Jens Ferdinand Willumsen. Study for Five Portraits 1901

Vilhelm Hammershøi painted this study for five portraits with oil on canvas, and I immediately get the feeling he was interested in process. You can tell he was thinking about what paint can *do*. There's a kind of seriousness, or maybe just a carefulness, in the way the paint is layered. It's not showy, but deliberate. The palette is muted, almost monochrome, but within that constraint, Hammershøi coaxes out depth and form. Look at the almost ghostly quality around the head and hair! It is like he wanted to show you all the thinking behind this painting, all the possible outcomes. That little patch of brighter pigment, right on the tip of the nose, pulls you in, doesn’t it? It’s such a small thing, but it animates the whole face. It's like a little flag that tells you where you are in the painting! I feel like, in a strange way, Philip Guston might have been thinking about Hammershøi. Both are thinking about what it means to make a painting, to wrestle with the medium itself. For Hammershøi, as with Guston, it's the ambiguity that makes it sing.