- Good evening.
I'm Margaret Iacono,
associate research curator
at the Frick Collection.
I'd like to welcome all of you
here in our audience tonight
as well as everyone watching
us live via our webcast.
A video of tonight's
talk will be available
following the lecture on Frick.org/live.
We would like to thank Hannah Stovering,
executive director of American Friends
of the National Gallery of Denmark
for her initiative in
arranging this lecture.
We would also like to
offer a warm greeting
to the many members of the organization
that are with us here this evening.
Before we begin, I ask that you kindly
turn off your mobile phones.
Tonight, it's my honor to
introduce professor doctor
Jorgen Wadum.
Doctor Wadum is director of conservation
at the Statens museum for Kunst,
the national gallery of
Denmark in Copenhagen.
He is also director of the center for art
technological studies and conservation,
a partnership between the
national museum of Denmark
and the school of conservation
at the Royal Danish
Academy of Fine Arts schools
of architecture, design,
and conservation.
Additionally, doctor
Wadum is full professor
of conservation and
restoration in the faculty
of humanities at the
university of Amsterdam.
From 1990 through 2004,
he was chief curator
at the Marts house in the Hage.
He was also a founding
member of Art Matters
international journey for
technical art history,
and published and lectured extensively
on a multitude of subjects
related to technical art history
and other issues of importance
for our understanding
and preservation of our cultural heritage.
Doctor Wadum holds positions in several
international organizations
and committees,
including the Science for Arts program
and the integrated platform
for the European research
infrastructure on culture heritage.
Perhaps most exciting,
however, is the roster
of great paintings on which doctor Wadum
has had the opportunity to work.
He's treated, for example,
no less a masterpiece
than Johannes Vermeer's
Girl with a Pearl Earring.
Doctor Wadum undertook
treatment of the picture
in 1994, working in
full view of the public
in a temporary restoration
studio at the Marts house.
Talk about pressure.
I was a young graduate student then
and had the great luck to
be visiting the Marts house
during this period.
It was a thrilling
experience, and one made only
more poignant when I had
the honor of organizing
the Fricks exhibition,
Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Halls,
masterpieces of Dutch
painting from the Marts house
in 2013.
For that exhibition, the
Frick had the exceptional
opportunity of displaying Vermeer's girl
in our oval room gallery,
along with 14 other iconic
paintings from the Marts house collection.
Doctor Wadum's talk
this evening is titled,
framing the perspective,
painting techniques of Vermeer,
Whistler, Van Gogh, and Hammershoi.
Following the lecture, we
will keep the south hall open
until 7:30 so that you may
visit two of the Fricks
great paintings by Vermeer,
officer and laughing girl,
and girl interrupted at her music.
I would also encourage you
to visit Scandinavia house
at 58 Park Avenue to see
their current exhibition,
painting tranquility, master
works by Wilham Hammershoi
from the Statens museum for Kunst,
on view until February 27th.
Please join me in welcoming
doctor Wadum to the podium.
(applauding)
- Thank you very much for this
most generous introduction.
Well, it's a great pleasure to be here
at the Frick collection, and
to be able to speak to you,
and I sincerely thank Sibere
Solomon, the Peter J Sharp
chief curator, and Susan Grace Kolasky,
senior curator of the
Frick, for inviting me over.
The title of this talk is maybe ambitious
or ambiguous.
What do these four painters
now really have to do
with each other?
They're all herostratically
renowned for their paintings
in their own right, and
yet, I believe that aspects
of their painting techniques,
their ways of looking
at painting, executing paintings,
that may inter-collect
them, or interrelate them.
And I will start out with
Vermeer before moving on
to the other three artists.
When Pieter Teding van
Berkhout once visited Vermeer
in his studio in 1669, and
he was a wealthy person.
He was collecting paintings
and also collecting
paintings of Vermeer.
Then he wrote in his
diary, and at that time,
French was the language
you would write in,
he said that, what I see
here in this collection
are great masterpieces, and
some of them are the most
curious, extraordinary
paintings of perspectives.
Now, why would Berkhout now
call Vermeer's paintings
for perspective?
We would normally associate
a perspective with an image
like the View of Delft, for instance.
But this painting wasn't
painted at the moment,
or, it was not on view when Pieter Teding
van Berkhout was there.
So, it must be something
else that was tempting him
to write this in his diary.
What he could have seen was this painting
by the geographer at the Noo-Va.
We see a three dimensional
room, but not much of it,
and would it warrant the
notion of being a perspective?
The same goes for another painting, oh,
jumps a little bit ahead here, I think.
But perspectives were
invoked at this time.
We have lots of publications
about how to create
a convincing perspective,
and already early
in the 17th century, Hans
Vredemen de Vries, in 1604,
presented a publication
with numerous versions
of perspectives, oblique
views, views into buildings,
that could be of inspiration for artists.
