The Engine

THE POVERTY OF SILENCE: VILHELM HAMMERSHOI AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY The Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershoi (1864-1916) was the sort of technically competent yet uninspired artist who crops up in all kinds of guises throughout history. Normally figures like Hammershoi acquire a quiet celebrity in their own lifetimes, then are quietly forgotten about after they die. Now this happened to Hammershoi. But he has somehow been miraculously resurrected at the RA this summer. Why? The RA's audioguide, the assorted 'experts' gathered there describe Hammershoi's work as 'poetic', 'beautiful', 'mysterious', 'enigmatic'. His works consist of interiors (usually with a single female figure whose back is turned), landscapes and postcard-like representations of Copenhagen and London, his favourite European city. A typical Hammershoi interior has light flooding through windows into a beautiful but empty drawing room. However, the effect of Hammershoi...

Eric Rohmer's new film is a wonderful, light comedy of love, jealousy, loss and lovers re-united, perfect for this season. It seems to follow after the lightest of Shakespeare's comedies, there is a deliberate concatenation of eras and epochs as a Bucolic idyll set in 5th century Gaul is reformulated through the 16th century and then finally to our own time. The story of Astrea and Celadon is fitted exactly to the 16th century, the era of the High Renaissance, because of the intensity of its idealisation of 'nature' (as against culture) and the themes of jealousy, loss echoed in Celadon's death and subsequent posing as a woman. Celadon then falls in love again with Astrea, who suffers the jealousy of the other shepherdesses and her own sexual ambiguity in falling in love ardently with another 'woman'. There are some beautiful touches, such as Rohmer's handling of Astrea's friends, the gentle but wonderful comic dialogue and a sudden reinvention o...