The Danish painter (1864–1916) remains relatively obscure, though his inclusion in a number of international exhibitions at venues from the Royal Academy of Arts in London to the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art, has garnered him a growing, almost cultish following. And that following will likely only grow, especially in the United States, as the Art Institute of Chicago recently purchased his 1907 painting, Interior. The Music Room, Strandgade 30, for a record $9.1 million at Sotheby’s last year.

“It’s really beautiful to show such a historical, well-known artist, who is still kind of an unexpected surprise,” said dealer Carlo Knoell, who recently closed his eponymous gallery to join Hauser & Wirth as a senior director.

Hammershøi was also an anomaly for his time. Influenced by 17th-century Dutch painting, particularly Johannes Vermeer, Hammershøi veered into his own way of making, which feels fresh even today. Described as a painter of “silence” and melancholy, Hammershøi renders stark gray interiors. Pared-down versions of what he observed in the rooms of his Copenhagen apartment, they lean toward the surreal.

Titled “Vilhelm Hammershøi. Silence.” and featuring 16 works, the exhibition shows off Hammershøi’s signature stark restraint and  somber gray palette. On view are a few actual masterpieces that are a rare treat to see in person. Hammershøi’s paintings feel very much alive.

The air hangs thick in these foggy, blurred scenes, so much so that this stillness feels not dismal but hopeful. In their cold stillness, these paintings are heaving. Some works show nearly empty rooms, like Interior in London, Brunswick Square (1912), in which the London fog seeps in to the three paned windows, while others show a woman, usually Hammershøi’s wife from behind, the nape of her neck the only skin exposed. She often stands still, to the side of a table, as she does in Interior with a Writing Desk (1900), showing rays of light diffusing the tension of the scene as the woman appears to read a letter. The gallery space’s history as a 19th-century silk ribbon factory adds to the ease of the display here, a comfortable home in which to take it all in.

Hammershøi, who was born in 1864 and was based in Copenhagen for the majority of his career, is best-known for his interiors and portraits, which draw from influences like Old Masters, in particular Vermeer. His interior scenes often convey a sense of eerie stillness, as though the artist had labored to capture the scene when the light in the room was just right; he often painted the same room several times over. Hammershøi treated his portraits of people in a similar way, even when it came to his self-portraits. The people in these pictures always appear to be caught off guard, interrupted mid-thought.

Titled “Silence” and curated by art historian Felix Krämer, the Hauser & Wirth exhibition will bring together 18 paintings by the artist from private collections. Several of those works have rarely ever been exhibited to the public. Presented as a “cabinet-like exhibition,” according to the gallery, the show will include works made between 1883 to 1914.

“It has been a long-held dream to present this truly exceptional artist [Hammershøi] whose lineage situates him as a kindred spirit to Johannes Vermeer, Giorgio Morandi, Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth,” Hauser & Wirth senior director Carlo Knöll said in a statement. “Hammershøi’s work reveals a remarkably modernist sensibility that continues to garner new generations of followers who join those steeped in the history of art of the 19th and early 20th Centuries.”

Hauser & Wirth, which started out in nearby Zurich in 1992, announced last September that it would set up shop in Basel, marking its fifth gallery space in Switzerland but its first in the city where the world’s top art fair takes place each June. With this expansion the gallery would take over the current space of Galerie Knöll, whose founder, Carlo Knöll, joined the gallery as senior director.

With a focus on secondary market sales, Knöll has a history of showing artists whose work has receded into the annals of art history and shining a light on them anew. Among the solo shows he mounted for historical artists include Christian Friedrich Gille (in 2018), Antonio Calderara (2020), Rudolf Maeglin (2021) and Verena Loewensberg (2019), whose work is currently the subject of a solo at Hauser & Wirth’s Upper East Side space. (He also showed a number of Neo-Expressionists, like Per Kirkeby, Markus Lüpertz, and A. R. Penck.)