Nevertheless, a
perspective is an odd thing
to call a painting, also like this one,
a painting in Vermeer's work,
the Lady Writing Her Letter
with Her Maid.
It's hanging in Dublin, in Ireland,
and the painting was prior
to the Vermeer exhibition
that was staged between
the national gallery of art
in Washington and the
modern times in 1995, 96.
Stolen from the bite collection.
We sent in a request for a loan,
hoping that it would turn
up, and also to support
the museum, and believing
that it would turn up.
And fortunate, what would pay
off, it came to light again.
It was discovered in the
booth of a car in Antwerp,
where it had been lying
hustling around in Europe,
and I saw the painting for the first time
in the art museum in
Antwerp, where it was lying
on a table, and there was
light reflected in the surface
of the floor tiles, and
that looked like this.
And what I found surprising
when I looked at this detail
was that you could see lines scratched
into the wet paint between
the tiles, the floor tiles.
So, there was an
indication that Vermeer was
very careful in rendering these tiles.
They should be perfect in shape.
So, would that be an
indication that he was occupied
with creating space on these
two dimensional surfaces
called canvases or panels?
Well, it appears so.
And when examining further, the painting,
together with a colleague from Dublin,
to see if there had been any damaging
factors to the painting, we
discovered that in the eye
of the woman in the shadow
area, there were two small
losses of paint, the two small
indentations in the paint
that had not really been
causing attraction before.
Attention before.
And we looked at it, and we could see that
exactly this particular
spot was the vanishing point
of the perspective in this painting.
Vermeer could create
the room by introducing
exactly what Hans Vredemen
de Vries had shown
in his sketch of a check
of floor, you could say,
or how you would make a perspective
by having a horizon line,
you would have on it
the eye view, and you would
have two distance points,
and viewing at the exact that point,
you would be able to draw
these lines that would
create a convincing
three dimensional space.
Even a painting like the Milk Maid
hanging in the Amsterdam
also bears witness of this
very careful construction.
And looking here at an
x ray of the detail,
I made a small circle there.
That circles around small black spots
in the canvas.
Small brown spots, black spots,
that is exactly in the vanishing point
of that composition.
If you were to draw lines
from the window down here
or from the window, from
the lip buys in the window,
they would meet exactly
at this particular point.
And you would have, again,
in this very narrow,
small space, a convincing perspective.
And it might be an accident
or it could be on purpose
that this spot is exactly
where the milk runs out
of the jar, as well.
It seems to be a composition
that was very well
thought through before
this painting was made.
Another of the fantastic
paintings by Vermeer,
the Music Lesson has, as
you can see, also, here,
a similar small indentation
in the wet paint
where needles have been
positioned that were,
again, used to create the perspective.
But how would he now do this?
Why would there be this
spot in the wet paint
of that area?
Well, we have indications
that artists would
be very careful in working with rulers,
but they could also work with
something very, very ordinary.
And that could be with a flunk
line and a piece of string,
and a nail, and you
would have that attached
to your painting, exactly
where the vanishing
point would be.
And I wonder if that is not also the case
with Officer and Laughing Girl.
Many years ago in '94 and '95,
I had the pleasure of being
here at the Frick collection,
and was studying your documentation
on this particular painting.
The X radiographs that were available,
and it became clear that, also, here,
there is a small indentation in the paint
right on the rim of the hat.
And I could draw the same conclusion
as with a late painting from Dublin.
However, there is a
difference between the two,
and that difference is
that the distance points
are very close to the vanishing points
in the Frick painting,
where the distance points
are much further away
in the Dublin painting.
And what does that mean?
Well, it means that when
distance points are far away,
a painting can be looked
at a further distance
and still work, and still have
a convincing space of room,
the floor tiles will stay flat,
they were not bent downwards.
If you, on the other hand, are far away
from a painting, which
has the distance points
very closed in, you will have
distortions in the image.
Now, is that something Vermeer
was very careful about?
Well, indications in sales
catalogs and inventories
of paintings from the 17th
century sometimes mentioned
that a painting would have
been sitting behind doors
or in a box.
Here now, one of Rembrandt's
most skilled students,
he painted a number of paintings
in very minute brush work.
Very detailed.
And some of them were behind doors,
so when you opened the
doors, you would see that
very esteemed may be of a woman sitting
with a child in a cradle,
and you would be at an arm's
length's distance to the painting.
And I just wonder then when we read about
the Vermeer paintings in
1692, they were on sale,
a number of them, they are
mentioned to be behind doors
or in boxes, and would that
mean that you would open up
a door and you would see the painting?
Because then that would
be the optimal distance
to view that particular painting.
And I just wonder if that
could have been the case
with a smaller painting like
this one here at the Frick,
that it was meant to
be seen from close by.
And here, I'm stepping
further into a painting
by a Swiss painter called Albrecht Anker,
and you already noticed that red arrow
pointing to a needle
sitting in the canvas,
and with that yellow string hanging down
from this needle.
