January 2009

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The curious thing about the paintings of Dutch artist Vilhelm Hammershoi (1864-1916) is that within moments of seeing them you are casting around to find words that define their mysterious, omnipresent mood. Barren, still interiors of the artist’s flat in Copenhagen, where he lived with his wife Ida, show large empty spaces dominated by open or shut doors, little or no furniture, and given life only through shafts of light or the gleam of a surface. Just occasionally, a female figure features in the composition, her back turned, motionless, arrested by some silent, lone distraction. They are at once oppressive and intriguing, seductive but not entirely pleasurable to look at. The same is true of the artist’s landscapes and exteriors. Gloom-filled streets of dank mist around the British Museum, for example, are devoid of people, movement or energy. The focus is on the stillness, the feeling of nothing, and the sound of its silence.

That Hammershoi led the uneventful life of a recluse will therefore come as little surprise. Artist Emil Nolde, who visited Hammershoi in 1901, wrote in his diary that ‘He spoke slowly and softly; we all spoke quietly.’ But to conclude that Hammershoi languished in melancholic introspection would not be the full story for the artist’s self-acclaimed interest was in the linear structures of windows, doors, their frames, cornices and ceilings. ‘What makes me choose a motif are…the lines, what I like to call the architectural content of an image.’ Of the 71 paintings on show in the RA’s retrospective there are multiple versions of the same section of his apartment, exploring the interplay between light and line. Homage to geometry is therefore the cause of his preference for sparse interiors, ‘If only people would open their eyes to the fact that a few good things in a room give it a far more beautiful and finer quality than many mediocre things…’.

It is Hammershoi’s ghostly palette of greys and browns that creates the subdued and repressed mood. His technique of sometimes covering the canvas when nearing completion with a layer of grey paint, blurring the outlines of the objects and edges, achieves a disquieting sense of dislocation. And, ultimately, it is this dislocation that has the most to offer contemporary audiences living in noisy, time-short and experience-hungry times. For Hammershoi’s interiors quietly demand an almost existential contemplation, and if you are lucky enough to find a quiet moment to visit the RA show, you might just find yourself hostage in an interior, listening to the silence and searching for the words.

'Vilhelm Hammershoi: the poetry of silence' is at the Royal Academy, London, until 7 September.

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