Painting Tranquility: Masterworks by Vilhelm Hammershøi, Scandinavia House, New York — ‘Wistful and sublime’

Does an age of CGI apocalypses, barn-sized puppy sculptures, flash mobs, viral videos, and online splatter games have space for the art of a long-dead Dane once known as “The Painter of Tranquil Rooms”?

Vilhelm Hammershøi was born in 1864, a few months after the Norwegian Edvard Munch, and died in 1916, taking his reputation with him. Munch’s scream has kept bellowing through the decades, from grand thefts to coffee cups. Now Scandinavia House has mounted a Hammershøi exhibition that whispers into the uproar, testifying to the power of austerity and restraint. Emotion overflows in the limpid light of empty rooms. Landscapes quiver with an atmosphere that is otherworldly, wistful and sublime.

In one lyrical interior, clarity struggles against dimness. Sunshine pours through a large window, transmuting parted drapes into diaphanous wings and projecting a lattice on the vast, empty floor. But in a corner, a woman, seen from behind, hunches over a shadowed desk. The spiritual silence of the scene harmonises grey and white patterns: the door, with its sequence of rectangular mouldings, a vertical casement, and the geometric panelling on the walls.

The simple, gridded arrangement verges on modernism. It also taps older traditions of sun-dappled chambers flecked with anxiety, contemplation and desire. Dutch 17th-century painters bathed gestures and half-completed thoughts in floods of light. Later, after Napoleon’s fall, a generation of artists ground down by imperial adventures turned their visions towards home. In an 1826 painting by Wilhelm Bendz, two brothers keep silent company in a lambent green parlour, the sober values of middle-class Copenhagen illustrated by the spare, brightly lit furnishings.

Hammershøi was hardly alone in reviving the contemplative, domestic mode. Another contemporary, Edouard Vuillard, wove his subjects’ inner lives into intoxicating mélanges of shapes and colours. He channelled anguish and joy into delicate and decorated surfaces — and yet, all that kaleidoscopic patterning is a kind of gentle jail. Hammershøi’s women are cut off in their solemn surroundings, while Vuillard’s disappear into the riot of the room — but the abnegation remains the same. In his 1879 play The Doll’s House, Ibsen confined his restless character Nora to just such gracious quarters.

Despite all the precedents and resonances, Hammershøi’s work puzzled artistic authorities. “I have a pupil who paints most oddly,” his teacher reported. “I do not understand him, but believe he is going to be important and do not try to influence him.” Maybe critics were mystified by the muted monochromes, though he shared that palette with J.A.M. Whistler. Or perhaps it was the mystery at the heart of his depopulated canvases. Absent of motion and colour, the interiors still thrum with muted energy. The Danish poet Sophus Claussen memorialised Hammershøi with a poem that captured the glow beneath the dark surface: “Yet O! how sweet to know that blacks and greys/ Give shelter to the Light and let it stay.”

In a painting from 1888, another solitary woman stands with her imposing back to us as she engages in a recondite task. A beam of sunlight sets the nape of her neck aglow, along with her pillowy elbows and starched white apron. Aside from these illuminated patches, the woman is a monumental shadow against a grey wall, her face and hands hidden from our sight. All that stillness and stolidity bring to mind the isolated figures populating boarding houses and cafés in the work of Edward Hopper. Though their output looks quite different, both painters deal with psychic alienation, a sense of supreme aloneness in a world suffused with melancholy.

Hammershøi extends his muffled asceticism into the urban landscape. Copenhagen, his home town, looks as colourless and devoid of people as the rooms of his house. An equestrian monument dominates an empty square ringed by blank windows — this time seen from the outside. The light is cool, the air misty. Greyness abounds.

But some rude spirit forces its way into Hammershøi’s brush when he ventures into the countryside. There, the city’s grim regularity gives way to the disordered silence of nature. Hammershøi steered clear of cliffs and turbulent clouds — anything that might distract through grandeur. A great flat sky, bounded by a field edged with a stand of trees, strikes a truce between wilderness and cultivation.

In a picture of a deer park north of Copenhagen, he achieved a rare and perfect transcendence. We look into a forest where boughs are haloed by a setting sun. The leaves blear into mossy fur, the roots dissolve into grass the texture of velvet. Shadows stretch towards us, boding the end of the day, of the season, of life itself. Hammershøi dissolves shapes and objects into atmosphere. Instead of views on to a bright and ever-changing reality, he offers us timeless vessels of sensibility.

‘Painting Tranquility: Masterworks by Vilhelm Hammershøi’, to February 27, scandinaviahouse.org