Hammershøi’s Hidden Colors

A palette is where the painter’s mind meets the material, the physical stage on which a chromatic idea gets laid out. And an uncleaned one usually looks like the paintings that came off it. Van Gogh’s is instinctive and urgent. Mondrian’s square metal palette is almost comically close to one of his grids. Lucian Freud’s earthy paint hangs over the edge with the same weight as the flesh he painted so unflinchingly. Alexandra Loske, who has spent years hunting down palettes, notes that Hammershøi’s is the exception.

“Vilhelm Hammershøi’s palette puzzled me: If you are familiar with his thinly painted and gauzily layered paintings, you would not expect to see thrown-up heaps of oil paint on his palette, reminiscent of lunar landscapes.”

_{— Alexandra Loske}1

During the decades when Hammershøi was painting a lot of artists were rediscovering the power of bright colors, especially artist in Paris and the Fauves. This was not the case for everyone, certainly not Whistler, nor Nordic stemningsmaleri,2 nor many Symbolists who favored muted registers. Hammershøi was not an isolate, but he studied Dutch and Danish gray traditions long enough to not only embrace it but to push this shared tonal language even further than anyone else was willing to, and he kept pushing it even after the current had passed. But there is another comparison that is far better than Fauvisme-in-Paris.