In December 2018, the Getty Museum, an institution with seemingly bottomless pockets, paid 5.04 million dollars for a work entitled Interior with an Easel, Bredgade 25, painted in 1912. (See earlier post.) If one were to guess what early 20thcentury modern artist would fetch such a sum, names like Bonnard, Vuillard, and Ensor may come to mind. But, no, Interior with an Easel was painted by Danish artist, Vilhelm Hammershøi.
Who?
Who indeed. For many the name Vilhelm Hammershøi is not a familiar one, but it may be in the future. If you’ve seen the movie The Danish Girl, you’ve already been exposed to his work thanks to the efforts of director Tom Hooper who insisted on using Hammershøi paintings as the basis for interior set design.
At this point, the question that logically arises is why is Hammershøi, who died in 1916, just beginning to be recognized? And the answer, as will be shown, is that the world was not ready for Hammershøi in 1912, but, thanks to artists like Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth, the changing perspectives and sensibilities of society and the burgeoning power of media, it may be now.
Vilhelm Hammershøi was born in 1864, on the cusp of art’s “modern” era. By the time he was eight his mother, who recognized his budding talent, had hired Niels Kierkegaard (cousin of Søren Kierkegaard, the “Father of Existentialism”) to teach him drawing. Young Vilhelm went on to study at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts as a precocious teenager. He continued his work at the Independent Study School where he was mentored by Norwegian-born Peter Severin Kroyer, a painter who favored rich colors and lively scenes which seems had noinfluence on his student. Kroyer once remarked about Hammershøi, “I don’t understand him, but I think he’s going to be important so I’m trying not to influence him.”
In 1885, at the age of twenty-one, Hammershøi exhibited Portrait of a Young Woman, a study of his sister done in what would become his trademark palette of muted tones, at the Spring Exhibition at Charlottenborg. The painting is said to have been admired by Renoir at the time. But his entry for the 1890 exhibit (one of his early interiors) was rejected by the jury leading Hammershøi and others to create Den Frie Udstilling (The Free Exhibition) in 1891. He had become the “black sheep” of Danish art at a time when another Scandinavian, Edvard Munch was embraced by the art world. Even though, in comparison to Munch, Hammershøi’s paintings are calm and serene, it seems, as Vlad Maslov states, that “the psychological intensity of his work in the 1880s was ahead of his time”.
And what of that psychology? Ken Johnson in his review of a small exhibit of Hammershøi works at New York’s Scandinavia House in 2015 says Hammershøi’s work conveys “a distinctively modern complexity”. The composition of his interior paintings which often feature large windows through which sun is shining along with closed or partially open doors where, according to Johnson, the artist “seems stuck at the threshold of alternative modesof consciousness, paralyzed by existential uncertainty.” (Johnson, 2015) Further, Bridget Alsdorf asserts that the “intense inwardness of Hammershøi’s art is fundamentally philosophical, demonstrating a Kierkegaardian vision of mind that is existential in temper” while simultaneously capturing his inner life.
Following his death in 1916, Hammershøi was all but forgotten outside of Scandinavia until the Brooklyn Museum’s “Northern Light: Realism and Symbolism in Scandinavian Painting” exhibit in 1982. Since then, his work has been shown at the Royal Academy, London, the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, New York’s Guggenheim and, most recently in the exhibit, “There I Belong: Hammershøi by Elmgreen & Dragset” at the National Gallery of Denmark.
During the intervening years between Hammershøi’s death and the Brooklyn Museum exhibit, much has occurred in western culture, but most significantly, there has been a philosophical shift that has filtered down from the lofty ranks of academia to a place of acceptance by the mainstream. According to Stanford University’s Kevin Aho, Søren Kierkegaard’s existentialism first “exploded on the scene” in mid-twentieth century France, emerging from the backdrop of the Second World War through the literary works of Sartre and Camus to America’s “Lost Generation” including F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway who spent time in France, and then to “The Beats” like Kerouac, Burroughs and Ginsberg.
