Det danska ögat - En studie i blick och binära motsatser i fyra porträtt av Vilhelm Hammershøi

Sammanfattning: The Danish Eye - A study in The Gaze & binary oppositions in four artworks by Vilhelm Hammershøi The following thesis will investigate four paintings by the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi, with a study of portraits from 1890 to 1911. The paintings include two self portraits and two portraits of the artist’s partner, Ida. The method of investigation will be structured around Gillian Rose’s studies about formal studies in art history - the site of the image itself. The method will be helpful for the essay regarding that the research will be executed with a formal comparative method, as well as with a theoretical base in Griselda Pollock’s feminist art historical texts regarding the gaze and binary oppositions. As a further theoretical foundation around the gaze, the essay will include Norman Bryson’s The Gaze in the Expanded Field. The main purpose of the study is to investigate how portraits by Hammershøi are formulaically structured, and if they might have similar or different manners of composing the painted individual regarding the gaze, color, light, spatiality etc. Does the modes of portrayal have footing in the historically traditional ways of portraying a man versus a woman? The study implicates the empiric material, the four paintings, to be dissimilarly structured regarding the formal elements of the gaze such as binary oppositions of, for instance, object/subject or seeing/being seen.