Art Of The Day Weekly
#244 - from 2 February 2012 to 8 February 2012
Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916), Interior with the Artist's Easel, National Gallery of Denmark, 1910, oil, on canvas, 84 x 69 cm. © SMK Foto
Hammershoi, an avant-gard European
COPENHAGEN – Vilhelm Hammershoi (1864-1916) was a revelation for the French public when hs remarkable retrospective took place at the musée d’Orsay during the Winter of 1997-1998. The public discovered a stranger from the great North, a worthy manipulator of white lights at an angle, who built interior scenes like still lives. Since then the Danish artist has been reviewed, in particular confronted to Dreyer (at the CCCB in Barcelona in 2007) or during another personal retrospective, at the Royal Academy in 2008. An artist everyone believed to have sprouted out of nowhere, a sort of spontaneous generationfrom the cold countries, was actually a European forerunneri, who travelled and took in all the avant-gards of his time. That is what is presented in Hammershoi and Europe by confronting him to his contemporaries such as Whistler, Khnopff, Carrière or Gauguin.
• Hammershoi and Europe at the SMK, 4 February to 20 Mayi 2012.