Leslie Hossack’s photograph of Vilhelm Hammershøi’s 1913 painting
“The Tall Windows. Interior from the Artist’s Home” (collection of the Ordrupgaard Museum, Copenhagen)
Artist Leslie Hossack believes the late Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi is the perfect artist for this “stay-at-home, work-at-home” corona virus pandemic.
But even before COVID-19 pushed us indoors, Hossack says she was “transfixed,” “besotted” and “smitten” the first time she saw Hammershøi’s paintings – especially his interior scenes – at a 2018 touring exhibition from Denmark at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.
“I instantly identified with Hammmershøi,” she says. “I saw my work when I looked at his work. His paintings and my photographs spoke the same visual language.”
Hossack, who divides her time between Vancouver and Ottawa, has become obsessed with Hammershøi, traveling to Europe last year to photograph 100 of his paintings in various galleries and to shoot places where the artist walked, lived and painted in Copenhagen. She captured images from a century-old book about his work and was given access to Hammershøi’s letters at the Royal Danish Library.
“By holding these handwritten pages, I could feel the traces of his physical DNA,” says Hossack. “By viewing his paintings, I could see the traces of his psychological DNA. Both were palpable.”
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Leslie Hossack, “St. Peters Church, Copenhagen,” 2019
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Leslie Hossack’s photograph of Vilhelm Hammershøi’s 1906 painting “St. Peter's Church”(collection of the National Gallery of Denmark (SMK)
photographed in Le Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris as part of the exhibition “Hammershøi, The Master of Danish Painting”)
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Leslie Hossack’s photograph of a 1918 reproduction of Vilhelm Hammershøi’spainting “St. Peter’s Church” in “Vilhelm Hammershøi, kunstneren og hans vaerk (The Artist and His Work)” by Sophus Michaëlis and Alfred Bramsen
Her goal is to mount an exhibition next year of her photographs and publish a book. (Her photographs, including the ones pictured with this article, are a work in progress, and their final look could change before they are formally presented to the world.)
Hossack has held exhibitions at home and abroad and self-published books related to earlier, less ardent, obsessions, including photographing architecture associated with such 20th-century giants as Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Churchill and Freud.
In some cases, she idealized her images with the help of Photoshop. People, automobiles and the scars of age vanished. Buildings were transformed, in slightly surreal fashion, into the visions the original architects probably hoped would last for eternity.
Leslie Hossack's 2019 photograph of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, where Hammershøi studied from 1879 to 1884.
Hammershøi had a similar approach to his paintings, says Hossack, and he often removed people and “the chaos and clutter of contemporary life,” effectively emptying the very rooms in which he lived.
“I’ve been doing that for 10 years at various sites around the world,” says Hossack. “I kept thinking, ‘Oh, I really get this guy.’ ”
Hammershøi also painted landscapes, portraits and nudes. But it’s the interior scenes that resonate the most for Hossack.
And it’s the interior paintings that also resonate now, during a pandemic that is forcing us indoors and giving us a more intimate relationship with the rooms in our homes, rooms that no longer welcome visitors. Our world has shrunk to the things contained within the walls around us as we eat, sleep, work (or wait for work) and school our children.
Leslie Hossack’s photograph of Vilhelm Hammershøi’s 1910 painting, “Sunshine in the Drawing Room” (National Gallery of Canada)
There are only two Hammershøi paintings in public collections in Canada. Both Interior with Four Etchings, at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, and Sunshine in the Drawing Room, at the National Gallery of Canada, depict a sparsely furnished room. A woman, likely the artist’s wife, Ida, is seen from the rear on each canvas, but seems no more important than a chair or table. Calmness, bordering on the surreal, dominates both paintings.
“When you fall in love with Hammershøi’s domestic surroundings and psychologically charged interiors, you enter your own personal labyrinth where you encounter endless open passages and countless locked doors,” says Hossack.
“You confront a multitude of windows through which light passes but from which you cannot see the outside. Hammershøi’s calm, quiet, soothing, poetic interiors require you to look inward. His work is deceptively silent, somewhat subversive and totally seductive. I was seduced.”
Leslie Hossack’s photograph of Vilhelm Hammershøi’s 1914 painting
“The Four Rooms. Interior from the Artist's Home, Strandgade 25” (collection of the Ordrupgaard Museum, Copenhagen)
Hossack photographed Hammershøi’s paintings in galleries because she wants people to see them as the artist wanted – framed and on a wall. She will present those paintings and their frames exactly as they look in their respective galleries, even when the lighting did not bring out their colours fully. The walls, however, will be changed so they are all the same – almost black – to create a unifying aesthetic for the eventual exhibition and book.
Hammershøi’s love of tranquil interiors matches his own personality. “He was a quiet man,” says Hossack. He did not speak publicly. Few direct quotations are on record. He loved books and music. But generally, Hammershøi did not crave external stimulation or distraction. Undoubtedly, he would have coped well in a pandemic like ours. ■
More of Leslie Hossack's images can be seen on her blog at hautevitrine.com.
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