Hauser & Wirth’s Basel space will build on this exhibition history, with the Hammershøi show being the first of several historical outings to be mounted there. “Opening this space in the cultural heart of Basel will allow for intimate encounters with art of an extraordinary calibre,” Hauser & Wirth cofounder and president Iwan Wirth said in a statement. “Since we opened our very first space in Zurich in 1992, we have always sought to create a dialogue between artists of different eras. Hammershøi possessed a powerfully prescient vision and his art remains as vital and relevant today as when it was created.”

Interior. The Music Room, Strandgade 30 (1907) depicts the kind of serene scene typical of Hammershøi. A piano abuts a wall with white-trimmed wainscoting; a picture hangs above it. A violin rests on a wooden chair, and a cello leans against the piano. Natural light comes in through a window.

This interior was, in fact, Hammershøi’s own. The painting is part of a series of works that he made while he and his wife Ida lived in an apartment on Strandgade 30 in Copenhagen from 1898 until 1908.

According to a press release from Sotheby’s, the instruments featured in Interior. The Music Room, Strandgade 30 most likely belonged to the children of Hammershøi’s friend, patron, and biographer, Alfred Bramsen.

At Sotheby’s, the painting will have an estimate of $3 million–$5 million, the highest ever given a Hammershøi work at public auction.

The last time the painting changed hands was in 1944, when relatives of the current owners of the Strandgade 30 apartment bought the painting and promptly had it hung on the very wall that the work depicts.

Although this work’s estimate is high for a Hammershøi painting, his works have sometimes sold for more than $5 million.

The Getty acquired Interior with an Easel, Bredgade 25 (1912) in 2018 for $5.04 million in a Christie’s auction. Then, during the pandemic, a collector bought Interior with a Woman Standing (1913) for $5 million from an online-only edition of TEFAF Maastricht. Hammershøi’s record sale was set last year, when Stue (Interior with an Oval Mirror), 1916, sold for $6.3 million in a Christie’s auction, where it bore an estimate of just $1.5 million–$2.5 million.

The painting will travel from Denmark to be viewed in London for a few days in mid-April. Then it will arrive in New York for a pre-show viewing.

“It fills us with pride to be sending this Danish masterpiece forth into the world, and for Hammershøi’s inimitable and timeless way of seeing to be appreciated and enjoyed by a global audience,” said Nina Wedell-Wedellsborg, of Sotheby’s Denmark, in a statement. “As we have seen in recent years, his aesthetic and popularity have truly transcended his local market, and he now occupies a key position in the canon of classic modern artists.”

Christie’s global head of Impressionist and modern art, Adrien Meyer, took to the auction podium to welcome another full room of spectators. First up were the works previously owned by Bass, who amassed her wealth during her marriage and subsequent divorce from the Texas oil magnate Sid Bass. Twelve works from her holdings—including pieces by Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, and Mark Rothko—brought in $363 million, well surpassing the presale expectation of $250 million. All the works in the sale sold.

The works that impressed the most in the sale that followed may not have been quite as highly valued as the ones previously owned by Bass, though they garnered significant bidding wars and prices far beyond what had been expected. In the 20th-century art sale, records were set for Emmanuel Leutze, Howardena Pindell, Grace Hartigan, and Blinky Palermo. In particular, it was an Ernie Barnes painting that turned heads, overperforming dramatically.

Monet, Degas, and Hammershøi Top Bass Sale

The bulk of the Bass sale’s total came from two paintings by Mark Rothko that once hung on adjacent walls in Bass’s New York apartment. Both were backed by financial guarantees. Despite accounting for $116 million of the sale’s total, and despite being some of the most expensive works of the evening, they still managed to perform below expectations.

The first Rothko to be offered, Untitled (Shades of Red), from 1961, hammered on a bid of $58 million, going to a bidder on the phone with Christie’s New York impressionist specialist Max Carter. It failed to reach its low estimate of $60 million. The other, No. 1, an orange and pink abstraction (1962), failed to spur excitement among bidders, hammering for $43 million, below its $45 million estimate.

