Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum Special Exhibition Vilhelm Hammershøi and Danish Painting of the 19th Century A window into the tranquil interiors painted by the “Vermeer of the North”
Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916) is synonymous with quiet interiors deftly rendered in a sparse, subdued color palette, and known for his curiously compelling canvasses which evoke a paradoxical intrigue in their simultaneous blend of comforting serenity and unsettling desolation. A new exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, titled Vilhelm Hammershøi and Danish Painting of the 19th Century,offers a comprehensive window into the enigmatic world of painter Vilhelm Hammershøi and the contemporaneous work of his Danish compatriots.
Although
Hammershøi garnered measurable acclaim in his own lifetime, warranting a large
retrospective held shortly after his death in 1916, he quickly faded into
relative obscurity for much of the twentieth century. It was not until the
1980s that his oeuvre received a long-overdue reappraisal in the West. Moreover,
the first Hammershøi retrospective on Japanese soil was not held until 2008’s
acclaimed exhibition at The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo.
The present exhibition is divided into four parts, beginning with a selection of nineteenth-century paintings from the so-called Danish Golden Age. The second exhibition room showcases work by the Skagen Painters, a group of Scandinavian artists who congregated in Skagen, a fishing village in northern Denmark. Seeking spiritual refuge from the city, they depicted the area’s idyllic rural landscapes, and the people who lived in community with nature. The third gallery features the work of late-nineteenth-century Danish painters, whose interiors and blissful domestic scenes in a sense augured Hammershøi’s stylistic approach. The exhibition culminates with an extensive collection of paintings by Hammershøi himself, spanning from early works to those produced in his waning years, filling two exhibition rooms.
Above: Exhibition Room #1, “In Praise of Everyday Life – The Golden Age of Danish Painting,” showcases the halcyon “people’s art” that blossomed with the advent of romantic nationalism in the early nineteenth century. Below: Work by the Skagen painters, depicting the fishermen and other local subjects found in the northern Danish village.
Early on, Hammershøi created both portraits and landscapes. However, he would soon become uninterested in painting subjects whose interiorities were an unapparent, inherently inaccessible enigma. Although he frequently travelled abroad, the majority of his landscapes depict familiar Danish locales. It seems Hammershøi had a predilection for painting subjects which he knew intimately, and with which he felt a special connection.
Work by Danish contemporaries of Hammershøi, offering a point of reference by which to compare similarities and differences with the artist.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, Hammershøi began predominately producing his signature interiors in earnest. The spartan rooms in his paintings are populated with a limited array of furnishings and quotidian accoutrements. When people appear in his interiors, they frequently have their backs turned to the viewer, or else are inconspicuous figures, situated in the room’s distant recesses.
As exhibition curator Yasuyuki Takashiro comments, “I believe that Hammershøi felt a certain intimacy toward the rooms he depicted.”
Paintings by Hammershøi. Notice the windowed wall to the right, evoking the windows that frequently appear in the artist’s work.
Takashiro: “The Danish term ‘hygge’ is one key theme that informed this exhibition. Although difficult to translate, the word connotates a comfortable conviviality, along with feelings of soothed contentment. Surely, Hammershøi would have seen his room as a prime source of hygge, the place where he could best relax. I think he painted the people and punch bowls for their curved lines, as a soft accent that complemented the otherwise architecturally linear angles of his interiors.”
The exhibition included punch bowls and other items that feature in Hammershøi’s paintings. Although he often took artistic license, depicting items not to scale, the display evinced how he oftentimes faithfully depicted such props even down to their mended cracks.
Hammershøi moved eight times over the course of his life, but was particularly fond of his seventeenth-century merchant house at Strandgade 30 in Copenhagen, producing many paintings of the home during his long tenancy. As for décor, Hammershøi had a taste for late-eighteenth- to early-nineteenth-century furniture, which even in his time would have already seemed a vestige of a bygone age. A noted collector of antiquarian books, he assembled a personal library of over 1,000 titles, with a particular penchant for early-nineteenth-century French literature.
Even so, Hammershøi also painted empty interiors, devoid of furnishings. Upon closer inspection, the viewer may even notice doors without handles, bathed in light streaming in from a closed window. All the more for this austerity, the way the light illuminates these vacant rooms is apt to approach the sublime. Perhaps the light itself could be seen as an embodiment of the hygge ideal. On the other hand, some viewers may feel these scenes evoke a forlorn, solitary despair. Hammershøi’s paintings are open to interpretation, inspiring as many possible narratives as there are viewers who have come to appreciate his work. In art as in life, a little bit of mystery goes a long way.
Text: Naoko Aono Photos: Fumitaka Miyoshi
Vilhelm Hammershøi and Danish Painting of the Nineteenth Century
Venue: Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum Exhibition Rooms Dates: Tuesday, January 21st – Thursday, March 26th, 2020 Hours: 9:30 a.m. – 5:30 p.m. (Last admission at 5:00 p.m.) Extended Hours on Fridays and March 18th: 9:30 a.m. – 8:00 p.m. (Last admission at 7:30 p.m.) Closed: Mondays and February 25th (Open on Monday, March 23rd) Exhibition website: https://artexhibition.jp/denmark2020/
Note: Information in this article current as of January 2020.
