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Vilhelm Hammershøi, Auguste Renoir, And The Problem Of Innovation, Robert Jensen

Art and Visual Studies Presentations

Consider the following eulogy offered the Danish painter, Vilhelm Hammershøi, by one of his own countrymen upon the artist’s untimely death in 1916. “Renoir is an artist for the entire world; Hammershøi, name and repute notwithstanding, only for a small country.”1 The Danish critic offered no criteria for his judgment; it was too obvious to him. Even in his own country Hammershøi could be no more than a minor artist. His diminished posthumous reputation within the history of art might be summed up by the decision in 1931 of the director of the Statens Museum in Copenhagen to return a …