Jarrett Earnest on Vilhelm Hammershøi

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:04]Once you kind of tune into them, they are on such a specific wavelength, they're like no other painting.

[00:00:15]The narrative slows you down in looking so that that's the level of time that you're there.

[00:00:24]It's like being alone in a room and looking at the quality of light, but being present with it.

[00:00:29]And within that, there's space [music] to think, there's space to feel and reflect. I think often times people talk about Hammershøi as being about silence.

[00:00:39]I think the quality of sound is maybe closer to the quality of light, which is just it's brought [music] way down. It's not a perfect silence, just like it's not a perfect stillness. There's a sense that there is something incredibly quiet, incredibly slow.

[00:00:58]The thing [music] that's interesting about this particular painting is it's like those interiors that are super radical, which it's like there's almost no incident within the painting. And it's has this very weird perspective because it's at [music] an angle.

[00:01:15]Like you look into the room that recedes at this angle, like one-point perspective. And all of the geometry of the room, and there's like a lot of geometry because [music] there's all these panels, like why is there so much going on? And all these little decorations and stuff that are catching the light, and they become this meditation on the description of light and shadow. The whole thing is set up so that you're looking out this door that is slightly [music] open, and that kind of zigzag space, you're kind of looking in and the door goes like this, and then you see something behind, and then the lightest part of the painting >> [music] >> is what must be a window, a little sliver of a window just beyond the top of the door. And so that particular wedge [music] of distance also is enough of a story.

[00:02:09]You can go out, someone can come in, maybe someone has just left. You're [music] just in this room forced to think of like what's beyond. Like everything in the painting is [music] kind of like driving you there.

[00:02:23]Even the faces, like sometimes he paints women. I think there's something about the the presence of his wife where you only see the back of her.

[00:02:32]You're not distracted by the likeness.

[00:02:33][music] You're not distracted by expression. What she represents is a human presence. It represents habitation.

[00:02:41]>> [music] >> In the way that like the door being opened means that like people are here.

[00:02:45]He doesn't give you like a real fancy chair. [music] Well, and sometimes there are chairs, but like but then they have drama cuz it's like cuz it's like an actor. And so I think that's one of the reasons why Hammershøi reemerges at a time like this is we have a renewed engagement [music] with so-called figurative paintings.

[00:03:02]Anything you want to see like the most sensitive relationship to to formal language and abstraction, he's doing that and he's doing it in a way that has psychology, emotion, narrative, image, and the one does not destroy the other.

[00:03:19]They're just pitched at exactly the right >> [music] >> level. I think now basically the most important work is to help people see the abstraction in the contemporary representational paintings or figurative paintings. [music] And so I think Hammershøi is like like a perfect he was it's like almost he was sitting there waiting for us to like be able to see them again. And now they look like the best paintings anyone ever made.

[00:04:06]>> Mhm.