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Hammershøi Painted the Same Two Rooms for Twenty Years
In May 1898, Vilhelm Hammershøi and his wife Ida moved into a first-floor apartment at Strandgade 30 in the Christianshavn district of Copenhagen. The building was a seventeenth-century merchant's house with high-ceilinged rooms, white panelled walls, and small north-facing windows. They lived there for the next eleven years. During that time Hammershøi painted, by recent count, approximately sixty interiors of the apartment. The paintings are nearly all the same: a doorway, a small section of wall, a piece of dark furniture, sometimes the back of a single figure. The figure, when present, is usually Ida. She faces away from the viewer, often in the act of leaving the room. The light is northern and grey. The walls are white-grey. The floors are dark wood. Nothing in the paintings indicates the year, the season, or any specific occasion. Copenhagen Hammershøi was born in Copenhagen in 1864, into a merchant family. He studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in the early 1880s under teachers who taught a conservative version of late nineteenth-century academic painting. He was a competent student, won prizes, and exhibited at the Charlottenborg from 1885 onwards. By the early 1890s he had begun the kind of interiors and figure paintings that would define the rest of his career. He married Ida Ilsted in 1891. Ida was the sister of his fellow painter Peter Ilsted, and the two painters maintained a close working friendship for the rest of Hammershøi's life. Ida had been a model in his student work and continued to model for many of his mature paintings, almost always with her back turned. What the Rooms Look Like The Strandgade 30 apartment had a recurring set of architectural features that Hammershøi painted over and over. A doorway opening through to a back room. A small white stove. A bookcase. A windowless wall section with a single hanging picture. A polished wooden floor that caught the grey light. The whole palette of the building was within twenty values: bone white, grey-white, dove grey, soft black, mahogany brown. Hammershøi painted these elements in different combinations across sixty canvases. Sometimes a doorway with no figure. Sometimes a doorway with Ida walking through. Sometimes a section of wall and an empty chair. Sometimes a piano with no player. The compositions are not arbitrary: each painting is built on a strict geometric grid, with the doorways aligned to specific vertical axes and the figures placed at calculated points in the visual field. Vilhelm Hammershøi, Sunshine in the Drawing Room, 1903. Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen. One of the rare paintings with strong sunlight rather than overcast grey. What He Was Doing The standard reading is that Hammershøi was painting silence. The reading is correct in its way. His pictures are quiet, and the quietness is structural: the rooms are empty enough to function as compositional fields rather than as containers for action. The light is even and unmoving. The figures, when they appear, are passing through. The more useful reading is that Hammershøi was painting the same problem repeatedly. The problem was how to balance a Vermeer-influenced understanding of light against the late nineteenth-century Whistlerian interest in tonal harmony, both inside the constraint of a single architectural setting. By restricting his subject to one apartment, Hammershøi turned the painting practice into a kind of laboratory. The variables (figure or no figure, doorway open or closed, light direction, season) could be tested against an unchanging set. Vermeer had used a similar method 250 years earlier. Hammershøi's small interiors descend directly from Vermeer's small interiors. The connection is not historical accident: Hammershøi saw Vermeer paintings at the Mauritshuis on visits to the Netherlands in 1887 and 1897, and several of his interiors quote Vermeer compositions directly. Both painters used a single room as a study laboratory. Both painters limited their palettes. Both painters used a recurring figure (Vermeer's domestic women, Hammershøi's Ida) to anchor compositions without dramatising them. The Reception Hammershøi was successful in his lifetime. He exhibited regularly at the Charlottenborg, won the gold medal at the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition, and was bought by Danish and German collectors at increasing prices. His reputation was secure across northern Europe by 1905. His reputation outside Scandinavia, however, did not survive his death. The early twentieth century moved past the kind of mood painting he produced, and his interiors looked, by the 1920s, like a kind of nineteenth-century relic. He was largely ignored by the international art-historical establishment for almost