NO ONE’S HOME
There’s a show of Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi at Scandinavia House called, misleadingly, Painting Tranquility. Hammershøi is famous for the mute, enigmatic tone of his domestic interiors. These are composed like Vermeer’s, with views into small rooms, often populated by a lone young woman. The spaces are uncluttered and shadowed, their surfaces revealed by daylight that spills inside through half-open doors and windows.
It’s a disservice to compare Hammershøi to Vermeer, whose masterful handling of light and volume give them a ravishing optical lyricism. And it’s a disservice to see Hammershøi’s interiors, as they’re displayed here, alongside his portraits, landscapes and street scenes, which are less skillfully rendered. The Danish painter doesn’t handle the human figure, the landscape, or architecture with ease. And his handling of light and color, in all genres, remains muddled, something that’s hard to understand in reproductions. One wall caption explains that he liked to paint through drizzle. This is apparent in the grey cast of the canvases, that feel as if they need to be wiped clean.
Hammershøi is often considered the Scandinavian Edward Hopper, whose views capture a cultural spirit, specifically, that of bourgeois nineteenth-century Copenhagen. The wall texts describe the canvases as “melancholic,” “contemplative and claustrophobic,” with “evacuated narrative.” They’re unsettling because they’re empty, not just of people and activity, but of emotional content. As one approaches a painting, to enter it fully, it dissolves back into paint. One searches these stills scenes for flashes of loneliness, fear and despair, and finds nothing. If anything, one comes away with a new appreciation for Hopper (and Nolde and Munch too), whose paintings are throbbing, haunted, devastating. By comparison those by Hammershøi aren’t tranquil; they’re banal.