This painting wasn't finished,
the artist died in 1910,
and it was sitting there,
and bears witness to
that very pragmatic way
of painting by simply
sticking in a needle in
the paint, in the canvas,
or in the panel, and you
would be able to take this
thread hanging down here by one hand,
and stretching it out, and
you would follow the lines
in the composition, and by having it there
during the whole painting process,
you could continue to keep track of how
this composition would
work the best in its
three dimensionality on the canvas.
It is so that, already,
very early on painters
were using strings like this,
and you know them today,
some crafts people still use them,
but there's some painters or brick layers
that you keep them tightly
between two points,
and you rub them in with
chalk, and you snap them,
and then flip back onto this
surface, and you have a line,
and you can paint along it,
and you can brush it away,
and it will disappear,
and you will not find
any trace of it.
We have deliberately tried, also,
with the Vermeers, with
infrared radiography,
to look through the
paint and see if we could
discover any black paint
that would have been left
from the screen in that
way, but we don't find it.
It could very well be that
Vermeer would have used
red chalk or any other
color, and it would not
be able to be traced by
infrared photography.
Another discussion is
running, and has been running
on how Vermeer paints, and that relates to
Vermeer's possible use
of a camera obscurer.
A camera obscurer is as the
word says in translation,
a dark room.
And the dark room is what
we, imagine our self here,
imagine a wall in front of this gentleman,
and he would be standing
into a closed box,
and the only hole in the
box would be this one
where you would have a lens,
like a magnifying lens,
and then the outside world
would be painting itself
in light on the inside of
the box, and he could then
trace that image.
The question is, would
an artist like Vermeer
or any other artist of that
time really want to trace
an image of something outside the box
that would be upside down
and at the same time,
in reverse, just to make sure
that when they are traced this
and to finish their canvas,
then the composition
would just be perfect in reverse again,
and up the right way?
I hardly believe so.
There are scholars that
believe that Vermeer
would even have been painting
inside the dark room.
Which seems odd for a painter,
about who's paintings,
people say that they have
been painted with light.
Well, the boxes are
there, one can speculate,
I'm sure that Vermeer would
have seen the phenomenon.
He would have been aware of this.
It is, after all, a period when astronomy
and microscopes are having
a boom since they ended
in the 16th century.
Keplar has been writing
about how the eye functions,
and he calls action to the
eye for a camera obscurer.
This small round saying,
with a lens in one side,
and an image upside down on the retina.
So, it works the same way.
And that was a notion that
was discussed elaborately
by a number of scholars at the time.
And the camera obscurer developed,
and early in the 18th century,
we have a development into
apparatuses like these small shoe boxes
that look like, what
with a lens at one side,
and the glass plane inside on the mirror,
where then what's outside and well lit
will reproduce itself on the
inside, on the glass plate,
and could be traced.
Lots of artists used
that in the 18th century.
But we have reference
from the 17th century
of a German artist working around a
hill to time, that he's
complaining that he's standing
in something like the box to
your left, and he can't get
the city scape outside
correct, it doesn't work,
and he really complains about it.
But it's an interesting thought.
And maybe it's a thought
that we relate to Vermeer
because Vermeer's paintings has
some photographic qualities.
It's not only three dimensional images,
but they also have these
contours, these diffuse contours
that makes a thing of
an unsharp photograph.
Like this tiny painting hanging
at National Gallery of Art
in Washington DC, the Girl with a Red Hat,
she's painted in brush works that's very,
very loose, and very bouncing
over the small panel in this,
and if I zoom in on the
bottom part of the painting
in a second, you will
see that the brush work's
another tone neat on
details, like we would have
expected on the small panel.
They are much more loose and, yeah,
almost hammer strokes in
their paint application.
At least they are globals of light
and dashes of paint that prompted some
to believe that a painting
like this would have been
created by an early version
of a camera obscurer
that couldn't focus in
depth, but only focus partly,
and what would be out of
focus would also be painted
as a mimic of out of focus.
The question is, of course,
wouldn't 17th century
Dutch painters really mimic reality
or would they have the
artistic license to paint
what they see in a way that
looks as if it was reality?
We can all understand what's going on,
that if lying faint on a Spanish chair,
that the girl is sitting
with an elbow into this,
but it is an oddity, you could say.
And of course, the Girl with
the Pearl Earring in the Hage
has some of the same qualities as
the small panel in Washington.
And if you look at her head
gear, very artful period,
it's exotic, and not at
all the head gear you would
find normally.
And you see her blouse, her dress,
when you look at this,
and when some of you had
the opportunity to look at her
by close by during the show
a couple of years back, you would notice
that you cannot really
tell what kind of fabric
her jacket is made of.
We can see that there are
some dots of yellow paint
at these spots here.
Of the like, the ion finials
also reflections of light
in a maybe woolen sweater.
But her eyes, her nose, and
face is in perfect focus.
