Where the Selves Commune: Hammershøi’s Rooms, by Massimiliano Nastri

Where the Selves Commune: Hammershøi’s Rooms
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...monotony can be the very expression of something beautiful. … the predicates applicable to married love. … faithful, constant, humble, patient, forbearing, sincere, contented, observant, persistent, willing, joyful. … have the property of being inward specifications of the individual … their truths consist in applying … all the time. And nothing else is acquired … just the self. … healthy love … has quite another idea of time and of the meaning of repetition. 
Kierkegaard, “The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage,” Either/Or. II. 
 
Let’s start a la Kierkegaard by what Vilhelm Hammershøi is close to but is not.

The air and everything ephemeral have been sucked out, as in Piero, but none of what is seen is the "eternal;" the scenes are domestic as in Vermeer, and indeed the French press referred to him as the “Vermeer of the North,” but his sombre palette marks a clear contrast with the Dutch’s use of “bright colours, expensive pigments... and natural warm light.” (Harris 2013) 

The mystery of what his rooms mean is not alluded by obvious symbols. Maybe the urban solitude of Hopper’s boarding houses and cafes; even closer, Morandi’s variations of vases and bottles, the infinite in slight changes. 

But let’s proceed with his typical calmness, for ever since I get close to his paintings, I am given a sense of privacy, of letting me be, and move around. It was the impression I had when I first saw his paintings, I guess it was Portrait of a Young Woman: I "knew" he was a Northern European, maybe Dutch or German, or the Baltic, a "cousin" of Caspar David Friedrich.

Now, let’s start with what is obvious and see it afresh: his palette restricted to subdued colours “umber, sienna, brown, black, and white” (Harris), like in Interior. An Old Stove, or the depleted yellow, the grey, the pale blue, master a “sophisticated technique of thinly brushed paint, through which emerges the canvas grain”, managing to render alive a sheen of light glittering amid the half-tones.” (Simon 2008)

Perhaps, the real influence is of James McNeill Whistler, as Hammershoi painted several portraits of his mother and his sister Anna based on Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black (Harris 2013), executing “a study in tonality rather than in light and colour”. Indeed, Hammershoi subsequently exhibited alongside Whistler in the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889, and visited London in 1897-98 to follow in the master’s footsteps.” (Simon 2008)

For most works, however, one has to ask: where’s everybody?

As his oeuvre comprises depopulated cityscapes and landscapes, and most famously, interiors, “fully one-third of Hammershøi’s output of 370 paintings” (Harris), which typically feature sparse furnishings, empty rooms, or solitary figures seen from behind, such as his wife Ida, often depicted with her back to the viewer.

And yet, one feels a mutual relation from how painter and subject place themselves, one Alsdorf (2016) described with Kierkegaard’s ideas about the transcendence in the everyday, in the repetition, in the paradox of intimacy and inaccessibility in marriage: there’s a sense of trust in how the "settee" will convey what she wants. 

But there’s no psychologism, no descent in the maelstrom of the soul: the letters she reads, the sewing is what one does when one is not looked at. 

However, these interiors are “not an image of tranquil domesticity but a carefully constructed product of the artist’s imagination”: Interior with Young Woman Seen from the Back. Strandgade 30 (1909) is “an exercise in which the figure,"Scales (2003) wrote "seems to have stopped in her tracks, a carefully arranged component in an aesthetic ensemble.” On that same work, Alsdorf observed how “Hammershøi extends the gray vertical line marking the wooden spine of the window’s left panes past the windowsill... connecting the window directly to its interior reflection on the floor."

There’s a “geometric rigour” everywhere, in doorframes, window-frames, picture frames, square parts of chairs, in the shadows of windows against the wall, where the sofa is sculpted like an altar, with two white chairs on either side. (Sunshine in the Drawing Room III)

There, as in all other paintings, from the framing and refracted on other surfaces – the polished tables, the quirky three-legged pianos – the light emerges in a “tightly contained psychological tension” (Sloan 2008), a sort of in-stasis, the illuminated attention to what appears. 

And what is noticed need not be "something’," in fact it might well be Sunbeams or Sunshine (1900) or Dust Motes. It is quite obvious, to me at least, how the shadow of the windowpanes across the floor reveal the true characters of his paintings: light and space, the former acquiring or "losing" volume in the latter, while this one is till material but lighter. 

