Insides

Many paintings let us see the buildings inside. Private places that, thanks to these art works, have a place in history. The permanent collection of Thyssen Museum invites us to get to know the most intimate insides.

Hotel Room, Edward Hopper (1931)

The girl checks the train timetables while sitting on the bed of a hotel room. She doesn’t know anyone in this city. She’s all alone. We know all this because Jo, Hopper’s wife, wrote what the girl on the painting was doing. We are talking about loneliness, the main theme of the American artist’s work: empty spaces and empty hours.

The Annunciation to St. Anne and St. Joachim, Bernhard Strigel (1505-1510)

This is not the Annunciation to the Virgin, but the annunciation to Saint Anne and Saint Joachim. In the inside, the Virgin’s mother is filled with joy when an angel explains to her that her daughter will give birth to God. In the background, an open wardrobe let us see an untidy pile of books. Through a large window we can see another angel informing Saint Joachim. The space in this primitive German canvas resembles more a stage than real life.

Woman with needlework and a child, Pieter Hendricksz de Hooch (1662-1668)

Interrupted by a child, the woman leaves her sewing for a while. We would like to know what they are talking about. But we can imagine: the child’s babble, the nanny’s sweet voice echoing on the high ceilings of the house. The light comes in from the left window, and there’s a corridor on the right, like in many other compositions of the 17th-century Dutch painting.

Alpine kitchen, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1918)

What we can see here isn’t just the inside of an Alpine kitchen, it’s also the inside of Kirchner’s mind, a tormented painted that suffered from a nervous breakdown during the First World War and had to retire to Switzerland. Like many other expressionist artists, he changes the appearance of things to reflect his own psychology. The green, yellow and red walls, which crawl violently towards the back of the painting, are an almost literal depiction of his anxiety.

La clé des champs, René Magritte (1936)

Magritte makes us think that the landscape we see through the window is fake, as the pieces of the broken glass still show the same horizon. This painting deals with the blurry limits between fiction and reality, art and life, inside and outside. It’s true, we are inside, but who can assure that we won’t be still inside the painting if we step outside the window?

Advertisement