The Grey Colour in Art and Literature

The novelist Poul Vad talks about the painter Vilhelm Hammershøi.

Af : Inge-Lise Klausen

The book is the result of thirty years´ work. Two years ago its author received the Amalienborg Prize awarded by the Queen and Prince Consort "in recognition of an outstanding humanistic labour." The prize included a translation grant. The book has now been published in a sumptuous English edition by Yale University Press.
   The Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi lived in the years 1864-1916 and his works include figure compositions, landscapes and architectural pictures.
   "He was brilliant at it, but the interiors are what is characteristic and pivotal in Hammershøi´s oeuvre. Therefore the genre has been given a central position in the book," Poul Vad relates.
   "There is an odd, profound stillness in the rooms Hammershøi depicts. If there are figures in the room - a woman, as in the pictures of his wife Ida - they don´t move. It is almost a question of absence. The furniture is sparse, the walls spacious and bare - all of it of advantage to someone who is concerned with the play of the light on the walls. It is a kind of pictorial meditation on light and space and with a simple, austerely classical composition. There is at once deep calm, classical simplicity and refined intimacy. They are qualities which distinguish Hammershøi´s interiors. That is why they have such a powerful effect," Poul Vad says.
   The interior was cultivated by several Danish painters around the turn of the century in extension of a traditional genre going back to Dutch painting of the 1600s.
   "Hammershøi tackled the motif unconventionally and audaciously and so his interiors differ from all the others´. He doesn´t use the interior as a point of departure for the genre picture, which depicts domestic life. On the contrary, he uses it for something almost abstract, to paint rooms where he investigates the light and creates a simple and utterly classical composition," the sixty-five-year-old author says, turning to the plate in the book Interior with a young man reading.
   "What is striking in the picture is the asceticism. The feeling of an asceticism bordering on the bare and deserted. Few but exquisite furnishings - and then the book... reading, and not an outgoing physical action, is one of the few activities which appear in Hammerhøi´s interiors,"
   Asked whether the artist was a reader Poul Vad replies:
   We know very little about that. But we do know that Hammershøi loved books and created a large and costly collection of his own, comprising the entire classical Danish literature and parts of the foreign, French and German. Goethe and Schiller. And Dickens, as well as books on archaeological and historical subjects.
   He loved beautiful books and I only wish he could have been delighted by this," Poul Vad says, looking at his own book with its 464 pages in luxury format.
   He thinks a book about Hammerhøi which did not meet a certain standard of esthetics and design would be tiresome... "Because on of the reasons for producing a beautiful book about Hammerhøi is that he himself loved books and collected them.
   The book is profusely illustrated. There are over three-hundred illustrations. At the same time it is highly readable. The text is massive. It gives an account of the artist´s life to the extent necessary for a knowledge of him as a person, and as background for the art he created. As such the book is almost a work of literature and a part of my literary oeuvre.
   I have written a couple of novels, and for me they are the most important.
   I am first an foremost a novelist.
When I say that Vilhelm Hammerhøi and Danish Art at the turn of the century " is a part of my literary oeuvre it is because I am a two-track writer.
   I write novels and parallel with that I write about and am involved with pictorial art.
   In 1957 I wrote a small book about Hammerhøi, and the reason I took it up again is that after thirty years I have so much more experience.
   I think I know considerably more about what pictorial art is, and I felt that I could get deeper into Hammerhøi´s art than I could then.
   Therefore it seemed natural to me to utilize all that I had assimilated over the years in the way of knowledge and insight in a large book which was to be exhaustive and in-depth.
   It is a book about Hammerhøi, but both directly and indirectly it is also a book about art. It deals with certain central problems concerning the nature of pictorial art, and of the relationship between form and content. How pictorial art stands in relation to the period in which it is created. And it also goes into pictorial art´s - and Hammerhøi´s location in the artistic and idea-historical landscape at the time when he was active," says Poul Vad.

A work of literature

The Hammershøi book is a part of the author´s literary oeuvre.
   "A book that size is also a composition. A material of that magnitude can be organized in all kinds of ways. It´s a huge amorphous mass of facts and the author´s experiences.
   How are you going to give structure to so unwieldy a material? In terms of his life, his art and development?
   The way I have built the book up reflects my assessment of Hammerhøi. The book isn´t absolutely chronological. It focuses on a few main points, and they aren´t given beforehand. They are there because that´s the way I have seen it. In that way we arrive at a subjective picture. It is my conception of and sympathetic insight into Hammerhøi´s art.
   The idea-historical is important because it lets the reader put himself in the period. And Hammerhøi did indeed play a role for his period.
   In Denmark he was an object of contention. Some understood him from the outset, but there were many who didn´t understand him at all.
   He quickly aroused interest abroad. One of his admirers was the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. In the book I describe how this great modern poet in European literature after having published a book about Rodin seeks out Hammershøi in Copenhagen with the intention of writing about him. Nothing ever came of the project, however.
   I have tried to examine what it was that fascinated Rilke and why. It had to do with the idea-historical position Hammerhøi occupied at the beginning of this century. Another example is the English art critic Arthur Clutton-Brock, who reviewed an exhibition of Danish art in 1907 and gave prominence to Hammerhøi. The review is reprinted as an appendix in the book. This review should find response in the Anglo-Saxon countries, where interest in Danish art is growing thanks to the exhibit Northern Light in the USA in 1981."
   Poul Vad goes on to say that it is in Germany especially that Hammerhøi ought to be presented. He was a big name in the German art world and exhibited many times in Germany, where his pictures were sold by some of the leading art dealers. But in the period between the wars and after the Second World War his name passed into oblivion in Germany.
   In contrast to their German and French counterparts, English-speaking art historians have in the past decade become increasingly interested in Scandinavian art, particularly since the Northern Lights exhibition in the United States. With the publication of Poul Vad´s book in English other countries now have a unique opportunity to become acquainted with Hammerhøi´s universe, where deep stillness, classical simplicity predominate in his interiors.
   Poul Vad was captivated by this universe while studying art history at Copenhagen University and did research into Danish painting in the 1890s.
   "That was when I became interested in Hammershøi. Why I can´t say. Perhaps something accorded.
   Three years after the little Hammershøi book from 1957 when I published my first novel there were many who wrote of an affinity with Hammerhøi. An affinity in the grey tone.
   I myself have never thought about a accord in the grey tone. But perhaps there was something or other when it all began...
   I would rather not say that I feel an affinity with Hammerhøi. But I do feel attracted by his art. Maybe it has something to do with the economy of means in his painting. The reserve. Hammerhøi never makes a play for the beholder. He is simply a good artist," says Poul Vad.
   The author, who operates on two tracks, is often asked what pictorial art means for his writing.
"When I write my novels a strongly visual element is often involved. And so it may not be a coincidence that I have had the close involvement with Hammerhøi," he concludes.


This interview first appeared in Danish Literary Magazine nr. 3, 1992

Oversat af Kenneth Tindall