Look at the pearl, where the pearl,
or glass pearl, or whatever, silver pearl,
it's being formed by the
light coming in on the face,
hitting the pearl on one
side, and then there's
the reflection from her
collar that falls up
and makes that shape on the bottom side.
It's all pretty much in focus.
I wonder if not Vermeer was aware
of the way we perceive things is so that
what's out of focus,
our eyes go away from.
We continue to search for what's in focus,
and by doing so, Vermeer
helps us to create
a very intimate moment with this girl
because wherever we look,
we get back to her face.
So, he's assisting us into
getting that narrative,
that wherever you may
come from on this planet,
we can build our own
story because there is no
iconography here that helps us to say,
it is about this or that.
It is a girl for all of
us, and by doing this trick
in his painting, manna, I
think, we get much closer
and much more in teem
with her than otherwise.
I fell in love with her in '94, at least,
when I had the chance to restore her.
There are plenty of
publications, as I mentioned,
from the period, as
well, trying to describe
how to make a convincing perspective.
And you see here an allegory of painting
sitting in the front with a palate,
with her brushes, and she's being taught
by the allegory of measurement,
how to use a trump line that hangs here,
a compass, and measurement.
And this book was just one of many
that was appealing to
artists, but primarily though,
I believe, to concerns to
those that appreciated art
to the collectors that would
like from Peiter Tedings
van Berkhout go and visit
to Vermeer's studio,
and they would discuss these things.
The artist and the
connoisseur would elaborate
on the new trends and
try to work their way
into understanding these things.
And I want to finish off
Vermeer for the time being
with a letter, or, a quote from a letter
from Nicholas Poussin to
Francois Sublet Noyers
where he describes two ways of viewing.
And he says that one is by simply seeing,
and the other ponders them attentively.
Simply seeing is nothing other than
a natural reception in the eye of the form
and resemblance of an
object seen out there.
Whereas to see an object
with deliberation,
we search with a deliberate
and particular procedure
for a way to understand
that same object properly.
Therefore, we may say that simple aspect
is a natural operation,
while, when we, what I call,
what you call, what I call prospect,
but what I call prospect
is a function of reason
and depends on three things.
Knowledge of the eye,
reference to Keplar maybe,
of the visual ray, and of
the distance from the eye
to the object.
And this is exactly where,
and in this environment
that Vermeer creates his
images that have this
photographic, yet
individual way of painting.
But now, how comes van Gogh into this?
We're jumping a couple of
hundred forward, years forward,
but at the same time, Vincent van Gogh,
thanks to his sketch books
and his many letters,
tells us how he went about to paint,
and tried to conceive and
understand three dimensionality.
He writes in a letter in
1882 to his brother Theo
that, and I quote, while I
spent less on paint this winter
than others did, I had
more expenses in connection
with the study of
perspective and proportion.
And I studied especially
an instrument described
in a work by Albrecht
Durer, and proper use
by the Dutch of the past.
And he's describing then that
he is trying to understand
and grasp what this
gentleman here to the right,
the draftsman, is actually doing.
Some of you will know this print well,
but for the sake of
clarity, the gentleman has
a piece of paper on the
table in front of him
that's been squared.
He's having a frame in
front of him with strings
in vertical and horizontally,
and through this,
he looks at this woman lying here.
And he tries to draw her on the paper,
and thanks to the squaring, he can get
all the details correct.
You have drawing lessons
here on Wednesdays, I recall,
and I wonder if some of you
will use that same technique.
It is pretty good if you
don't grasp what perspective
is about, and van Gogh, he
was troubled all his career
with getting things right in perspective.
He really complains about it,
and he says in the same letter,
this scene here makes
it possible to compare
the proportions of objects close at hand
with those on the plane further away.
And in cases where construction
according to the rules
of perspectives aren't feasible.
Which, if you do it by eye,
would always come out wrong
unless you are very
experienced and skilled.
He didn't believe in himself in this case.
And he also refers to Vredeman de Vries
to the same kind of print
that Vermeer must have known,
where you had this horizon
line, the eye was sitting here,
distance point, and you
had the checkered floor
that you can draw with a system like this.
Checkered floors in that
paintings are plentiful,
however, not in reality,
but on paintings, they are.
That's another story,
I can't go into this,
but van Gogh develops his own method.
He simply has a coffin to produce a stand
with a small square on
top, and he has two strings
and a cross on it, and then he sits here.
You can see him sitting
with his sketchbook in hand,
and where he also has drawn
a cross on his sketchbook.
So, he, looking through that little frame,
like a photograph, the
photographer is looking through
the camera, he knows exactly at the frame,
exactly where he wants to draw,
and then he has something
to assist him in getting
this three dimensionality correct.
We can also see in his
collection of prints,
in this case here, a print after
the French artist, Mee-Lay,
that he has added small
points along the edges
of the image, and he has drawn lines.
So, he has squared this print prior to
actually painting a
version of the painting.