seventy years after his death in 1916. The recovery began in the 1980s, accelerated through the 1990s, and reached a popular peak in the 2010s when a major Royal Academy retrospective in London and a Met retrospective in New York brought him to wide international notice. The pictures had not changed. The audience had become ready to see them again. Why It Took So Long Hammershøi's pictures resist most of the things the twentieth-century art-historical mainstream wanted from painting. They are not formally innovative in the modernist sense. They are not narratively rich. They are not politically engaged. They do not use new pigments, new techniques, or new subjects. They paint the same room with the same person across two decades. The qualities the pictures do have (attention, patience, restraint, a refusal of drama) are difficult to argue for in a critical environment trained to look for break and innovation. The recovery of Hammershøi in the late twentieth century coincided with a wider cultural willingness to value attention as a virtue. The pictures became readable again because audiences had learned, after sixty years of art that demanded attention from them, to value art that gave attention back. What He Left Hammershøi died in February 1916, aged fifty-one, from throat cancer. He had moved out of Strandgade 30 in 1909 and into a slightly larger apartment, but had continued to paint variations of the same kinds of interiors there. Ida outlived him by thirty-three years and died in 1949, having looked after his estate and continued to model occasionally for his brother-in-law Peter Ilsted. The approximately sixty Strandgade 30 interiors are now distributed across the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, the Ordrupgaard collection outside Copenhagen, the Hirschsprung Collection, and a network of museums in Germany, France, Britain, and the United States. The Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen has the largest single concentration. The apartment itself was demolished in the 1980s. The building still stands, but the interior layout was replaced. The rooms now exist only in the paintings. They were never large or elaborate. They were not interesting in their original form. They became interesting because a man with a small palette, a methodical compositional habit, and twenty years of patience kept painting them.
Frida Kahlo Painted 143 Pictures and 55 Were Self-Portraits
Frida Kahlo produced about 143 paintings in a working life of twenty-eight years. Fifty-five of them were self-portraits. The proportion is unusual for a painter who could draw anything. Kahlo painted herself repeatedly because she had a working model permanently available (herself), because she was almost continuously injured and could not always travel to other sitters, and because the figure she most wanted to investigate was the one she could not stop being. The story of Kahlo has been compressed in popular culture into a few large events: the streetcar accident at eighteen, the marriage to Diego Rivera, the affairs, the surgeries, the unibrow. The compression is accurate to the headlines and misleading about the work. What Kahlo actually did, day by day for twenty-eight years, was sit in front of a small mirror and paint herself. The Accident On 17 September 1925, Kahlo was eighteen and a student at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria in Mexico City. She was travelling home on a wooden bus that collided with an electric streetcar at the corner of Cuauhtemoctzin and Calzada de Tlalpan. The streetcar drove the bus forward; the bus collapsed; an iron handrail entered her body through her left hip and exited through her vagina. Her spine was fractured in three places. Her right leg was broken in eleven places. Her right foot was crushed. Her collarbone was broken. Two of her ribs were broken. Her pelvis was broken in three places. She survived. The medical care she received in 1925 Mexico City was unable to fully repair any of these injuries. She underwent more than thirty surgeries across her remaining twenty-eight years, was repeatedly placed in plaster body casts and metal corsets, and lived with continuous physical pain. The accident is the single fact from which the rest of her biography unfolds. The Studio That Was a Bed She began painting during the long convalescence. Her mother had a special easel made that allowed her to work lying down. A mirror was set into the canopy of the bed so that she could see her own face while immobile. The first self-portrait was made in 1926, in the year following the accident. Kahlo painted in oil. Her early canvases are small, often less than fifty centimetres on a side. The smallness was practical: she was working from a bed and could not handle large supports. The smallness also fits the kind of attention she was paying. A small painting forces the viewer close enough to read every detail. Kahlo's self-portraits ask to be read at the distance she painted them, which was the distance from her own face to her own mirror. Frida Kahlo, The Broken Column, 1944. Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City. Painted after a spinal surgery that fused several of her vertebrae. The Marriage Kahlo met Diego Rivera in 1928. He was twenty-one years older, already a famous muralist, and married twice before. They were married in August 1929. Rivera weighed roughly twice what Kahlo did; Kahlo's mother described the wedding photographs as "the marriage of an elephant and a dove." The marriage produced two extended separations and one divorce-and-remarriage. Rivera had affairs with Kahlo's sister Cristina in 1934 and with multiple other women across the marriage. Kahlo had affairs in response, including with the photographer Nickolas Muray and (briefly) with Leon Trotsky in 1937 when the Trotskys were sheltering at the Casa Azul in Coyoacán. The marriage worked in spite of all this. Rivera was the most respected painter in Mexico during the period; Kahlo's reputation was secondary to his, both publicly and (somewhat) in her own self-presentation. They lived next door to each other in twin houses connected by a bridge after their 1940 remarriage. He died in 1957, three years after she did. The Subject She Made Her Own Kahlo's self-portraits are not a sequence of likenesses. They are a sequence of arguments. Each painting takes the same face (heavy brow, full mouth, severe parted hair, often with elaborate hairstyles or floral arrangements) and uses it as the centre of a composition that argues for something specific: a political position, a medical fact, a marital crisis, a relationship to her ancestry. The 1939 painting The Two Fridas shows her in two costumes (one Tehuana, one European), seated side by side, holding hands, with their exposed hearts joined by a single artery. The painting was made during the months Rivera was suing for divorce. The double-figure is Kahlo arguing publicly that she contained both identities (Mexican peasant heritage on her mother's side, European bourgeois on her father's) and that the loss of Rivera would not collapse either. The 1944 painting The Broken Column shows her in a metal medical corset, her body split open vertically to reveal a crumbling Ionic column where her spine should be. The painting was made after a spinal surgery that had fused several of her vertebrae. The argument is direct: this is what is wrong with me. What the Self-Portraits Are For The conventional reading of Kahlo's self-portraits is that they are confessional, that they document her life directly, and that her work is therefore a form of autobiography. This reading is not wrong, but it is incomplete. The self-portraits are also, more importantly, a discipline. They are a daily exercise in looking at the same subject and finding something new in it. The same face, painted fifty-five times, becomes a kind of laboratory. Kahlo varies the costume, the background, the colour palette, the symbolism. The face itself is the constant. The variables are everything else. The painter who emerges from this discipline is more rigorous than the confessional reading suggests. Kahlo was not unloading her trauma onto canvas. She was building, painting by painting, a way of using the self-portrait as a structural form. The form was Mexican Catholic devotional painting (the small ex-voto pictures hung in churches across Mexico), the materials were European oil-on-canvas, and the subject was a woman who had been almost destroyed at eighteen and was working out, methodically, what could be salvaged. The End Kahlo's right leg was amputated at the knee in August 1953. Gangrene had developed from the original 1925 injuries. She lived less than a year afterwards. The last self-portrait, painted in 1953 or 1954, shows her in a brace and corset, on the front porch of the Casa Azul, with a small dog at her feet. She died on 13 July 1954, aged forty-seven. The official cause of death was pulmonary embolism. Her diary, found after her death, ended with the line, "I hope the leaving is joyful and I hope never to return." The 143 paintings, including the 55 self-portraits, were spread across several Mexican museums, private collections, and (a small number) international institutions. The Casa Azul became a museum dedicated to her in 1958. The reputation that had been secondary to Rivera's during her lifetime became, by the 1980s, larger than his. She is now the most famous Mexican artist of the twentieth century and one of the most reproduced female painters in any tradition. What survives is not the biography. The biography has been retold often enough to dull. What survives is the discipline. Fifty-five times, in front of the same mirror, painting the same face with absolute attention.
