Though much of the world is now slowly and cautiously returning to a semblance of normal life, it was only a couple of weeks ago that things were in a state of bizarre suspension. Streets were empty, coffee shops were closed, and everyday things like casually shopping for groceries felt like something done in a past life. Social gatherings as a whole practically ceased to be. People were forced to do something that many of us find rather unpalatable: be alone.
The Danish painter, Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864 – 1916), was a master at painting scenes of solitude — an isolated figure in a nearly empty room, appearing to the viewer to be completely lost in her own world. It’s difficult, in fact, to look at a painting by Hammershøi and not feel as if one should turn off any music that might happen to be playing, and let the subject of the painting remain undisturbed.
Who was this Danish artist, why did he paint in such dreary colors all the time, and was his life as dormant and austere as the scenes expressed in some of his paintings? In Michael Palin and The Mysterious Hammershøi (2005), such questions are explored, as Palin takes us around Europe to some of the locations that most influenced the life and work of this little known artist. It’s a fun enough jaunt, although not always terribly enlightening or riveting.
Perhaps that’s not too surprising. Presenting a gripping and informative documentary on an artist like Hammershøi isn’t easy; some artists, like Caravaggio, lived such explosive lives that it’s not hard to suck a viewer into the biography and works of a man who had all the artistic talent in the world and who was also a rowdy street brawler. Hammershøi was certainly not that kind of person (he was relatively reserved, shy, and sometimes diffident), and the details of his life are relatively sparse. As for his paintings, they require considerable patience — perhaps even a penchant on the part of the viewer for appreciating solitude.
But Palin does his best to draw us into Hammershøi’s world and present a portrait of this intriguing artist. From London to Delft to Copenhagen, we see the environments in which the Danish painter developed and called home. It’s a particular treat to see some of the actual sights and rooms that Hammershøi painted. One begins to get a feel for who was and what he found worthy of capturing on canvas; much of what he painted seems — at least at first — rather uninspiring: quiet interiors, lone figures with their backs turned to the viewer, the outsides of unremarkable looking buildings.
Such scenes were by no means new. Johannes Vermeer, the 17th-century painter whose works Hammershoi admired enough that he made multiple trips to Holland to view them, was an absolute master of the quiet interior, as evinced in Woman Reading a Letter and The Milkmaid. Such paintings contain little action, but they do possess elements of narrative, even if subtle, and they offer complex clues about the psychological dynamics taking place.
Hammershøi, on the other hand, as Palin rightfully points out, gives us scenes which are reduced to nearly nothing — a back turned in a relatively dark room — giving us little to no indication as to what the subject might be thinking, feeling, experiencing. And whereas Vermeer used a range of colors — including beautiful mellow yellows — Hammershøi adamantly stuck to his somber blues and grays. Was he colorblind? Some people have apparently speculated about this, but as Christoper Bramsen (the great nephew of Alfred Bramsen, a collector and patron of Hammershøi) suggests, it seems more likely that Hammershoi simply enjoyed a subdued palette. He knew what he liked.
Whatever reason Hammershøi had for painting with the colors he did, there’s no doubt that his works are not exactly uplifting, joy-inducing scenes of warm emotions. They are dreary, quiet, contemplative, still, and perhaps melancholic as well. Maybe that’s part of the reason why Hammershøi is not well known. Perhaps not. But few of his paintings grace the walls of museums, and as Palin meanders around the Danish National Gallery inquiring of its museum-goers whether they’ve heard of the Danish artist, almost none answer in the affirmative (although, of course, that hardly proves a great deal).
As for Hammershøi himself, he seems to have been a well-adjusted, more or less “regular” kind of guy, nothing along the lines of a deeply reclusive or cranky killjoy sort. He was married to a woman named Ida Ilsted, appreciated nature, had a sense of fun about him, was involved in the Independent Exhibition (“a movement supporting free-minded artists”), and — though you wouldn’t guess it from viewing his many restrained interior paintings — even painted some nudes of his wife.
Some artists — some people — go to great pains to let us know who they are, what they like and hate, what makes them tick. Hammershøi, one gets the impression, wasn’t terribly concerned to make a dazzling mark on the art world, or to put himself straightforwardly into his work. He painted what he liked to paint, in the style he liked to create, and with a palette of colors he found pleasing to his own eyes. His love for painting guided his method of creation, not superfluous or ulterior motives.
What we have from his brush are incredibly quiet and frozen moments of everyday life. They’re often puzzling; sometimes they’re even jarring in their austerity and gloomy colors. And in that sense, it’s easy enough to see why they aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. But there’s something refreshing, even reassuring, about these quiet paintings in a world full of nearly unrelenting motion.
Spectatio 