Vilhelm Hammershøi, Auguste Renoir, and the Problem of Innovation
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University of Kentucky UKnowledge Art & Visual Studies Presentations Art & Visual Studies 10-2004 Vilhelm Hammershøi, Auguste Renoir, and the Problem of Innovation Robert Jensen University of Kentucky, [email protected] Right click to open a feedback form in a new tab to let us know how this document benefits oy u. Follow this and additional works at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/art_present Part of the Art and Design Commons Repository Citation Jensen, Robert, "Vilhelm Hammershøi, Auguste Renoir, and the Problem of Innovation" (2004). Art & Visual Studies Presentations. 4. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/art_present/4 This Presentation is brought to you for free and open access by the Art & Visual Studies at UKnowledge. It has been accepted for inclusion in Art & Visual Studies Presentations by an authorized administrator of UKnowledge. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “Vilhelm Hammershøi, Auguste Renoir, and the Problem of Innovation” Southeastern College Art Association Conference University of North Florida, Jacksonville, October 2004 Dr. Rob Jensen Art Department University of Kentucky Lexington, KY 40506 [email protected] 2 Minor art and the canon: Hammershøi and Renoir Consider the following eulogy offered the Danish painter, Vilhelm Hammershøi, by one of his own countrymen upon the artist’s untimely death in 1916. “Renoir is an artist for the entire world; Hammershøi, name and repute notwithstanding, only for a small country.”1 The Danish critic offered no criteria for his judgment; it was too obvious to him. Even in his own country Hammershøi could be no more than a minor artist. His diminished posthumous reputation within the history of art might be summed up by the decision in 1931 of the director of the Statens Museum in Copenhagen to return a gift of 28 pictures by Hammershøi to their donor merely on the grounds that the museum lacked space. Here is a poignant example of how the triumphant modernists translated the kind of stylistic differences between artists such as Vilhelm Hammershøi and Pierre-Auguste Renoir into historical and geopolitical arguments and their long-term effects on the canon of modern art. The meat of such a comparison is obvious. Two pictures with similar subjects painted roughly fourteen years apart encapsulate these differences: Renoir’s Study (Nude in the Sunlight) 1875 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) and Hammershøi’s Seated Model, 1889 (Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen). Hammershøi worked nearly in monochrome, whereas Renoir loved the richness, variety, and luminosity of color. A Hammershøi painting minimizes the presence of the artist’s fashioning hand; when we do notice the artist’s brushwork, we tend to read his tightly controlled, methodical technique as a matter of cool or even cold objectivity. Conversely, for most Renoirs we are immediately conscious of the painting’s surface. We see a Renoir as a complex accumulation of apparently rapidly applied touches of paint. These are generally understood by his audiences to be the index of the subjective, warmly emotive response of the artist to the observed motif. Renoir’s technique gives a sensual liveliness to his subjects, which 3 themselves usually embody pleasure in a variety of forms. Hammershøi’s coolly methodical technique matches the stilled, introspective character of his pictures. Hammershøi’s two principal subjects, women and architectural environments, are invariably treated as inanimate geometries, where the possibility of movement, of change, has been excluded. Hammershøi chose to imprison his women in their interiors, to lock them in their windowless spaces, in a manner not seen in Western painting since Vermeer. A century later, the differences between Hammershøi’s pictures of apparent self-denial in both aesthetic means and treatment of subjects and Renoir’s effusive, generous pictures may no longer seem as important as they did in 1916. Many art scholars now profess to question the hierarchies that gave Renoir international fame and Hammershøi local stature. Hammershøi’s pictures also may no longer appear so out-of-step with their times as they did at the beginning of the 20th century. For example, there is a particular kind of modern sensibility in Hammershøi’s pictures that is often missing from Renoir’s paintings, a descriptive concreteness that eschews the pictorial conventions to which Renoir often adhered. This difference is especially notable in their treatment of the nude. Renoir’s approach to the Nude in the Sunlight, strongly invokes pastoral conventions stretching back to Giorgione. At the same time, Renoir’s experimental approach to painting frequently led to an inconsistency in his technique. This is often expressed in the artist’s ambivalence of how to use the division of tones and Impressionist divided brushwork in respect