Is how world traveller Michael Palin of Monty Python fame describes Hammerhoi – and we think he’s got a point. In an article in The Guardian Michael wrote how his love for Hammershoi developed in to a documentary:
It wasn’t exactly love at first sight; more a slow, benign haunting. It began after a visit to the Hayward Gallery in London nearly 20 years ago to see an exhibition of Scandinavian art. ….Golden harvest fields, couples strolling along beaches enveloped in the odd blue light of the midnight sun, women in deck chairs in long, white cotton dresses, big healthy nudes, thatched houses with spick-and-span rooms. Positive, glowing stuff, and very much in the general run of 19th-century European and American taste. Except, that is, for two or three canvases, which stood out from the rest of the exhibition like undertakers at a carnival. These depicted sparsely furnished rooms, almost stripped of colour, conveying a powerful sense of stillness and silence, occasionally emphasised by the addition of a single female figure, always in black, her back turned. There was something about the work that drew me like a magnet. Something beyond appreciation of technique or decorative effect, something deeper and more compulsive, taking me in a direction I’d never been before.
And apropos “American taste” New Yorkers get to feast themselves on Hammershoi when the Danish National Gallery open up an exhibition at Scandinavia House with 25 works covering his full repertoire, called Painting Tranquility.
To celebrate the event we’re offering high quality prints of Hammershoi at 50% off (free-shipping) HERE!
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