Art has its own version of the crop circle, that unexplained natural phenomenon. It is when the work of an artist appears informed by theoretical concerns of which he cannot be aware, because they haven't been invented yet. One example of this is "The Poetry of Silence," on until early September at the Royal Academy, which showcases the work of the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi, whose oeuvre is simultaneously behind the times, of its time, and before its time.
Born in 1864, Hammershøi lived most of his reclusive life in Copenhagen. In his day he enjoyed a mixture of recognition and rejection—he won prizes at a young age for the skill of his painting, but later riled the art establishment with his departure from academic convention.
His exteriors follow the same blueprint. He came to London several times and painted some desolate, oddly cropped views of the British Museum in 1906, picking a unprepossessing corner angle. Perhaps the topography of his country of origin provided the inspiration for this anti-aesthetic—certainly his few landscapes faithfully depict the flat and featureless countryside of Denmark.
Subject and style have a remarkable coherence. Hammershøi's palette is as ascetic as his interiors. The pictures are virtually monochromatic—just greys and browns with the occasional gold of a picture frame or gilt divan. The paint is thinly applied in meticulous layers, with short little brushstrokes. The colour hangs softly around his lonely figures and bare walls like a wet mist. Hammershøi, as a French cultural theorist might say, painted the void.
These are paintings that could be 300 years old. They share the size, feel and format of Dutch 17th-century paintings and most seem to be a monomaniacal attempt to re-create the atmosphere, and often the subject matter, of just one painting by Vermeer: Woman in Blue Reading a Letter.
But Hammershøi was no reactionary. His work looks nothing like the contemporary avant-garde of Paris and Berlin, where artists were experimenting with bright colours and primitivism, but the Danish artist was a modernist—only one whose paintings had more in common with the existential literature and psychoanalysis of his day than its visual art.
His paintings appear in the tradition of 19th-century realism, but they are not realistic. Photographs of Hammershøi's apartment of the time show that he had more furniture and decoration than he depicted. With his empty rooms, he was painting an internal world.
If I was writing for a trendy art magazine, I would say that Hammershøi was preoccupied with the "geometry of domesticity." Prospect readers will be happier if I call it Ibsen in oils. Hammershøi's wife wanders through his apartment like Nora in A Doll's House or Hedda Gabler—a woman imprisoned in her bourgeois environment, a symbol of the restrictive social codes of the day.
These qualities can be explained with reference to the zeitgeist (and Hammershøi's contemporaries: Freud, Kierkegaard and even Robert Musil). But in other ways, Hammershøi looks like one of those rare species of artist who are years ahead of their era, like Hieronymus Bosch, whose scenes of hell are full of hybrid, half-human, half-bird creatures that prefigure Max Ernst's surrealism by five centuries. The Danish artist's bland subjects, with their frontal perspective, look forward to the banal aesthetic of the 1980s Düsseldorf school of photographers (and especially the early series of dull domestic interiors by the German photographer Thomas Ruff). Other works bring other artists to mind: an early landscape, The Farm (1883), is a radical proto-abstract painting. A lawn, bushes, the white wall of the barn, then its brown roof and the sky form five soft-edged strips across the canvas. It makes one think of Rothko.
Hammershøi appears well versed in feminist film theory. His wife invariably looks away from the viewer—a gesture of rejection of the male gaze, which feminist theorists think constructs women sexually. Indeed, the artist appears to have completed more than a gender studies course at Goldsmiths. The minimalist apogee of his project is Open Doors (1905). The room is completely bare, a door opens into the frame of the picture, opening up on to a room we cannot see, but closing off from us half of the one in the picture frame. A corridor leads away from us, ending in another almost closed door, behind it a sliver of light. Thus Hammershøi makes us look at something we cannot see—a perspicacious deconstruction of the act of painting, which suggests that even art history has its own UFOs.
