Vilhelm Hammershøi: Pictures from Home

Vilhelm Hammershøi is celebrated as Denmark’s most important painter of the late 19th and early 20th century, known particularly for his series of enigmatic, evocative, and painstakingly observed views of the Copenhagen apartment he shared with his wife, Ida, between 1898 and 1909.​

This presentation—the first in North America devoted to Hammershøi in over 25 years—focuses exclusively on these famous paintings of his home’s interior and brings together an unprecedented number—more than half—of the 65 domestic scenes the artist produced, including the Art Institute’s recently acquired Interior. The Music Room, Strandgade 30 and several works from distinguished private collections that have rarely been shown publicly.

The apartment at Strandgade 30 was simultaneously Hammershøi’s home, studio, and obsessive artistic subject, and this exhibition showcases how he transformed this seemingly hermetic world into a site of endless artistic possibilities, painting many rooms and compositions multiple times with slight shifts in lighting or in the arrangement of furniture or objects.

This profound engagement with repetition and difference is highlighted throughout the exhibition as are other compositional throughlines in Hammershøi’s work—his ambiguous spatial constructions, emphasis on linearity, and subtle approach to light and shadow. The presentation also explores interpretive themes in his paintings—the relation of light and shadow to the passing of time, the “lives” of his household objects as they migrated between various rooms, and the complex role that Ida played in many of the paintings.

Exquisitely painted, Hammershøi’s scenes of his home are both quotidian and uncanny, intimate and mysteriously remote. This rare North American assemblage of so many of the artist’s interiors offers visitors the chance to step inside Hammershøi’s unique world and to reconsider the very notion of home, at the turn of the 20th century and today.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website