And here, here comes the painting,
and looking carefully,
examining the painting
between the brush strokes,
you can see the black lines
that I have drawn in here as red lines
on this image.
But you can also faintly see them
on this infrared image, where
you can look through the,
you can see these black
lines, black lines will
be made visible on an infrared image
if you have a white
background that it can be
seen against.
So, van Gogh, he was carefully drawing,
and grasping, and trying
to understand perspective
also by copying one of his
favorite painters at the time.
However, he worked on and
wanted to elaborate more
and have more freedom in
the way he could draw,
and he's describing further
in his letter, it said,
at a point he says, quote, I
will start with small things,
but before the summer ends,
I hope to be practicing
bigger sketches in charcoal with an eye
to painting in the rather
larger format, he says in 1882.
And in that letter, he
draws this drawing here,
and this is why I'm having
a new, new stands made.
I hope it's a better perspective frame
which will stand firmly on two legs
and also offers me the opportunity to work
in the dunes around the Hage.
He writes a lot on it
an describes it further,
and in a following letter, we see it here
on the right hand side
where he also describes
how he's setting up his new palate,
he's buying paint.
On the right hand side, you
can see him out in the dunes,
and if I focus in on this,
you can see him standing
in the dunes with his new stands
over the etch of the dunes
with a square here, and he can
draw and perceive his image
through that very practical square
which focuses his view.
As he also did in the final painting
I'm going to show you
about van Gogh's views.
This is a view from Theo's apartment,
and an infrared image to the right,
and you can already see,
I believe, otherwise,
small red arrows will
help you, and the grid,
that there is a grid in there that reveals
that he has the same perspective frame
just at an end when he's making this view
out of a window to paint.
He was troubled throughout his lifetime
with getting the perspective right.
His perspective that he was working on
despite photography had
already made its enter
on the scene.
However, you could also
buy mechanisms like these,
and here's an advertisement
from 1887 where you see
this artist sitting with his
collapsible water color stand
out in the open air, and
he has a frame added here
to look through, very
comparable to the one
I just showed you from van Gogh's.
But...
Photography was gaining momentum.
And here, I'm now turning to Whistler.
Whistler paints here, an image
that he calls Blue and Opal.
The photographer is standing on the beach.
But Whistler is not painting the image
like the photographer would have seen it.
The photographer's image
would have been clear
and sharp, I would assume it would also
have been black and white.
There was no color
photography at the time.
And that was, of course, a shortcoming,
but would there be an influence still
on the painting procedures
like with a camera obscurer,
which then, a photographer
and the photographer,
the Kodak boxes, be something that would
have assisted the artist or have influence
on artists' way of working?
Whistler had a strong view on photography.
He, himself, would denounce it,
and he would say that...
The imitator is a poor kind of a creature.
If the man who paints only
the tree, or the flower,
or other surface he sees before him
were an artist, the kind of artist would
be the photographer.
It's for the artist to
do something beyond this.
I think this is exactly what,
also, Vermeer was thinking
when he was confronted
with a camera obscurer.
It is an artist's free license to paint
exactly what he wants us to see,
and to be inspired by.
And across the world,
academic and naturalistic
artists like Thomas
Ekins, an American realist
painter and photographer,
sculptor, and fine arts educator,
who would say that
photography was fantastic
because it would accentuate details
recorded by the camera,
and so it could really be
translated directly into paint.
But Whistler's single
popping response to this was
what you see here, he
was not convinced that
photography should be
his medium, so to speak.
He was strongly influenced
early in his career
by Velasquez.
They almost look a little like
each other, you could say.
There's no doubt that
Whistler was dating himself
in the world of his time,
but he was also having
a large of collection
of Velasquez's works.
I showed you one here,
it turned black and white
on purpose because he would
have them in black and white.
And he would look at
them, and he would record,
he aspired by them, he would
want to work from them,
and in one case, Whistler really has used
Velasquez, at least, as a
very strong inspiration,
and that is when you look
at this portrait of Philip
the fourth, the king of Spain.
And a Whistler painting here,
the Arrangement in Black
portrait of Fredrick
Leyland, there's so many
similarities here that one understands
that photography was an assistance to him
in the sense of having access to images
that were not directly undo for him.
He could be, they could be seen.
And Fredrick Leyland
became one of the major
patrons to Whistler during his life.
Until of course they had
a big quarrel at one time
about the peacock room, but that's, again,
another story that I shan't get into here.
Whistler also, at one
point, gets the permission
to paint one of the fantastic
portraits that's hanging here
in your collection.
He was permissioned in the fall of 1871,
and was exhibited as Whistler's
first one-man exhibition
in 1874, which was actually
also sponsored by Leyland.
But was never considered by the artist
to be totally finished.
It's not anew at the moment I'm afraid,
but when it comes up again, go and look,
and make up for yourself
whether you find it
totally finished or not.
But there was some debate about this,
and it's also being said
that the dress, for instance,
is completely made up by the artist.
