The larger, non-Scandinavian art world seems to be having one of its periodic rediscoveries of the discreet, atmospheric charms of the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershoi. It’s hard to discern a particular rhyme or reason uniting these rediscoveries. Just be glad that they keep happening and have been happening with apparent greater frequency since 1982. That’s when the eminent, now-deceased American curator Kirk Varnedoe featured Hammershoi in an exhibition, Northern Light: Realism and Symbolism in Scandinavian Painting 1880-1910, that successfully toured three U.S. centres. More recently, well-received retrospectives of the artist have been held at the Guggenheim in Manhattan and the Royal Academy in London, where critics all but knighted Hammershoi, dead at 51 in 1916, Scandinavia’s greatest painter after the Norwegian Edvard Munch.
Canadians have a rare opportunity right now to experience Hammershoi’s interiors, nature studies, cityscapes and portraits first hand, at the Art Gallery of Ontario. The occasion is Painting Tranquility: Masterworks by Vilhelm Hammershoi, a touring show organized by the National Gallery of Denmark that’s already appeared at Manhattan’s Scandinavia House and will move to Seattle’s Frye Art Museum once its Toronto stay ends. The exhibition also lets the AGO unveil its first-ever Hammershoi, Interior with Four Etchings (1905), purchased for the permanent collection earlier this year with help from Canadian Heritage.
Beauty isn’t a word much used in contemporary art-writing but it seems an apt descriptor of the 24 or so paintings comprising Painting Tranquility. Admittedly, it’s largely a severe beauty. An artist who often needed two months to complete a canvas, Hammershoi clearly took great pleasure in the act of painting, even if this sensuousness was profoundly methodical, expressed with a muted, highly limited palette and used to create sfumato-like vignettes of meditative hermeticism. Staring at one of the artist’s almost deafeningly silent, near-still-life interiors, the viewer requires no more than three seconds to realize the Copenhagen-based Hammershoi and Ida, his wife/muse/model of 25 years, never had children, so telling is the utter lack of ephemera, whimsical or otherwise, and the tamped-down “adult” colour scheme. There’s tranquillity, all right. But seen by contemporary eyes through the scrim of, say, Ingmar Bergman movies or Woody Allen’s Interiors, it’s of the clenched variety. Here, conversations are whispered, a burst of laughter as much a violation of politesse as a jag of tears.
On one level, the canvases in Painting Tranquility are unapologetically conservative. You can identify every object in them. Every nose and mouth are where they should be, the pictorial spaces are rigorously composed. There are no grand painterly gestures, no agonized, crudely distorted figures, no slashes of lurid colour, no loss of self-possession – nothing, in short, that reflects (except in their profound absence) the Expressionist, Fauvist and Post-Impressionist currents then inflaming Europe and informing its most forward-thinking art. At the same time, they’re quite peculiar. The cityscapes are at once precise and misty, utterly bereft of pedestrians, wagons, horses and vendors and painted from unexpected viewpoints. A similar asceticism distinguishes the interiors. All done in the spacious apartments the Hammershois occupied in central Copenhagen, they seem illuminated by a perpetual milky March light that makes their contents as much colour tone poems à la Whistler as invocations of physical space à la Vermeer.
Occasionally, a black-clad Ida makes an appearance, but usually she’s positioned off-centre on the canvas, her back to the spectator (1902’s A Room in the Artist’s Home in Strandgade, with the Artist’s Wife is a notable exception), her hands hidden. It’s all about as cozy as a refrigerator; yet has stillness and painterly restraint ever produced anything as, well … dramatic as Woman Seen from the Back, completed in 1888?
About the only time Hammershoi waxes lyrical is when he gets outdoors. This is best illustrated here by Near Fortunen, Jaegersborg Deer Park, North of Copenhagen, a 1901 landscape. Painted in the summer, the picture places the observer in front of a stand of trees atop a hillock as sunlight pours through the branches to warm the tall grass at the trees’ base. The silhouette effect is akin to what you used to get when, film camera in hand, you put your subject in front of the sun rather than the sun behind you. All in all, it’s a very pleasurable picture – welcoming, in fact.
A decade or so ago a curator described Hammershoi as “one of the most suicidal painters I can think of.” I don’t know if that’s entirely fair or accurate. Hammershoi, lest we forget, was unceasingly productive, his output slowing only with the diagnosis of the cancer, circa 1912, that would claim him four years later. He travelled extensively. He had friends. He had money. He had champions and recognition (in 1911, he was awarded first prize at a major international art show in Rome). Unquestionably he was attuned to life’s melancholic pitch but not, it seems, entirely so. Take a look at Self-Portrait, a masterpiece of murk from 1911, and an effective condensation/summation of virtually all his artistic “themes” (light and space, the body, doors and windows, in/out, the frozen moment). But isn’t that a smile – or at the very least a half-smile – on his face?
Painting Tranquility: Masterworks by Vilhelm Hammershoi is at the AGO in Toronto through June 26 (ago.net) and at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle July 16 through Sept. 26 (fryemuseum.org).