But, as Aho says, “What distinguishes existentialism from other movements in the intellectual history of the West is how it stretched far beyond the literary and academic worlds.” He goes on to cite well-known film directors (Bergman, Antonioni, Kurosawa, Malick), Black political figures and intellectuals (M.L. King, Jr., Malcolm X, Wright, Ellison, Dubois), theologians (Barth, Tillich, Buber) and psychotherapists (Laing, May, Frankl) all of whom contributed existential interpretations to the contemporary culture. Among those in the field of visual arts, Aho lists Edvard Munch, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, and Edward Hopper as artists who have brought this philosophical world view to their art, art which is now familiar to the general public well beyond museum walls.
Of particular interest for this inquiry, is the work of Edward Hopper. Hopper was born in upstate New York in 1882. He studied art at the New York School of Art and Design where William Merritt Chase was among his instructors. During his early years as an artist, he sought to emulate Manet and Degas. He traveled to Europe three times between 1905 and 1920, but there is no indication that he was aware of Hammershøi who was still painting at the time. Hopper sold his first painting, Sailing, 1911, at the 1913 Armory Show, but it took until 1923 and the help of his future wife to achieve critical and financial success with an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. It was then that the museum purchased the now-familiar, watercolor called The Mansard Roof, for $100.
Finally able to devote fulltime to his art, architecture and seascapes predominated Hopper’s work for several years, eventually homing in on the sights of Manhattan and Cape Cod. By 1930 his House by the Railroad (1925), depicting the desolate structure that would become a prototype for the Bates house in Hitchcock’s 1960 thriller classic, Psycho was added to the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the same year he painted Early Sunday Morning which shows a deserted row of storefronts warmed by the early morning sunlight that slants across the sidewalk. In 1932 he ventured indoors with Room in Brooklyn, that bears similarity to several of Hammershøi’s paintings of his wife. This was followed in the forties and fifties by a number of interiors—offices, bedrooms, theatres, motel rooms--occupied by abstracted figures, like those we see through the window in Nighthawks (1942). Tess Thakara has said of Nighhawks, “It is, in many ways, emblematic of Hopper’s noirish, cinematic style, characterized by…emotionally isolated figures.”
In 1951, at the age of 69, Hopper began to examine the possibilities of empty interiors with Rooms by the Sea where, in the manner of Hammershøi, he simply studied patterns of sunlight, an activity he repeated in 1963 with Sun in an Empty Room (above). Artist Michael Banning has done an in-depth visual study of the similarity of these two paintings to Hammershøi’s work which was exhibited at the Edward Hopper House Museum and Study Center in 2019.
While Hopper was making his slow journey to a place Hammershøi had been decades earlier, another artist was a bit more precocious. Then thirty-year-old Andrew Wyeth painted Wind from the Sea, a muted, yet delicately detailed depiction of a tattered lace curtain rising in the breeze, in 1947—a year before he completed Christina’s World which would both catapult him to mainstream fame and give the post-war world the existential situation of a woman in a field yearning toward a barn to consider.
Wyeth, raised and tutored in rural Pennsylvania, had a much different up-bringing from Hopper. His father, the famed illustrator, N.C.Wyeth, was a teaching force to be reckoned with. Young Andrew gleaned the mechanics of drawing and painting at his father’s side but developed his sensibilities from the intimacies of farm life. While his father worked in vivid oils, the boy experimented with muted sepia tones in drybrush watercolor and tempera, using the mundane objects and open-faced people in his daily life as his subjects. Although his portraits are more numerous and realistic than either Hammershoi’s or Hopper’s, Wyeth most often rendered the objects of everyday life, architecture, and its details. There are, for instance, over 300 paintings depicting windows, including Her Room (above). Low-key, muted tones remained a trademark of his style.
Not surprisingly, Wyeth often espoused an admiration for Hopper. Although their styles and palettes are markedly different, their quiet, solitary consideration of their subjects is eerily similar—as it is with Hammershøi’s. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke once said of Hammershoi, [He], as Maslow remarks, "is not one of those about whom one must speak quickly. His work is long and slow…” This is true of all three artists. And, as the decades have passed, the art-appreciating public, through Hopper and Wyeth, have come to recognize that quality whether through careful contemplation or because of the plethora of reproductions of their iconic images
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