Vilhelm Hammershøi, Basel review — powerful emotions behind the stillness and silence

Despite their popularity, the paintings of Vilhelm Hammershøi — empty apartments, spare portraits — are often thought of as cold, lonely, impenetrable and stiflingly precise, a reading encouraged by the hushed rooms of Danish museums in which many of them now hang. He made paintings of his wife and his house, inviting us in — but no one seems to have realised that we are there.

His first works, made while Hammershøi was still studying, immediately challenge the idea of him as a literalist. “Interior with White Door and Yellow Wardrobe” (1886), part of a new show at Hauser & Wirth in Basel, is an early indoor scene; it is also the most radical, a breath away from total abstraction. This theme runs throughout the exhibition, culminating in a painting of an empty ballroom; floorboards slowly turn to a fog of scumbled brushstrokes as our eyes dance across the canvas. The 16 paintings gathered here — portraits, landscapes, architectural views and domestic scenes — form a concise survey of the artist’s career and invite us to reconsider what we thought we knew.

Born into a prosperous merchant family in Copenhagen in 1864, Hammershøi remained in the city for much of his life. He painted the apartments in which he lived and the people that he was close to; usually this meant his wife Ida, the sister of an artist friend whom he married in 1891. “Study of Standing Woman, Seen from Behind” (1888) shows a female figure with her back to us, absorbed in something that we cannot see. She might be mending or reading something, but the narrative trail disappears the moment we catch sight of it. Hammershøi offers us precious little to work with; he often gives us mirrors, but not the reflections in them.

This feeling intensifies in a group of paintings made over the turn of the century in the townhouse apartment at Strandgade 30 that he and Ida rented for more than a decade. The focus has been tightened, and the settings are more staged. Each of his homes offered a different set of conditions for Hammershøi to explore, from the quality of light to the layout of rooms. Within these rooms he made constant changes; tables and chairs were shuffled around, pictures rehung, candlesticks moved, doors opened or closed for each different painting. Ida at times appears like a marionette or the queen on his chess board. His was a game of quiet drama that lasted for more than 30 years. The paintings themselves are the pauses between his moves, when the mind gets to work.

Time spent with the paintings is rewarded as a different register of feelings gradually begins to emerge, confounding our expectations. There are small, almost certainly deliberate imperfections in his portrayal of objects: a wobbly window frame, or an off-centre arrangement of ceramic pots. Their awkwardness offers us a way in. We become aware of an unexpected depth of colour, with blues, greens and pinks finding space on his largely grey-toned palette.

On a more intimate level, we begin to detect traces of warmth. In several paintings, a pair of framed prints hang side-by-side on a wall, subtle but unmistakable companions for one another. In a rare portrait of Ida that reveals her face and its soft, gentle features, a fireguard placed before a wooden stove invites us to imagine the glowing embers nestled behind. A double portrait towards the end of the exhibition has them finally together in the same room — but this time we remain outside, kept at a distance by the painted frame of an oval mirror.

Located in a 19th-century former silk ribbon workshop in the heart of Basel’s old town, the latest outpost of Hauser & Wirth has domestically scaled rooms and natural daylight which provide the intimacy and atmosphere that Hammershøi’s paintings deserve. It is intended to be the first in a series of historical exhibitions in the space and a small number of the works on display are available, the gallery has confirmed. (Works come from private collections including five from John L Loeb Jr, the former US ambassador to Denmark.)

It is an intriguing move by Hauser & Wirth to extend its roster back to the turn of the 20th century, just as David Zwirner has moved earlier by introducing Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) into its own stable of artists. Iwan Wirth, the gallery’s co-founder, says it makes sense to do historical shows because “they help to define the context for our contemporary programme” and that his artists “are constantly in dialogue with the wider context of art history”.

The darkest and most roughly worked painting in the exhibition, “Morning Toilette”, was completed in 1914 as Europe succumbed to war and Hammershøi received a diagnosis of the throat cancer which killed him two years later. It is hard not to draw a connection with another painting from around the same time that depicts nothing more than an empty chair, placed in an adjoining room beyond the artist, across the threshold. This life-long study in stillness, it turns out, is very moving indeed.

To July 13, hauserwirth.com