Among the other highlights of the Bass sale was a 1927 version of Degas’s famed sculpture of a young dancer that was given a $20 million estimate. It far surpassed that expectation, hammering on a bid of $36 million, generating applause, and going to a phone bidder with New York contemporary art specialist Ana Maria Celis. It sold for a final price of $41 million with buyer’s fees.

Anne Bass’s New York apartment living room.

One of three Monets to hit the block during the night’s first leg was Le Parlement, soleil couchant (1900–03) a lavender-skied view of the U.K. Parliament building. It drew five bidders and hammered at $66 million, far outpacing its $40 million low estimate. The painting sold for a final price of $75 million to a buyer on the phone with Christie’s European global president Jussi Pylkkänen. A second Monet, the waterlilies painting Nymphéas (1907), went for $56 million.

It was a rare interior scene by Dutch modernist Vilhelm Hammershøi that drew the most spirited bidding in the early portion of the night.

After a protracted spar between two bidders, Stue (Interior with an Oval Mirror), 1900, hammered at $5 million, going for more than three times the $1.5 million estimate. It went to a bidder on the phone with Christie’s Shanghai-based specialist Tan Bo, who beat out a New York client on the phone with contemporary specialist Sara Friedlander. The final price was $6.3 million, marking a record for the artist and surpassing his previous auction milestone of $6.2 million, achieved in 2017.

Vincent van Gogh, Champs près des Alpilles, 1889.

20th-Century Art Sale: Ernie Barnes Steals the Show

Following the success of the Bass sale, a 20th-century art auction brought in $468 million. Paintings by Monet, van Gogh, and other marquee names came to auction here, but work by women artists and Black artists, who have historically been under-represented on the auction block, stole the spotlight.

Van Gogh’s Fields near the Alpilles (1889), which the artist produced while he was committed to a French asylum, made its auction debut here. It hammered with a bidder in the room at $45 million, beating out another from Hong Kong after a minutes-long bidding competition. The painting went for a final price of $51.9 million and brought applause from the room—with Meyer, in a closing remark, calling the battle “a beautiful performance.”

A couple major museum deaccessions starred in tonight’s sale. The Metropolitan Museum of Art parted with Pablo Picasso’s Tête de femme (Fernande), a early bronze cast of a woman’s head dated 1909, with proceeds from the sale going toward the museum’s acquisitions fund for new works. Estimated at $30 million, the work eventually sold for a final price of $48.6 million, going to a U.S. buyer who won it against three other bidders calling in with specialists in New York and Hong Kong.

Another deaccession, this one from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, ended up being one of the sale’s more surprising flops. Georgia O’Keeffe’s 1937 painting A Sunflower from Maggie, which was estimated to fetch $6 million, failed to find a buyer altogether.

A recently restituted Claude Monet landscape was among the top lots of the night. Selling for $25.6 million, it reached its high estimate. Proceeds of the sale were split between the heirs of original owner Richard Semmel, who sold it under duress in the years leading up to World War II, and its current owners, a French family whose members did not reveal their identity. The two parties reached a legal settlement in March that resulted in the work’s sale.

Christie’s New York salesroom, May 12, 2022.

It wasn’t until Barnes’s 1976 dance hall scene came up, The Sugar Shack, an image used for the cover of Marvin Gaye’s album produced that year, that a bidding frenzy began. In 2019, the California African American Museum (CAAM) mounted a Barnes survey, and ever since, there has been renewed interest in his work. After a heated bidding spar between a New York phone bidder and another determined bidder in the room, the work’s hammer price climbed to unforeseen heights, eliciting awe from the crowd.

Eventually, the canvas hammered at a staggering $13 million, a factor of 80 times its $150,000 low estimate, with a final price of $15.3 million.

