Master of interior space
Andrew Lambirth
Vilhelm Hammershoi: the Poetry of Silence Royal Academy, until 7 September Supported by OAK Foundation Denmark and Novo Nordisk 2008 Season supporters Sotheby’s
The poet Rilke cautioned that ‘Hammershoi is not one of those about whom one must speak quickly. His work is long and slow ... ’ It is certainly muted, being composed mostly in shades of oatmeal and grey. Interiors and the fall of light were favourite subjects, together with buildings and the occasional landscape. He also had a taste for painting portraits of the back of the head, a theme developed by the surrealists (think of Magritte’s portrait of Edward James) and still popular with some artists today. Hammershoi frequently used his wife as model (rather like Hopper, whose work his superficially resembles), but although he is a resolutely figurative and realistic painter, no one demonstrates the principles of abstract pictorial construction better than Hammershoi. At heart his paintings are intensely formal.
The Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershoi (1864–1916) has not had a good press in England, in fact up till now he hasn’t had much of a press at all. In the past 25 years he’s been rediscovered, with major shows in Paris, Hamburg and New York, but this is the first retrospective to be held in this country. Generally unknown here, he isn’t even included in Erika Langmuir and Norbert Lynton’s very useful Yale Dictionary of Art & Artists (2000), though painters talk about him with admiration. So it’s very good now to see this show, though for me its impact is a qualified success.
Although I’m an admirer of Hammershoi’s quiet poetry, a little of it goes a long way. An exhibition of more than 60 paintings by him is too large, it overexposes the subtlety of his approach and makes it seem mechanical. I would have much preferred to see a smaller monographic show or a group exhibition of Hammershoi seen within the context of his contemporaries (such fellow-painters as Peter Ilsted, whose sister Hammershoi married, and the Skagen artists). This might have demonstrated how Hammershoi was not an isolated and peculiar phenomenon, but part of a tradition.
In his lifetime he was compared with Whistler, but his pictures have none of the American’s assertiveness and little of his panache. Their quietness can easily be mistaken for gloom, but it would be wrong to overemphasise their psychological content. In the first room, look at the first three exhibits: three low horizontal landscapes painted on near-square canvases. These long barns and farmhouses are so understated that any descriptive qualities are almost lost in the formal arrangement of shapes, yet this can be surprisingly beautiful. (‘The Farm’, 1883, is particularly beguiling.) By the second room Hammershoi has located his real interest in interiors, and developed his understanding of what he wanted to do with it. Compare ‘Interior’ (1893) with ‘Interior, Frederiksberg Alle’ (1900). In the later painting everything is in its place, locked in a fastidious design of horizontals and verticals, the handling assured. By contrast, the woman’s long skirt in the earlier painting comes to an intriguing pointed tail between the open door and the chairleg. This is visually distracting, sidetracking the eye from the all-over meander that Hammershoi’s mature vision promotes. It’s an inflection that must be eliminated.
And indeed it was. The actual paint-handling was looser in later years, but it is no less rigorously controlled. Hammershoi became the master of interior space, firmly articulated: a bookcase, some pictures usually hung low, a punchbowl, a sofa. Light is captured falling on a drawing-room wall. The mood is cool and analytical rather than golden and celebratory. When he turns his hand to landscape, the structure is relaxed somewhat. Especially fine examples are ‘View of Gentofte Lake. Sun shower’ (1903), ‘Landscape. Gentofte’ (1906) and ‘Young Oak Trees’ (1907). The buildings — some in London, painted on visits here — evince the same concentrated looking, an inexorable quality it’s easy to misread as melancholy.
For many people, I suspect this will be an ideal exhibition. The intensity of the work means you don’t have to look too closely or for too long to obtain a very clear idea of what Hammershoi was about. The images are memorable. The extent of the exhibition and the relatively packed nature of the walls (a sparer hang would have better served the work and the artist) reassures visitors that they’re not only getting their money’s worth but also a proper representation of the artist’s work. Equally, the number of canvases cuts down the amount of time that need be spent gazing on each individual image. For conditions are such in our museums today that lengthy contemplation — the sort of prolonged viewing that Hammershoi’s best paintings merit — is not encouraged, and visitors are prepared to be brief.
So here is an exhibition of reassuringly evident skill, that is also understated in a way designed to appeal to the English sensibility. (Why has it taken so long to mount a Hammershoi exhibition, given its potential popularity?) So, it’s a high-quality show you don’t have to linger over. Perfect. The satisfied visitor can rush round the gallery and then return to their high-octane lives with another cultural experience under their belts. But I’m afraid this doesn’t do Hammershoi justice. For that, you’ll have to hold up the traffic and withstand the sharp elbows of the elderly who are adept at getting right in front of pictures. But it could be worth it.
Of course, it should be the exhibition organiser’s dream to have the gallery full of real devotees who just want to marinate in the subtleties of the work on show. Certainly, I’d love visitors to give that level of attention to the paintings and drawings in an exhibition I’ve just helped to select for Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. There, until 21 September, you can see a glorious exhibition of Roger Hilton’s work called Swinging out into the Void. I call it glorious because I believe that it’s the first museum show since Hilton’s death in 1975 to offer a proper representation of his very considerable skills. Hilton is perhaps best-known for his rambunctious life (hard drinking and fabulous rudeness) and his colourful late gouaches, painted in bed during his last illness, than for the body of tough and radical paintings he made between 1955 and 1965. It is on this period that the show focuses. Hilton’s sheer inventiveness, wit and risk-taking are very visible, as are his incomparable draughtsmanship and originality as a colourist. His work moved profitably between abstraction and figuration, taking what he needed from each to make his highly original and beautiful paintings. Roger Hilton has not received the attention his work merits. I hope this exhibition will help to change that.
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