Hammershøi the hipster

Believe it or not, a degree in art history has its occasional uses. If I hadn’t done that course in fin-de-siècle European culture and written that mediocre dissertation on Symbolism,
I would have thought that Vilhelm Hammershøi was a contemporary Scandinavian artist, in his early thirties, now resident in east London.

The reality is that he was a late 19th- century Danish Symbolist painter. Born in 1864, he died in 1916 at the age of only 52. He spent 30 years painting the empty and atmospheric interiors of his apartment, in which a woman, actually his wife, hovers mysteriously. Occasionally he turned his attention to a flat piece of Danish countryside or an unprepossessing corner of the courtyard behind his apartment, or once, during a visit to London, a side view of the British Museum on a grey day. No artist is more phenomenally boring than Hammershøi — and that’s what makes him interesting, if not phenomenal.

He is not one of the late 19th-century and early 20th-century’s best painters. His subjects are far too repetitive and his paintbox too dour for that. This is an exhibition that you will get through in less than an hour, and you may need cheering up afterwards. But what Hammershøi lacks in exuberance and brilliance, he more than compensates for with his weirdness and obsessiveness, which are superglued onto a mood of mesmerising ambiguity.

The casual contemporary gallery-goer will think he is garnering some clues about the narrative from Hammershøi’s precise and repeating motifs — the woman always has her back to the viewer, while an erotically charged shaft of sunlight frequently hits the nape of her neck. The paintings thus reek of the repression of sexual desire, anger, resentment, violence and — well, everything else that can be repressed.

Interior, Frederiksberg Allé (1900) is typical of so many Hammershøis. A woman, in dark conservative attire, stands motionless in the dining room, apparently staring distractedly out of the window. She looks as if she has just got some terrible news or is dreaming of escaping from domestic oppression. The dining table gleams with fresh polish, a symbol of that cosy world which will never be the same again...

But all this would be jumping to conclusions. These pictures speak insistently of a loveless relationship, but we cannot be sure. On the one hand, the artist’s marriage was childless, and he burnt all his diaries and letters — let’s face it, not a good sign. On the other, the Royal Academy’s curator Maryanne Stevens assures me his friends testified that he and his wife enjoyed great intimacy — hence so many pictures by him of her.

All this appears to be uncannily prophetic. Like so many contemporary artists, Hammershøi appears to explore a personal fantasy world through enigmatic scenes that seem to be fragments from a larger story. You never find out what that story is, of course, because in art schools nowadays they teach artists to "avoid closure", which means "keep it vague". Even the 19th-century décor in the paintings does not necessarily suggest that this is work from a bygone age, because today scores of artists deliberately pick an old-fashioned, historically specific world to represent: the American painter Karen Kilimnik has been evoking a teenage romantic world of 18th-century mansions, ballrooms, horses and princes in fluid oil paint for 20 years, while the young British artist Charles Avery portrays a whole imaginary island with his illustration-style drawings (a new exhibition of his work opens at the Parasol Unit next month).

So, without the help of the Royal Academy’s curator and those undergraduate lecture notes, I would have told you that Hammershøi was one of thousands of Danish or Swedish artists who cram the bars of Hoxton at night and study art at the Slade by day, the stiff fees paid by their wealthy parents. Hammershøi’s weak and wimpy palette of browns and greys would have led me to imagine that he had previously been at the Rijksadakamie, where his tutor might have been Luc Tuymans, the Belgian painter who has won acclaim since the Nineties by pioneering an insipid, faded style of "bad" painting.

Hammershøi’s pedantic short-brushstrokes, known as stippling, with which he laboriously constructs his pictures in many thin layers, could easily make him part of the obsessive-compulsive tendency in contemporary art, in which a deliberately masochistic technique becomes a symbol of the artist’s angst. At the Aicon Gallery in Piccadilly, for example, there is an exhibition by Bose Krishnamachari, a contemporary Indian artist, who executes two-metre-high portraits in ballpoint pen.

And yet, even in terms of the age in which the artist lived, the evidence for the angst is at best inconclusive. True, Hammershøi’s interiors can be linked to the equally depressing plays of his Scandinavian contemporary Henrik Ibsen. Hammershøi’s women stand isolated in their domestic spaces, like the female characters in the first act of an Ibsen play. There is only one painting in this exhibition in which a man and a woman, husband and wife, appear together — and they are not chatting.

But Hammershøi’s painting style derives from 19th-century Danish painters, rather than a tortured soul. He himself claimed to be charmed by the aesthetics of the domestic interior, saying that "I have always thought there was such beauty about a room even though there weren’t any people in it, perhaps precisely when there weren’t any." So the artist could simply be celebrating the modest pleasures of a bourgeois life. In that sense, the dots could be joined between Hammershøi and Joseph Hofmann, the genial Viennese interior designer from the same period who conceived whole rooms in the houses of his rich patrons as works of art.

The real Hammershøi was unambiguously part of his age, not ours. His pictures are far from the bright colours and strong forms of his modernist contemporaries Gauguin and Van Gogh but have much in common with contemporary Symbolists, especially the Belgians, who also painted empty, psychologically charged domestic interiors.