Elsewhere in the sale, Grace Hartigan’s 1959 abstract canvas Early November went for $1.3 million, hammering just below its high estimate of $1.2 million. The price set a record for the artist, surpassing the $687,500 achieved in 2021 at Christie’s for her 1961 canvas The Phoenix.

Hartigan’s record is one of many achieved by postwar female painters in recent auction seasons. The momentum comes as houses look to bring to the salesroom influential women who have gone under-recognized compared to their historical male counterparts.

TEFAF is among the global art fairs that was hit hard by the onslaught of the pandemic. Its last edition, TEFAF Maastricht, was closed early this past March after several attendees tested positive for the coronavirus. Since then, digital art fairs have taken hold, and TEFAF’s one-item “masterpiece” format, first announced in September, was meant in part to fight online viewing room fatigue. Mimicking auction house vanity catalogues used to promote sale highlights, the single-object restriction allows for each work to stand out among hundreds of offerings.

The new online fair featured various digital frills, including a live-chat function and virtual programming. Known for its strict standards, TEFAF also incorporated a vetting profile, with each object on offer checked against the Art Loss Register, a private database for stolen art.

In the past, live editions of global art fairs have typically yielded a flood of sales secured on the opening day. But, at a digital fair like TEFAF’s latest edition, sales are announced at a much slower pace. “Because of TEFAF’s large institutional following, with global museum curators, directors and acquisition groups, some negotiations are ongoing, and business is often concluded in the weeks and months after the fair,” said a representative from TEFAF in a statement.

Though several dealers were still in the midst of fielding inquiries from interested buyers, one landed a major sale early on. The New York–based Di Donna Galleries sold Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi’s canvas Interior with a Woman Standing (1913) to a private European collector for $5 million during TEFAF’s VIP preview, making it one of the most expensive works on offer.

Describing the work as “a rare example of the boldly modern interior scenes that Hammershøi painted towards the end of his life,” gallery director Jeremiah Evarts detailed how the team carved out a strategy for selling the painting. “We specifically wanted to re-contextualize the discussion around the artist—he is often venerated as an inheritor of the tradition of Dutch genre painting, specifically Vermeer, but we wanted to point out the bold modernism in a late work such as this and its relationship to minimalism in 20th-century American art, such as the work of Agnes Martin and Mark Rothko,” said Evarts.

In June 2005, the seller purchased the present work at Sotheby’s London for £388,800 ($702,300) with premium, and during its 15-year holding period the work has seen an 612 percent increase in value. The artist’s current record moved up to $6.2 million when another interior depicting a woman sitting at a piano from 1901 sold at Sotheby’s New York in November 2017. The TEFAF sale marks the third-highest price paid for a work by the Danish artist.

Bust of a young Hercules, Greek, late Hellenistic period, ca. 1st century B.C.E.

Another dealer found success with enhanced visuals commissioned for the online showcase. London-based antiquities dealer ArtAncient tapped a design firm to create a VR clip of its offering: a late Hellenistic marble bust of Hercules. Yesterday, the dealer reported selling the sculpture for a price in the seven figures. The gallery purchased the bust in February at Adam Partridge Auctioneers in Macclesfield, Cheshire. It had been unearthed by a landscaper in the early 1980s at the U.K. property of collector Stanley Seeger for £320,000 (with fees), according to the Art Newspaper. Elsewhere in the fair, Netherlands-based Endlich Antiquairs sold an ornate 17th-century silver Dutch book cover for a price around $50,000.

London’s Colnaghi gallery reported fielding interest from American institutions, as well as U.S. and European collectors, for a late 16th-century Roman pietra dura tabletop. “For 2020, TEFAF NY Online’s format of focusing on a single masterpiece has enabled us to create a high-quality marketing campaign, showcasing the history and rarity of one artwork in an undiluted manner,” said Colnaghi’s CEOs, Victoria Golembiovskaya and Jorge Coll, in a statement to ARTnews. This year, the dealer commissioned a video highlighting the pietra dura technique to promote the object. “This has enabled us to reach new audiences around the world, and has already drawn sales enquiries from global public institutions,” said Colnaghi’s representatives. The dealer did not disclose the exact listing price of the item, but according to the TEFAF online site, the item is categorized among those priced above $1 million.

