deserted or being unable to engage with the people who remain. Slowly the truth is revealed to the subject. He cannot engage with his environment because he no longer exists.

Ida HammershØi does not turn to look at us in any of the Strandgade 30 paintings because we are not there. In spite of HammershØi’s numerous doors and windows there is no way into the picture for us, or out of it for the subject. Like Anna in Portrait of a Young Woman, we are unable to see the mystery-shrouded future, being trapped in our own omnipresent present. This is a stultifying thought, bringing home to us the materialist nature of HammershØi’s work. The light in his paintings is not that of the divine. Like his friend and contemporary, Edvard Munch, he was a student of human neuroses, not spiritual salvation. It is not surprising that, while HammershØi worked on the major body of his work, Sigmund Freud was completing The Interpretation of Dreams.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, another young artist was painting deserted streets, house exteriors and lonely, disengaged characters in domestic settings. Born in 1882, Edward Hopper was almost twenty years younger than HammershØi, but went on to live almost thirty years longer. When I survey a collection of Hopper’s paintings, including Nighthawks (1942) and A Woman In The Sun, I get the feeling that this is what HammershØi could have accomplished had he lived a longer life. All the themes are there; urban alienation, domestic claustrophobia and silence, that omnipresent silence so loud that it reverberates. I urge you to hear it for yourself. Words of warning from Felix Kramer of the Stadel Institut, Frankfurt: This collection is unlikely to be seen outside of Denmark again.

Take heed. Vilhelm HammershØi: The Poetry Of Silence is open until September 7, 2008. You can see all of these paintings and many more.

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