Mostly, layer is working
up, and is entirely
a design by the artist
rather than by the creator
that made the dress for the lady.
He would not admit that he was struggling
when he was painting.
He made a number of lectures, and in one
of his 10 o'clock
lectures in February 1885,
a number of years after
this painting was done,
he actually notes that nature contains,
I can give you a list up here as well,
nature contains the
elements in color and form
of all pictures as the
keyboard contains the notes
of all music.
But the artist is born to pick and choose,
and group with science, these elements,
and the result may be beautiful
as the musician gathers
his notes, and forms his
chords, until he brings forth
from chaos, the glorious harmony.
So, he, again, walks
away from photography.
I am the one composing what needs
to be seen on my image here.
The many layers of paint,
they really tell us
that it had been a struggle for him
to reach the final picture,
it was a time consuming thing.
And also, people that
worked with him or saw him
in action would witness
that it took him weeks
to get it finished.
Another of the great
portraits in this collection
by Whistler is called
Harmony in Pink and Grey,
a Portrait of Lady Meux.
It is a painting that was
very welcome for Whistler
because he was bankrupt at the time
when he got the permission.
He had a terrible fight and a law suit
against the critic, John Ruskin,
and that had emptied his
bank account entirely,
so he was very pleased when
he got the first commission
here, which was called
Arrangement in Black,
Portrait of Lady Meux,
which is hanging out
at the Honolulu Museum of Art.
And then later, this one was painted,
and is hanging here as, you know.
He was, however, beginning
to walk away from these
very precise recordings, or precise,
as precise as we could imagine.
But he was dwelling into making nature
and landscapes, sea scapes, water scapes,
and more for the graphic
way, you could say.
Going into the unfocused
area of these paintings,
and he has a whole series of paintings
that are called the nocturnes,
nocturne blue and silver, and further.
And the relationship between Whistler here
and photography is in fact,
yeah, it's much more nuanced
than just copying a
motive, it is more about
doing something that
photography cannot do perfectly.
And that is go out and choose exactly
how you want to put the focus where
the attraction should be.
He refined his painting
technique and he developed
anonymity message of applying paint,
where it would be deluded so much,
it would be same washes of paint,
and he wanted to rub them
down, and he rubbed them down
to kind of make them look more like,
yeah, not done by hand, it should be,
and he actually says it at one point.
And I'll illustrate that
with another of his nocturnes
in blue and silver, at
the Harvard Art Museum.
He says that paint should
not be applied thick.
It should be like the brass on the surface
on a pane of glass.
And if there's something
that is comparable to this,
it could maybe be an
image that has been taken
with an early camera, and
you cannot see it yet,
and you will have to put it down in a...
Developers to make that
image suddenly come up
like the breast on a pane of glass.
And this is an inspiration
from photography
where he moves away and
struggles to get paint
look in that mallard.
He wants to do something beyond.
And in the final nocturne
I'm showing you here,
it's a bit of the same,
it's hanging a bit,
taken in Britain.
And he really didn't want to
accept that photography was so important,
however, the interesting
thing is that photographers
were also looking to Whistler.
And that happens with Alfred Stieglitz
and also Edward Stechen,
they are inspired by
the way that Whistler paints.
And there is a dialog, you could say,
between the photographers, or rather,
the pictorialists of the
time, where they try,
also, to develop photography
beyond that of just
recording nature and what
you see in front of you
to develop photography
into an art form by itself.
By exposures and also by coloring
in their images.
And they could, then,
get an entirely new form,
and there is this style of up and down
between Whistler and these photographers.
But I'll just make a big
quick leap back in time,
also, to Whistler's mother.
This is an iconic painting,
and it's known throughout.
And when you look at, also, Hammershoi,
this artist's work here is important.
It's been said that this
painting by Whistler
could also have been
inspired by photography,
and there is a preferred photographer.
Henry Peach Robinson's famous photography
here from decades earlier,
that's why some is seen
as an inspiration, with
this woman sitting here
in reverse, in Whistler's painting,
but there's no evidence
that Whistler had seen
the photograph.
It was, though, very well distributed,
and was seen on many exhibitions,
but there's no direct
relationship, I believe
Whistler is definitely
trying to make that painting,
and I think his painting
in a different way.
But Hammershoi is the next one I want to
introduce you to for the
last part of my talk.
Hammershoi was accepted to the art academy
in Copenhagen in 1879.
And at the same time, he studied also
at the independent study schools,
and here, he was taught
by, amongst others also,
PS Kroyer, another of the Danish artists.
And Kroyer saw Hammershoi paint,
and as you can see, he
said, I have a student
who paints in a very strange way.
I don't understand him,
but I think he will
become important one day.
I'll try not to influence him.
And thank god for that, one could say,
because Kroyer is painting
entirely different
than Hammershoi ever was going to paint.