With this “shifting light – for example, in The Balcony Room at Spurveskjul (1911) - H[ammershoi] depicts the boundary between reality and illusion, seeing and not seeing … grasping something immaterial and intangible and consolidating it in paint.” (Sjarel Ex 2015)

And yet, the objects visible in this light - the china, the pianos, the clocks, the stoves – create a specific emotional atmosphere without narrative content. Indeed, when Hammershoi submitted Portrait of a Young Woman (1885) to the Danish Royal Academy, it failed to win the prestigious Neuhaus Prize, because of its “subdued colour, lack of finish and unclear perspective.” (Sloan 2008) 

Not only were the empty interiors deemed purposeless; they seemed “deliberately drained” of story-telling. (Simon 2008)

This lack was “[M]ost striking and unsettling”, constantly subverting “the viewer’s expectations creates a sense of disquiet and causes the viewer to emotionally turn back into himself or herself.” (Harris)

This absence of events, described as “the Poetry of Silence,” is what Krämer (2013) calls Verschlossenheit, "taciturnity," “an inward-looking, hermetic approach, is characteristic of much symbolist art.”

If "nothing" is happening, the compounded effect of architectural composition and sparse interiors, devoid of figures, leads us ask: what are we supposed to be feeling? 

Repeatedly painting and slightly varying the same rooms, windows looking onto other windows, the curved rails along deserted streets, does create a sense of both familiarity and estrangement, a disquiet the Danish critic Karl Madsen diagnosed as "neurasthenia." (Harris)

Yet, we the viewers should not forget we might have projected this disquiet onto that "absence," the silence of the ordinary inner lives of the others. 

If one just stops at what is in front of oneself, then the paradox of intimacy and inaccessibility, of the ineffable of the ordinariness Kierkegaard wrote about - and Hammershoi read – makes obvious another  absence: there’s no bourgeois performance of "natural" domesticity; these sparsely furnished rooms may embody what Hugues Choplin (2023) described as an "art of the common," distant from both sentimentalist mundanity and the obvious metaphysics of Symbolism. 

Sloan did note Hammershoi’s relationship with Belgian Symbolists, “particularly Xavier Mellery, whose concern with the 'secret life of things,' monochrome palette and brooding silences display a strong kinship with Hammershøi”, though the Danish operated with such an economy of means and meanings, “barely intimated beneath a deceptively calm surface.”

Harri Mäcklin has persuasively interpreted Hammershoi’s restraint with Levinas’ phenomenology of the "il-y-a," the "there is," how the light coming through his opaque windows is similar to the detached presence one experiences in an insomniac state, wandering in the labyrinth the apartment has become, almost hinting at Robbe Grillet’s hypnotic repetition.

“Emptied of all unnecessary detail the mundane realities of domestic life in Copenhagen, around 1900 … the paintings are imbued with a stillness and sense of introspection simultaneously melancholy and eerie”, as Sloan remarked, or even causing a "visual irritation" (Krämer) with the unsettling composition of View of the Old Asiatic Company, a grey sky over empty Baroque buildings. 

It shouldn’t surprise, therefore, how, after his death in 1916, Hammershoi’s reputation declined dramatically: his paintings were, indeed, unsettling, but their “quiet simplicity did not chime with the restless experimentation of early twentieth-century art”, so much that, by 1931, the Copenhagen Statens Kunst Museum disbanded its Hammershøi room and returned all works to their lender. (Krämer)

Even Hammershoi’s revival had to first undergo the critical misrepresentation by Danish writer Poul Vad as a painter “entirely unaffected by contemporary artistic developments.”
 
Only through international exhibitions and scholarly reassessment, was H being rediscovered:  scholars like Kirk Varnedoe, Emily Braun, and Robert Rosenblum “corrected Vad’s thesis, so that the artist could be seen in relation to his international peers” (Krämer).

His resurgence in terms of critical appreciation (a “flagship of Danish art”), high prices (The Music Room commanded $ 9m at Sotheby’s) and acquisitions and exhibitions by major museums (London National Gallery, Berlin Alte Nationalgalerie, Frankfurt Städel Museum; the MoMa, and Rotterdam Boijmans Van Beuningen), reflects “a wider rethinking of the development of early ‘modern’ art”, marked by “existential isolation, stillness, melancholy” as its clearest signs. (Krämer)

Hammershoi’s appeal for the modern viewer now lies in how this angst does “remain self-sufficient and ultimately impenetrable.” (Simon) 

I find some validity coming from Kierkegaard’s Sickness unto Death and The Concept of Anxiety: the infinite possibilities of our modern life have left it and us adrift, blinded by the shining but always-receding certainty that the next object, the next body, the next holiday will somehow give us peace. 
In this perspective, H’s approach is said to “anticipate the isolated world created by Edward Hopper” (Harris). Both painters deal with “psychic alienation, a sense of supreme aloneness in a world suffused with melancholy.” (Budick 2016)

And yet, there’s a certain disconnection between the aesthetic deluge of possibilities Kierkegaard examined and rejected and the sparseness, the austerity we see Hammershoi portrayed.

