The poverty of silence: Vilhelm Hammershoi at the Royal Academy
by Paul Murphy

The Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershoi (1864-1916) was the sort of technically competent yet uninspired artist who crops up in all kinds of guises throughout history. Normally figures like Hammershoi acquire a quiet celebrity in their own lifetimes and then are quietly forgotten about after they die. Now this happened to Hammershoi. But he has somehow been miraculously resurrected at the RA this summer.

Why? The RA's audioguide and the assorted 'experts' gathered there describe Hammershoi's work as 'poetic', 'beautiful', 'mysterious', 'enigmatic'. His works consist of interiors (usually with a single female figure whose back is turned), landscapes and postcard-like representations of Copenhagen and London, his favourite European city. A typical Hammershoi interior has light flooding through windows into a beautiful but empty drawing room. However, the effect of Hammershoi's painting is also cold, deadening, repetitive, uninspiring, a Sphinx (as Karl Marx once declared of Napoleon the Third) without a riddle. Hammershoi's canvases are empty, devoid of people

and essentially devoid of life, melancholic in an insipid, bourgeois sense. Typically women turn their backs to him, a sign of emotional rejection. This seems to be the dynamo of Hammershoi's art. The art revolution of Edvard Munch and Emil Nolde was essentially against the kind of art that Hammershoi represented and the society he grew up in which was deeply repressive and about to be spiritually emancipated by the arrival of Freud and the Expressionist movement in art and literature that followed the Great War.

It was after the Great War that Hammershoi's painting came to be forgotten, but was remembered again in the 1970s, after a return to Symbolism by the mainstream and a possible rejection of the kind of social art or art inspired by social movements and forces that was part of the great upheaval of the post-1917 era. The re-emergence of Hammershoi's art demarcates the triumph of post-modernism (and post-anything), the isolated bourgeois figure rejected, not by society, but by actual people, who has essentially turned his back on social or even emotional committment althoug he often figures this onipresent in others, especially women (and other sorts of people he wills to supress).

It must be said that Hammershoi's work is technically superb, but that does not lead onto superb art but superb craftmanship. Vilhelm Hammershoi is not a superb artist. Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch, Emil Nolde were superb artists. Hammershoi's current re-emergence is typically a sign of the retreat art and artists have made from social committment or even saying anything at all, a sign of the re-emergence of war and economic crisis, the things that precipitated the great changes and advances of the last century. No doubt his paintings will be soon put back in their boxes, returned to Copenhagen and the other small European museums that house his work, only to be brought out in another fifty years or so for another appraisal of this kind to be written.