He first came to my attention two years ago. I was wandering around Tate Britain marvelling at how much my taste in Art has changed as I’ve grown older. Paintings which once filled me with glee and satisfaction - the thick set morbidity of Frank Auerbach, the big cocked expanses of Franz Kline - I now passed by with nary a glance. That’s not to say I dismissed them, they simply felt like over-familiar friends whose personalities I had now exhausted... like certain songs by The Beatles you know you never have to hear again - The Fool On the Hill, Can’t Buy Me Love, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds - songs you once adored but have now been played to such an extent that never hearing them would only feel like a microscopic loss to one’s cultural life.
As I drifted past these iconographic paintings of my youth, I thankfully found myself brought up short by pieces of Art that had once struck me much like a grey day in Debden, something to be noticed without actually being drawn to. Such an example were the Victorian sculptures, particularly Antonio Canova’s The Three Graces on loan from the V&A. They turned me on in a way I could never, and would never, have imagined. Whether this is down to the fact that I am now ageing and the opportunities to feast my eyes upon such youthful pulchritude become less frequent, the poise and beauty of the work, the delicacy with which the women were draped around each other, I found both erotic and tender. It reminded me of my heterosexuality and strangely - although the two are probably inextricably linked - it also made me think about God. The notion of anything, any great power, being able to create something, some body, which can then engender such emotions simply by the implication of form felt somehow profound. Perhaps it can simply be put down to Dawkins’ selfish gene and all its latent urges, but to feel such delight in something carved out of marble surely implies something more than mere self-perpetuation.
Before I made a complete fool of myself - so tempted to touch, to caress - I moved on, and it was on my journey back towards the museum’s exit that I caught sight of it... a portrait of a woman in a simple black dress standing in an austere, sparely furnished room, her back to the viewer, hair tied in a bun. There was little if no hint as to her personality or identity but there was something strangely mysterious about the picture, something melancholic, somehow lonely, but nevertheless full of poise and calm. It was at that moment I first entered the world of Vilhelm Hammershoi.
Time passed, but the memory of the painting, its muted pewters and greys, stayed with me. I mentioned the artist’s name to a few friends but drew a complete blank. I researched him on The Web and found that he was an acquired taste. Unsuccessful during his career in the late 19th century, Hammershoi was rediscovered only as recently as the 1980’s. One of his great champions is the broadcaster Michael Palin who, like me, had stumbled into his work when on other matters, in his case a travelogue around Denmark. I felt quite proud of my discovery. It was like being a teenager again, finding a band no-one had heard of - a Prag Vec or Thomas Leer. But all that was to change twelve weeks ago.
Much to my surprise I learnt that the former Python and I weren’t the only aficionados to harbour a special interest in the moody Scandinavian. The Royal Academy was about to put on a major UK retrospective of Hammershoi’s work. Why on earth now? I asked myself. Was it something I said? Yet despite my amazement - once more considering Plato’s theory of floating ideas - I didn’t rush down to Piccadilly to see the show. As is my usual wont, I kept putting it off until the exhibition was about to close. I finally hurried to Green Park last Saturday lunchtime, fearful of potential crowds but thinking who the hell’s going to turn up to see an unknown painter from the dark side of Christianshavn?
Plenty it turned out. And as I found myself jostling for room space between Home County harridans and earnest Germans with large headphones clamped to their ears, I asked myself, why the unexpected appeal? And this ultimately is what I came up with.
These are tough times we’re living in, as if it needs to be pointed out. We’ve reached a post 9/11 era where nothing seems to connect. Wars are being fought in our name, the justifications for them changing seasonally. A generation of Baby Boomers have grown up to see their 60’s optimism slowly overwhelmed by a sea of empty materialism, ungrateful kids, failed marriages and insecure jobs. What’s more, their friends have begun to start dying around them. The new century promised so much. Technology would, we were told, make life more liveable. The Soviet threat had long gone, Europe was one big happy family and America was thriving. How swiftly that has changed.
In its place drifted in a seemingly-permanent cloud, a general malaise, a sense of dissatisfaction. All the stuff that was supposed to work, that was meant to make you happy, wasn’t paying off. Commentators like Oliver James and Alain De Boton became bestsellers as the public found themselves turning to someone, anyone, who could explain why this was happening in the hope that once understood they might be able to do something about it. But the remedy suggested by such writers was to scale down, return to a way of life more akin to the period after the Second World War.
That of course made little sense to a generation brought up on the belief that everything they have worked for, everything they have been told will make not only their lives better but the world a better place to live, is actually having the opposite effect. Giving up a hard-slaved for life of creature comforts in order to get in touch with yourself may look good on paper but the reality is another thing altogether.
Instead people began to retreat into their own little worlds. Whether through the Internet or the cubicle-sized society we have built for ourselves, people hid away in their bedrooms, their personal work-spaces or garden sheds. There they could sit with their own private thoughts wondering how they were supposed to make sense of it all. Concepts of community no longer rang true because at the end of the day we were still left with the nagging sense that none of this was really worth it, certainly not as rewarding as we had been led to believe. Besides which, we no longer knew who our community was.
And now the credit crunch. After five years of watching the axis of the world wobble furiously and all the philosophical indulgences of the 60’s & 70’s replaced by fundamentalist considerations we thought long left behind, we are now being forced to consider a new way of life, a downsized, more modest way of life we seemingly have no choice but to embrace. People unsurprisingly are mighty concerned about it. Beyond the fact that it doesn’t really appeal, there is also an overriding sense that we have been sold a pup. What have we spent the last 20,30,40 years working for if it’s all going to be taken away because of matters beyond our control?
Except they were in our control. Global warming and rapid population growth are completely down to us. The de-regulation of the finance industries we voted for... if any of us had bothered to read the small print. So we can’t wring our hands, stamp our feet and say it wasn’t our fault. Because it was.
But what has any of this got to do with Vilhelm Hammershoi?
Looking at his paintings of people standing alone in empty, cold rooms, one realises the work is less about the geography or the details - the porcelain serving dish, the bare table, the perfunctory decoration on the walls - but more about a state of mind. There is a willing austerity, a cleanliness of space, no clutter, no fuss, a pre-Ikea interior. The rooms are left sparse in order to give room to the thoughts on the mind of either the character pictured in the space or, if the space is empty, then the viewer themselves. And the relationship with this spare, meditative, restrained - almost ‘Huis Clos’ - type of environment seems enormously prescient in the current climate.
All the junk we have bought to fill up our lives suddenly seems irredeemably useless. It’s not working... it’s a fraud. And looking at Hammershoi's unoccupied rooms and desolate streets we are both reminded of that fact while being left with nothing but our own relationship to their sobriety. They feel barren, post-apocalyptic, as if some terrible virus has come to rid the world of its self-made ills.
All that remains is a place to exist... a place to reflect... a place solely for oneself.