Expert Voices: Vilhelm Hammershøi | Interior. The Music Room, Strandgade 30

Описание: Interior. The Music Room, Strandgade 30 by the great Danish master Vilhelm Hammershøi has hung for over three quarters of a century on the very wall it depicts in the artist’s Copenhagen apartment, which he occupied with his wife Ida from 1898 until 1908.

 

Speaking to the artwork is legendary Danish architect, Bjarke Ingels, who relates Hammershøi’s ability to find meaning in the mundane to the challenges of his own profession when orchestrating all the practicalities of every day life in the most poetic way possible. Also speaking about the painting is Nina Wedell-Wedellsborg, head of Sotheby’s Denmark and international specialist Claude Penning who delve into the provenance of the painting and their own personal connection to it. 

 

Interior. The Music Room, Strandgade 30 was painted in 1907 during the artist’s most accomplished period, in the apartment which played a critical role in his choice of subject. Hammershøi’s almost spiritual interest in isolation is most powerfully and consistently articulated in his atmospheric interiors, which are imbued with a sense of calm and mystery.  

 

True to Hammershøi’s counter-narrative aesthetic, however, here the trio of instruments – piano, cello, and violin – idle in silence, their players absent, their muteness amplifying the sense of soundlessness of the interior they occupy. They evoke instead the visual musicality of the composition, a harmonious arrangement in line, space, and light, cadenced by the even but slowly changing daylight illuminating the ensemble through the window to the left. 

 

The painting will go on view at Sotheby’s in London from April 12th to 16th, ahead of a pre-sale viewing in New York in May.