Sargent Painted Madame X With a Falling Strap and Had to Repaint It
John Singer Sargent was twenty-six when he began Madame X in summer 1883. He was already a successful portrait painter in Paris, and he wanted a picture that would do for him at the 1884 Salon what Manet's Olympia had done for Manet in 1865: provide a single sensational image that would settle his reputation as an artist of the modern moment. The sitter was Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, a New Orleans-born American who had married a French banker, Pierre Gautreau, and become a fixture of Paris society. She was famously beautiful, famously vain, and famously available for portrait commissions only on her own terms. Sargent had to negotiate access through a mutual acquaintance and was eventually granted thirty sittings over the summer at the Gautreau family château in Brittany. The First Version The portrait Sargent submitted to the 1884 Salon showed Gautreau standing in profile, one hand resting on a small table, the other holding the back of her dress in a half-turn toward the viewer. She wore a black satin gown with a sharply cut décolletage. The right shoulder strap, jewelled and thin, had fallen off her shoulder and lay against her upper arm. Her skin, painted in cool blue-white pigment that intensified the effect, was the most exposed thing in the picture. Sargent submitted the picture with the title Portrait de Mme. The Salon catalogue printed it as Madame ***. He had asked for anonymity, on the assumption that anonymity would protect the sitter from any controversy the painting might cause. The protection did not hold. Within an hour of the Salon's opening, Paris society had identified the sitter. The Reaction The reception was hostile. Reviewers attacked the painting's colour (the sitter's skin was described as cadaverous), its composition (her shoulder was held at an anatomically impossible angle), and its subject (the falling strap). Madame Gautreau's mother visited Sargent at his studio in tears and asked him to withdraw the picture. He refused. The painting hung in the Salon for the full run. The Gautreau family considered the portrait socially ruinous. The marriage, already troubled, did not recover. Madame Gautreau never sat for another portrait by Sargent and never publicly acknowledged the painting again. The Repaint Sometime in the weeks after the Salon closed, Sargent took the picture back to his studio and repainted the right shoulder strap so that it lay properly across the shoulder rather than fallen against the arm. He did not repaint anything else. The visible alteration is the only structural change to the painting in its history. The repaint did not rescue the picture's standing. The portrait remained in Sargent's possession, rolled up in his studio. He moved it from Paris to London when he relocated in 1886. He did not exhibit it publicly again for almost twenty years. John Singer Sargent, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The painting Sargent showed at the 1883 Salon to good reviews — the year before Madame X destroyed his Paris career. What Sargent Painted Next The Madame X scandal pushed Sargent out of Paris and into London. He arrived in 1886 with very few commissions and no settled studio. Within two years he had built a portrait practice serving the British upper class, the wealthy Americans who passed through London, and a smaller circle of aesthetes and writers. By 1890 he was painting forty or fifty portraits a year at fees that made him the highest-paid portraitist in Europe. The portraits from this period are now what Sargent is most famous for: Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, the Wertheimer family series, Madame Edouard Pailleron, dozens of others. The painting style had not changed fundamentally from Madame X. The same fluency in cloth, the same icy palette, the same understanding of how a single piece of jewellery could anchor a composition. What had changed was the cultural context. London society wanted to be painted by Sargent. Paris society had decided in 1884 that he was dangerous. The Resurrection Sargent kept Madame X for thirty-two years. He showed it occasionally at private studio viewings, lent it to one or two exhibitions, but did not sell it. In 1905 the Metropolitan Museum of Art's director, Roger Fry, approached him about acquiring it. Sargent refused. By 1915, the painting's reputation had begun to rebuild. Sargent told a friend that Madame X was "the best thing I have done." Madame Gautreau had died in 1915, and the social scandal that the painting represented was now a story about a vanished Belle Époque rather than a current society scandal. In 1916, the Metropolitan Museum approached him again. This time he agreed. He sold the picture for $1,000 — far less than he was paid for ordinary portraits during the same period — on the condition that the sitter be identified only as Madame X. The Met paid in cash. The picture has hung in the museum since. What the Painting Shows The painting now reads differently than it read in 1884. Audiences are no longer scandalised by an exposed shoulder, and the question of whether the falling strap was lewd has stopped being an interesting question. What the picture shows now is a painter at the height of his technical capacities working out a problem in cool tones and sharp profile. The chemistry of the skin is what stays surprising. Sargent built it from layers of underpaint with a final wash of zinc white tinted slightly blue. The effect, on a sitter who was famously powdered with rice powder and lavender water, is a kind of luminescence that no other portraitist of the period managed. The painting's claim to greatness rests on this technical achievement more than on the controversy that defined it for thirty years. Sargent never painted another portrait at that pitch. After 1884 he settled into a more conservative manner that delivered for his sitters what they expected: flattering likeness, technical fluency, and propriety. The portrait that destroyed his Paris career was also the last one in which he was willing to risk anything.