And there was also the German poet,
Rainer Maria Rilke, who
coupled the case later,
he became, also, very fascinated
by Hammershoi's paintings,
and he also voiced great
admiration for his work
in several letters.
And in 1905, he writes about Hammershoi,
that Hammershoi does not belong
among those about whom
one may speak rationally.
His work is long and slow.
And whence whoever one studies it,
that moment will always be
an occasion for speaking
about the important and
essential things in art.
He wrote this in a letter
to the patron of Hammershoi,
Alfred Brownson, a Copenhagen
dentist and art collector.
The first painter that
Hammershoi had on show
was a painting hanging
above the piano here
in this interior.
The interior is photographed
by a good friend
of Hammershoi that he
met at the free academy,
Valdemar Schonheyder
Moller, who took this image
of the living room where the portrait,
sister to Wilhelm Hammershoi, Anna,
is sitting, playing
music while the painting
is hanging above.
The painting arose a stir at the time
when it was exhibited.
And here, you have it in color.
It was a painting that
was so much contrasting
to the naturalist painting of the time,
which had bright colors and very, yeah.
It showed these kind of diffused contours
that also was to be Hammershoi's
hallmark, you could say,
and the somewhat muted colors.
The friendship between the
two, Schonheyder Moller
and Hammershoi, the photographer
who was also a very active
painter, and an artist,
and painted some fantastic paintings,
some of which we have in our collection,
was long, and Schonheyder
Moller photographed
a number of things, but
also of the paintings
that Hammershoi produced.
And that's why I return
to this, because here,
you have Hammershoi's
version of an old lady
sitting on a chair in
reverse as if it was more
that one that was copied
after the photograph
that we showed a while ago.
And when I now click
the button, you will see
that the Hammershoi painting
is now put in relationship
in size to the one that
could have been his model.
The Whistler painting.
It is a tiny painting in reality,
but look how much there
are of resemblances.
The painting hanging on the back wall is,
in Hammershoi's,
substituted by an open door,
or, a door behind the
lady sitting in a way
that alludes to that framing.
We know that Hammershoi was fascinated
by Whistler's painting,
and by Whistler's paintings
in general.
And Hammershoi was a traveling person.
He went to Germany, he went to Paris,
but he also went to London.
And in London, he was trying
to get a hold of Whistler.
And he went to his place
and wanted to visit him,
but he was unfortunately not there.
Hammershoi had gotten to know Whistler
from etchings, and from
prints, and engravings,
especially during the 1889 Paris
exhibition internationally.
And had really been
thinking about looking at
Whistler or meeting him
for quite some time.
Whistler, on the other
hand, was also introduced
to Hammershoi's work by small,
and yet, unidentified works.
And in the autumn of 1896, Whistler says,
I trust one of these
days, I will meet one of
the most gifted and sympathetic artists.
They never met, unfortunately.
Here, you have Hammershoi
sitting behind his easel
in his studio.
Hammershoi, when asked
about what he thought
that was important in
paintings, he would say,
and I quote, what makes me
choose a motive, the lines.
What I like to call the
architectural content of an image.
And then of course, it is the light.
Obviously, that's also very important,
but I think it's the lines
that have the greatest
significance for me.
And as we should see in a while,
in a few examples, the
lines are very important
in his paintings.
But what's noticeable here
is that there are cardboards
added to the painting around its edges.
What are these cardboards doing there?
Is that like the, like, in the camera,
you have the shutter,
is that you can change
your motor, you can arrange yourself?
Probably, it is, and
I have an example here
that's on view, and you
can be able to see it
for yourself down in
the Scandinavia house.
You can see that at the
edges, there have been
cardboards sitting there.
While the painting process was going on,
he didn't want that part to
be seen that was covered up
so that he could get
a tighter composition.
And when we remove these cardboards,
we can actually, in the
detail of the painting,
you can actually see in the wet paint,
there's an impression from
where these cardboards
had been sitting.
But apparently, he changed his mind
because you can still
see that the painting
is still at its full size,
it was framed this way.
We had, however,a number of examples
of paintings by the
artist where the canvas
had been much larger
than what we actually see
on the strainer on which its now sitting,
so they had been bent
back on the reverse side
of the strainer, but still showing that
he was moving the canvas
around on the strainer
to find exactly that part
that he wanted us to see
when it was finished.
In this painting, and
here, they come back,
we can also see on the next radiograph
that he has moved the
figure, you see her contour
in various places has been moved around
to find the exact
position in that interior.
So simple, so very, yeah.
Unpretentious, and yet, a lot of trouble
for the painter getting it entirely right.
I can't resist here at the end of my talk
to compare, again, Vermeer to Hammershoi.
When we look at these domestic scenes,
they're not telling us
a complicated story,
they are, you could say,
some of paintings we know,
no story to be told, but yet, very daily,
daily scenes happening.
A woman with a water
pitcher, a woman standing
with her back towards us,
basically, with something.