First of all, one may describe the pure appearance of what is not there, the empty spaces, the absence of events as the removal of words, of actions in excess, of their meaninglessness, of “the comfort of despairing … which permeates modern lyric both in verse and in prose … in case such a monotony were unavoidable in conjugal life … the task would be … to preserve love in and through it, and not to despair, for despair can never be a serious task; it is a convenience”.  (Kierkegaard, Either/Or)

But I cannot find convenience or comfort, in the sense we have come to associate with these words; there’s nothing trivial, uncommitted, half-hearted in Hammershoi.
 
Above all, to identify what Hammershoi depicts with what he "meant" is to revert to a medieval expectation a modern painting must be a cypher of, if not an allegory by the painter, and not an ambiguous communication we viewers establish on our terms with the subject and the painter. 

In this perspective, the light and the space frames reveal how Hammershoi challenged the viewer’s expectation about the transparency of the subject, its being intelligible for anyone, that is, to none, emphasizing instead the tension between representation and abstraction.  

The semi-transparent curtains and diffuse light make the viewer aware of the act of seeing itself, merging the interior of the painting and the exterior that light alludes to into a single surface, creating a tension between representational and non-representational elements. (Hemkendreis 2015) 

Thinking or even feeling that the despair is "there" impoverishes how those forms, those objects, their very ordinariness has been made visible again.

Hammershoi resisted the identification, the emotional connection between the viewer and the exterior, laying forth, instead, the awareness of the viewer to the act of perceiving, the ambiguity of interiority, as in Sleeping Room. (Hemkendreis)

His distinctive artistic vision characterized by restraint, psychological depth, and an attention that stands still but is not passive continues to resonate with viewers today for the quiet ambiguity emerging with an economy of ordinary means, and in that ambiguity, the viewers may also seek a muted, subdued representation of peace. One has to get closer to hear it, not because it is whispering, but to pay attention, which is a form of peace itself.
 
Massimiliano Nastri

Massimiliano Nastri grew up in a German-speaking village, up on the Italian Alps, but was born in the south of Italy, Naples, in 1973. He has been living in Ireland, north and south, since 2006, doing different jobs and eventually, getting his last PhD at Queen’s University, Belfast, where he worked as a teaching assistant. He is revising his PhD thesis on the interwar collapse of centre-right parties and the rise of fascism. He has written an unpublished political novel, and is working on another. His interest in art focuses on characters such as Sironi, Grosz, and Ben Shahn.

Bridget Alsdorf, “Hammershøi’s Either/Or”, Critical Inquiry, Winter 2016, Vol. 42, No. 2, pp. 268-305.
Ariella Budick, “Painting Tranquillity: Masterworks by Vilhelm Hammershøi, Scandinavia House, New York -’Wistful and sublime’“. FT.com. 2016

Hugues Choplin, “Un silence sans ambiance. Hammershøi, les impressionnistes et le tournant atmosphérique contemporain”, Ambiances Environnement sensible, architecture et espace urbain, 2023.

Sjarel Ex, “A study by Vilhelm Hammershøi acquired by Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam”, The Burlington Magazine, 2015, 157(1343), 97-98.

James C. Harris, “Interior. With Piano and Woman in Black (Strandgade 30)”, JAMA Psychiatry, 2013, 70(8), 774-775. 

Anne Hemkendreis, “Inner and Outer Realms: Opaque Windows in Vilhelm Hammershøi’s Interior Paintings”, in Interiors and Interiority. Edited by Ewa Lajer-Burcharth and Beate Söntgen. Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2015.

Søren Kierkegaard, “The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage”, Either/Or. II. Translated by Alastair Hannay. Penguin Book 2004.

Felix Krämer, “The rediscovery of Vilhelm Hammershøi: two recent acquisitions in New York and Frankfurt”, The Burlington Magazine, 2013, 155(1319), 95-97.

Harri Mäcklin, “How to Paint Nothing? Pictorial Depiction of Levinasian il y a in Vilhelm Hammershøi’s Interior Paintings”, Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, 2018, 5:1, 15-29.

Alette Rye Scales, “Vilhelm Hammershøi. Hamburg. The Burlington Magazine, 2003, 145(1203), 473-474.

Robin Simon, “Poetry without motion”. New Statesman, 23 June 2008, Vol. 137, Fasc. 4902, 38-40.
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Rachel Sloan, “Vilhelm Hammershøi. London and Tokyo. The Burlington Magazine, 2008, 150 (1266), 624-625.