New York dealer Skarstedt Gallery reported strong interest for Eric Fischl’s 1981 painting A Woman Possessed, which depicts a woman sprawled out on a driveway and was formerly in the collection of Miami’s Irma and Norman Braman. The gallery did not disclose the listing price, only confirming that it was seven figures. On the fair’s second day, Zurich’s Galerie Gmurzynska reported being in negotiations with a buyer for Fernand Léger’s abstract painting Nature morte au compas (1929), featuring a black, red, white and blue palette. And Hostler Burrows, a dealer focused on 20th century design with locations in New York and Los Angeles, sold Norwegian ceramist Torbjørn Kvasbø’s large scale red sculpture Stack (Red Glazed), 2014, for an undisclosed price. The work was listed at $34,000.

Polly Sartori, cofounder of Los Angeles’s Gallery 19C, described the single-work format as an effective method for engaging clients. “It is one thing to browse through a booth with 10 or 20 items at a live fair, and it’s another to browse through nearly 300 online booths with multiple items,” said Sartori. “In a way, the ‘masterpiece’ also functions as an amuse bouche.” Sartori reported the gallery received a number of serious inquiries from private individuals and museums for Jean Pierre Alexandre Antigna’s Young peasant girl (Une jeune fille des champs), from 1852, priced at $115,000. As with most live fairs, Sartori said, “I think we will see serious follow up once the fair concludes.”

Sartori was not alone in praising TEFAF’s format. Almine Rech was presenting a single work by abstract painter Vivian Springford, who is the subject of an upcoming exhibition at the dealer’s New York location. Though a price for the work was not confirmed at press time, Ethan Buchsbaum, senior director of Almine Rech gallery’s North American operations, said the gallery had seen solid interest in it because of the way TEFAF was structured this time. He said, “In the context of digital presentations, there is a unique benefit to focusing on a single work—the format lends itself to a digestible experience for audiences and collectors that encourages close engagement.”

Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior with an Easel, Bredgade 25, 1912, oil on canvas.

COURTESY THE GETTY MUSEUM

The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles has added Interior with an Easel, Bredgade 25 (1912) by Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi to its collection. The work will go on view at the Getty Center tomorrow, December 18.

The painting was sold at Christie’s for $5.04 million on October 31. A representative for the Getty told ARTnews that the museum acquired the work from Jack Kilgore & Co. in New York following the auction.

Hammershøi was well known for his contemplative interior scenes, which he began creating in the 1890s. Many of these works were informed by the Copenhagen apartments in which he lived; Bredgade 25 was the address of the place he was living when he died, in 1916. Like many of his other paintings, Interior with an Easel, Bredgade 25 lacks a human subject. The work shows a characteristically spartan domestic scene, with only an easel, a hung painting, and a table occupying two softly lit rooms.

Davide Gasparotto, senior curator of paintings at the Getty Museum, said in a statement, “Interior with an Easel, Bredgade 25 is a work of great power and stark beauty, mesmerizing in its sense of stillness and silence. All the elements of a great Hammershøi are here: the masterful rendering of the cool Nordic light, the exquisitely nuanced tonal harmonies, the geometric rigor of the planar composition, the shimmering weave of small, textured brushstrokes—all working to transfigure the mundane into something haunting and poetic. Hammershøi is one of Denmark’s most fascinating painters and the renewed interest and scholarship that his work is now receiving is well overdue.”

Timothy Potts, director of the Getty, added, “There could be no more appropriate subject for the Getty Museum, or any museum, and we are delighted to be able to add this extraordinary work by one of the most important Scandinavian artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to our collection.”