A Hammershøi for Santa Barbara

Vilhelm Hammershøi, The White Door, 1888. Santa Barbara Museum of Art

The Santa Barbara Museum of Art has acquired Vilhelm Hammershøi's The White Door in honor of its recently retired director Larry Feinberg. The painting was auctioned at Christies in 2019 for $915,000. 

The White Door is a picture about nothing, even by Hammershøi's reductive standards. It depicts a corner of a nearly empty room in the home of Danish art historian Karl Madsen. The black object to the left is a stove, old-fashioned even at the time. Otherwise, the painting looks toward the future. The muted simplicity anticipates Morandi, and the rectilinear architecture can be seen as a fuzzy precursor to Mondrian's flatness. But the luminous white door pops back into 3D illusionism. The painting's brushy quality was carefully calculated and led to a meticulously reproduced, though cropped replica in Copenhagen. The Santa Barbara painting, measuring 24-5/8 by 21-1/2 in., retains its original varnish.

In a 1908 interview Hammershøi said The White Door was "the first interior I painted," meaning the first painting that didn't include a human figure. "I have always thought there was such beauty about a room like that, even though there are no people in it, perhaps precisely because there are no people in it." 

In its radical abstraction The White Door bears comparison to Paul Sérusier's The Talisman, created the same year. That tiny painting, created in response to Gauguin's theorizing, became a touchstone for French Post-Impressionist abstraction. But The Talisman deploys vibrant color, something that wasn't Hammershøi's thing.

The White Door impressed French critic Théodore Duret and Russian ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev. None of this made much impression on America's Gilded Age collectors. That is why there are more paintings by Vermeer than Hammershøi (the "Danish Vermeer") in American museums.

In 1985 collector John Goelet gave the Boston Museum of Fine Arts Hammershøi's Woman in an Interior. That was followed by museum acquisitions of Hammershøis by the Toledo Museum of Art (2000), the Met (2012), the National Gallery of Canada (2017), the Getty (2018), and the Chicago Art Institute (2023), whose purchase was announced just months before Santa Barbara's. 

Santa Barbara is punching above its weight as the smallest American city and museum to have a Hammershøi on public display. 

Paul Serusier, The Talisman, 1888. Musée d'Orsay

Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior of Courtyard, Strandgade 30, 1899. Toledo Museum of Art