And when we close up on these two,
we can see that their notion of contours,
a notion of light, how light folds around
edges of textile in front of a
back wall is very comparable.
It has been assumed that
Vermeer's soft contours,
the haloing contours, could be related to,
maybe, Leonardo Da Vinci's writing on
that there is nothing called a contour.
There is this Fra-Mah-Toe,
the soft transition
from one plane to another plane.
And isn't it exactly what,
also, Hammershoi is working with
when we get up close to his paintings?
And this painting I'm
going to compare with
the Girl with the Pearl Earring.
Because there is, like the eyes
of the girl with the pearl,
the shiny eyes with the
reflection of the light
on perfect focus, so is the Chinese bowl
in the back room here.
And all you see in front
are slightly out of focus.
And this is not because
Hammershoi is having
a bad camera obscurer.
This is not because he's...
Working with photography as such,
but influenced by learning from, but also,
attracting our gaze away from the easel,
at least in a way you can actually see
the cardboard sitting here on that side
of a painting where he
is adjusting the motive.
But we are looking into the room,
and that is where he
wants us, to attract us
into this through view, a through view,
you could say, that
was very characteristic
of the dutch paintings
of the 17th century.
Just moving very briefly
into just a few examples
of the photography of Hammerhoi's time.
Again, Valdemar Schonheyder Moller,
and a portrait that
Hammerhoi painted himself,
and you can see there are relationships,
but the relationships are
more that they resemble,
but they're not direct copy.
The same with this, again,
one of the paintings,
or, the photographs that were
made like the pictorialist
would have made then
by Schonheyder Moller.
And the interesting thing is that we have
these staged photographs like this one,
it's not a portrait, it's not the detail
that interests the photographer,
it is the atmosphere.
And we have at the Royal
Library in Copenhagen,
a large number of photographs
by Schonheyder Moller
and others that were
working in relationship
with artists of the time.
And we would very much like
to investigate these further
and see how they would
have developed then,
how would they have paginated them to work
into this pictorialist group of Denmark,
and compare that to what
happened in the United States
at that time, for instance,
that could have influenced
across the Atlantic.
Hammershoi's last painting
here, Sun Over the Sea,
is almost one of, what you
could call the nocturnes
of Hammershoi.
We have his interest in lines,
this fantastic painting which
is Orduppgaard collection
outside Copenhagen, where
you see the sun rays
entering the room, and
dust is being caught
by the sun rays, and kept
giving us this very atmospheric
view, but the lines are
extremely important to him,
and the lights that fall to him,
the light, the work, the
way light works in space.
And that's comparable to,
yeah, I couldn't resist
putting in this lighted framed window
of Vermeer's from a detail from
the music lesson in London.
And when you come to London
next, promise me to go up
and have a good look at it.
It's an amazing painting when it comes to
the study of light, and
how light is reflected
from multiple surfaces,
and reflected back.
Something that, also,
Hammershoi is working with here.
All these delicate
reflections that catches him,
and is recorded so, almost precisely,
and yet with some distraction.
The through views I just mentioned
like Peter de Hoogh would have done it
in the 17th century.
Also here, these open
doors, all these spaces,
all these areas that
catches and fascinates
the artist is comparable,
there is the same mentality
working with them, or even up and had
Woman Reading a Letter.
And what would a woman reading a letter
otherwise look like, of course.
But it's not for graphic recording,
it is a way of viewing, a
way of seeing very trivial
daily things in an environment
that's being captured here
in a comparable way.
Finally, and this is the
final image for tonight,
this self portrait in
the Cottage Spurveskjul,
it's not in Copenhagen,
where he's picturing himself
looking into the mirror, and
seeing what he's painting,
but it's a very odd kind of composition.
He's doing something out
of the focus of any of us,
and he's having a door opened
to the garden behind him
where light streams
into the room, but yet,
we cannot know what's going on out here.
And there's a large background
of the very Hammershoi
brush work, the small
squares, the small Dutch paint
that builds up, that is like, yeah,
a shower of paint that has muted in
and sat down here to wait for us.
It is a painting that is
all about atmospheric views.
It's all about understanding
and creating, also,
contact with the viewer.
It's a little bit, again,
like being drawn in,
you're going back, looking at
this face once to understand
what is Hammershoi alluding to?
What is the story in this painting?
This is a song or scene without a story.
It looks like it.
So, was van Gogh
struggling with perspective
and grasping it?
And was Whistler trying,
under the influence,
and in dialog with an
opposition to photography
like Hammershoi may be?
Also, like Vermeer with
the camera obscurer or not,
they were all struggling
with creating spaces
on these two dimensional spaces.
That should be convincing spaces but yet,
with a complete freedom
of artistic license
to create a narrative
that was in dialog with,
or, in accordance with special
things in their own time.
I couldn't have been telling
you what I've told you
without assistance of a number of people,
many of them might not
even be on this list.
But thanks to all and thanks
to all of you for listening.
(applauding)
