Hammershøi: Back Story
| 2 of 4 | Deep Dive I: why Hammershøi stops time
Before the backs, there was a photograph. In 1890, newly engaged, Hammershøi photographed Ida Ilsted and then did something painters routinely did when working from photographs: he drew a squared grid over the image, to transfer it to canvas. Standard workshop procedure, nothing to see. Except that Henrik Wivel,1 in the most thorough study of the painter we have, stops at this photograph and won’t move past it. The grid over Ida’s face reads to him as a barrier, a mesh of rational lines with the future wife held behind it, distance inserted on purpose, and he uses a word you don’t expect in a monograph about quiet interiors. Coercion. I keep coming back to that photograph too, though I’m not sure I read it the way Wivel does.
The gentler version of Wivel’s claim turns up all over the writing on Hammershøi. Christian House, in a recent Gagosian Quarterly essay, describes Ida as an essential prop, arranged within the compositions the way the bureaus and chairs were arranged, so that the lines would align. He means it as a description of working method, and it reads less harshly than coercion. Still, prop and prisoner are not that far apart. In both accounts she is there for the paintings to use. Even the tradition is a label after the fact: the word Rückenfigur, which sounds like an old academic category, actually entered the vocabulary mainly through the writings on Caspar David Friedrich. Painters had turned figures around for centuries with no name for them; Hammershøi wasn’t working in a tradition and he was filed into it afterwards. And there is a plainer fact sitting under all of this that the literature tends to walk past. A wife who sat for her husband across three decades would normally have left behind hundreds of images of her face and with Ida we only have a handful.
In Friedrich the back is a door, you’re meant to step into the wanderer and look with him at the fog and the infinite; the back exists so the view can matter; the identification move.2 Hammershøi, on the other hand, kept the device but deleted the destination. Ida’s back opens onto a wall, a letter you can’t read, a piano you can’t hear. The invitation is intact, the place it invites you to is suspended.