Hammershøi, the painter who gains by losing

Vilhelm Hammershøi is a rare painter for whom less is more. At the exhibition at the Jacquemart-Andre in Paris, we see his early paintings, depicting interiors which are hardly full of objects, become further reduced so that the late paintings may show just a human figure shown from the rear, or even no figure at all.  Yet his work includes some very impressive portraits, both of himself and of his family, and of nudes. Why abandon something for which you obviously have a talent?

One reason why Hammershøi appears here as a major artist is that the Jacquemart-Andre is a house full of clutter. The private apartments are ugly, and the Italian rooms are an object lesson in how to take away all the power of paintings by displaying them insensitively: pulled together by the same theme (three Virgins and Child shown side by side), and in the wrong place (a funeral sculpture intended to be seen at ground level but shown here around three metres higher). To pass from this 19th-century clutter to Hammershøi is like a bath in spring water: invigorating and cleansing.

Of course, Hammershøi is not a great artist. Like the Dutch 17th-century artists, he knew how to make the most of his limited talent. He could paint interiors and buildings and, it seems leafless trees (no trees with leaves, as far as I could see from this show). There is even a remarkable picture of a house in London, yet the house is almost obscured by a leafless tree in front of it. You ask yourself if this is a painting of the tree or the house.

Pretty much everything Hammershøi painted is in various shades of grey. And in another major variance from Dutch golden-age artists, he is not obsessed with including objects that may or may not have a meaning for the audience; in fact he does not seem to be telling a story at all. Instead, he shows the effect of light. The last room of the exhibition is the best, because he seems to concentrate all his works with lighting effects into this one room. It is the light that tells the story. What does it mean that the light from a window casts a strong, clear light on a wall or piece of furniture? What indeed?

You can see the scale of his achievement because the exhibition cleverly places paintings of similar subjects by contemporaries alongside Hammershøi, and the difference is clear. Hammershøi does not try for the picturesque. He tones down his use of colour. He avoids conventionally beautiful scenes. His interiors are typically shown off-centre; in fact in one early portrait of his mother, she appears rather unnervingly in front of two objects on the wall behind her, but she is not symmetrical between the two. If I had been taking a photograph, I would have moved the camera away so that the objects behind were not there at all or otherwise symmetrical.

Even more interesting, the removal of details may not have been all Hammershøi’s own work. One of the best paintings in the show is very simple to describe: just an interior, with a door and a window. It would appear that originally there was a human figure on the left, but the buyer of the painting, a friend, folded the human figure out of the painting – and improved it as a result.