Hammershoi, the master of Danish painting at the Jacquemart-André Museum

From March 14 to July 22, 2019, the Jacquemart-André Museum dedicates a wonderful exhibition to Vilhelm Hammershøi, a master of Danish painting. For the first time in 20 years, 40 poetic works of art by the Danish painter are gathered in Paris for a beautiful display of his work on portraits.

From March 14 to July 22, 2019 Hammershøi is given center stage of a beautiful exhibition at the Jacquemart-André Museum. This retrospective on the Danish painter – considered by some as the Vermeer of the 20^th century – is a wonderful occasion to wonder about Danish art.

Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864 – 1916) was rather unsociable and laconic, remaining his entire life in a restraint circle that he kept on depicting. His melancholy makes all the power of his portraits: when he paints his fiancée, Ida, in 1890, she looks distant and you can’t read the face of his model, a sacrilege for this time giving pride of place to detailed compositions.

All along his career, his works will take as models his mother, wife, sister, brother, brother-in-law and a few close friends, alone or together, but always frozen and diffident. Hammershøi considers his big format Five Portraits (Stockholm, Thielska Galleriet) as his masterpiece: immortalizing close artists around a table, dead silent, in a chiaroscuro painting, this canvas will create a scandal in 1902 when it was first displayed.

Other themes displayed throughout the exhibition, nature, urban landscapes but most of all, the inside of his apartments that Hammershøi will immortalize in his works: we find then sober rooms with parsimoniously set furniture and paintings, various objects and thoroughly selected books, the presages of today’s hygge.

According to Culturespaces CEO Bruno Monnier, “This is for the discovery of this universe, as intimate as enigmatic you’re invited to the exhibition. It brings together forty works by Hammershøi facing for the first-time other paintings by artists who’ve been the closest to him: his brother Svend, his brother-in-law Peter Ilsted and his friend Carl Holsøe. The exhibition highlights all the modernity of this artist who excelled in depicting a solitude speaking to each and every viewer”.

We can’t wait!

Photo credit: Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior with Woman standing, oil on canvas, 67.5x54.3 cm Ambassador John L. Loeb Jr. Danish Art Collection © TX0006154704, registered March 22, 2005

Hammershoi, the master of Danish painting at the Jacquemart-André Museum

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