to the representation of the human form. Characteristically, in the Nude in the Sunlight Renoir executed the background in broad strokes of paint between which the canvas often shows, yet treated the model as a closed form, fairly carefully worked up. Unlike Renoir, Hammershøi painted very few nudes in his career. Seated Model was painted early in his career and its large size suggest that the artist intended it to be more than an academic study, to be, in 4 fact, an ambitious statement of his personal aesthetic. The picture has none of Renoir’s indecisiveness and makes a lucid public display of Hammershøi’s formal ambitions within a time-honored convention. However, Hammershøi appears content, in a way that Renoir never was, to depict his model as a model, and in a manner perhaps more closely related to Cézanne’s nudes than to academic studies, to see the human body more as a motif or a thing rather than as a symbol (unlike Renoir’s typical evocation in his nudes of both art and pleasure). There is also a visual reticence that pervades this and many other pictures by Hammershøi’s, a descriptive discreteness that makes the model retreat before our eyes, even when the whole point of the picture appears to be the artist’s careful tonal modeling of the woman’s body. Hammershøi’s self-conscious refusal of color and his concentration on subtle gradations of tone are curiously closer in feel to Picasso and Braque’s cubist pictures painted around 1910, with their similarly restricted palette and subtle tonal modulations, than they are to the pictures by the contemporary artist we know Hammershøi most admired, the American James McNeill Whistler. No actual relationship between Hammershøi’s work and that of the French cubists, of course, exists. To evoke such a relationship, however, is to engage in what has become a typical practice by anyone who seeks to raise the value of one artist’s work by comparing it to the work of more valued artists. Art historians, for example, have routinely extended such labels as “impressionist” to artists far removed from the historical group known by that name, consistently with the aim to elevate the respective importance of the thus labeled artist. But even if one were to concede that there was a fundamental connection between Hammershøi’s essentially anti- modern aesthetic and the aggressively avant-garde practice of the Parisian cubists, would that sufficient to raise the reputation of Hammershøi within the history of late 19th-century European painting, to something on par with Renoir? 5 To answer this question it is perhaps first worth noting that unlike Renoir, Hammershøi acquired a very loyal clientele early on in his career, forming a base of patrons that steadily increased as he grew older. The provenances of the 72 paintings included in the catalogue of the 1998 Guggenheim Museum retrospective indicate that only a handful were in the artist’s possession at the time of his death and these clearly were all paintings the artist chose not to sell.2 In addition, a little less than a third of the paintings belonged during the artist’s lifetime to a single collector, a dentist named Alfred Bramsen, who began to collect the artist’s paintings in 1888 when Hammershøi was just 24. A number of the artist’s paintings were subsequently acquired by museums in Scandinavia, Germany, and elsewhere, signs that the artist enjoyed a notable international reputation during the years around 1900. The obscurity into which the artist’s work fell over the last three quarters of the 20th century cannot undermine the fact that during his lifetime he was widely perceived by his contemporaries to be a very significant artist. Yet, having said this and despite the artist’s Guggenheiim retrospective, shown in New York, Paris, and Copenhagen, and many other indications of renewed interest in his oeuvre, it is highly unlikely that Hammershøi will ever become canonical on par with Renoir. This is because art history neither considers aesthetic merit nor treatment of subject matter as decisive constituents of artistic importance in evaluation the historical stature of an artist. Although even professional art historians have not always been conscious of this fact, canonicity is determined by the perception that an artist has made significant contributions to the larger history of art, that is, that an artist is understood to have made some important innovations that subsequently influenced the development of art. This clearly can be said of Renoir, but not of Hammershøi. There is, therefore, a definite ceiling to the rehabilitation of the artist’s reputation. Returning to the Guggenheim retrospective, the Danish curators selected for the show 6 roughly half the paintings dating from the years before the artist’s 40th birthday, and took the other half from the last decade of his working life, that is, up to 1914, when his career was cut short first by the outbreak of the First World War and then by throat cancer, from which he died, following a long illness, in 1916.