I think this is why so many artists and writers talk about truth, say that they want to express what is true. In this conception truth is seen as lying behind something else, there is always a veil of notions that must be pulled aside in order for us to see the truth, to see the world as it really is. And to do that one must possess a language other than the language of one’s time, since the language of the age is one of the things that conceal or overshadow. This is why originality is among the most highly valued qualities in the world of art. Originality is the idiosyncratic, the particular, it is the new. Whereas the true is always the same.
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The first painting we know Munch admired, when he was still a child, was Bridal Procession on the Hardangerfjord by Adolph Tidemand and Hans Gude. In his late teens he developed a strong aversion to such paintings, with their numerous photorealistic details and glossy surfaces, and it is hardly a wild speculation to claim that this aversion arose out of his personal experiences, which in no way corresponded to the image of reality created by these paintings: of connection, balance, beauty and meaning. When his mother died, he became closely attached to his sister Sophie, it was the two of them together, they shared a world of their own, and he was the sick one, he was the one coughing blood and lying in bed during the winter months, whereas it was she who died, suddenly, following a summer when he had been in love with one of her girlfriends, it was over in a few weeks, she grew weaker and weaker and died in the chair in front of the window, their father Christian and aunt Karen carried her dead body to the bed, and Edvard was the one who went on living. He never quite got over her loss, he longed for Sophie the rest of his life. The basic trust in others and in the world that most of us have must have been shattered for him. One of his biographers, Sue Prideaux, believes that he dealt with the trauma by withdrawing into himself, thus severing the connection between the internal and the external world, a rupture which eventually became permanent. He lived out his inner life through reading and drawing, and his drawings met with so much approval early on that he must have come to base his identity on his art. Later, when as a young man who thought of himself as an artist he viewed Norwegian romantic paintings, which were almost the only paintings in existence in Kristiania at the time, he saw nothing that represented his own reality and experience, and he understood early on that he would have to break with the embellishment which stood between the images of reality and what he perceived as real if he was to accomplish something true, something consequential. He read Ibsen, whose works sought to tear down the embellished facade in order to find the truth, and he read Dostoevsky, who against a background of poverty and imperfection and unbearable inner pain brought forth in his writing something luminous, shining, burning. He met the painter Christian Krohg, who returned from Paris as a great and disruptive force and almost single-handedly implanted impulses from abroad into the small Norwegian art scene, and who questioned the relevance of seventeenth-century baroque pastoral painting for modern life in nineteenth-century Norway. And he met the writer Hans Jæger, who spoke not only of the hypocrisy and inhibition of the bourgeoisie but about describing one’s life as openly and honestly and nakedly and truthfully as possible. That Jæger himself proved to be a hypocrite didn’t diminish the value of what Munch learned from him, and he was later to say that Jæger, not Strindberg, had been his most powerful influence; by the time he met Strindberg, his most important ideas had already been formed.
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Such refractions between the individual and the cultural, both being time-bound entities, occur in all works of art. The artist strives for truth by liberating him- or herself from time and place, the dominant language, at the same time as he or she is involuntarily a part of it, because the timeless and the placeless simply don’t exist, even the most original work of art and the most original thought are bound to time and place. In this sense there is an ironic dimension to the history of art; only those works that break with the era come to be seen as typical of the era, those works in which the artist’s personal vision forces its way through, using the language and the methods then available to and belonging to everybody. That is why the works of Albrecht Dürer and Dante Alighieri remain relevant to us, while so many other works of the Middle Ages are not. By expressing their own self they speak to what we have in common with them, namely our self. This ‘own self’ was once linked to a very particular character formed by a set of very particular experiences, but time has faded it until all that remains is a certain tone, a certain attitude to the language and form available, that to us is almost indistinguishable from the time in which it was formulated.
Edvard Munch’s time is still so close to our own that his biography has not yet vanished into his paintings, so we continue to seek the causes of his idiosyncrasies, what enabled him to break with the art of his contemporaries, in his personality and personal experiences. He lost his mother and sister as a child, and he was exceptionally sensitive, that is why he painted The Scream.
But why did Dürer paint the portrait of himself as Christ? Most critics interpret it against the wider cultural-historical background, including the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, who sees the painting as a strangely concrete expression of ‘the elevation of the profane face to a subject worthy of portraiture’. This is at the transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the turning away from belief in the truth of canonised texts towards the truth found in nature, and that is a place where the question of whether Dürer’s mother or any of his siblings died when he was a child has no relevance, even if his self-portrait seems just as personal and deeply felt as Munch’s.
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What it is possible to say in a given epoch, and how it can be said, defines more than anything the different expressions of art, and this of course applies to Munch too. That during the 1890s he began to paint scenes from his own life, and that he sought to give external painterly form to his inner emotions, was not solely the result of intense inner pressure – I assume that most major painters throughout history have experienced intense inner pressure – but also because something in the culture changed, opening that possibility for him.
That Munch began only ten years later to move away from the method he had found and for the rest of his life, that is to say close on forty years, produced very different paintings, which are rarely charged with either biography or strong emotion, means, I think, that what interested and drove him was never merely the biographical or his own inner life per se, but also what it might yield in terms of art. Perhaps even primarily the latter.
After ten years the method had been emptied out, in other words it became recognisable as just that, a method, and no longer yielded anything new, but instead entailed repetition and restatement, exactly what he must have felt that the rules of painting, which he had been trained to observe and which were all around him when he first began to paint, represented. That which is present beforehand, before one even picks up the paintbrush.
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The conflict between what is present beforehand and what comes into being without precedent, was fundamental to Munch, it was a battle he waged, resulting in both great victories and great defeats. The irony is that the pictures he is remembered for do not process merely memories, that is, work with past events, but also states of mind and emotional conflicts which the elements of the picture are tasked to bring out, so that some of them are less in themselves than what they signify – the painting Jealousy might serve as one example, with its formulaic Adam and formulaic Eve with apples in the background and a pale, suffering face in the foreground, in which the figures appear to have been placed following a set formula, as an illustration of the emotion, in a painting that doesn’t have much more to offer than that – while the paintings where he succeeded, by approaching what he was painting almost entirely without bias – an elm is an elm, a hay-drying rack
is a hay-drying rack, a horse is a horse – but not in strict accordance with the rules of art, not at all, but instead hastily and often carelessly, emphasising their paintedness – an overtly painted elm, an overtly painted hay-drying rack, an overtly painted horse – these are largely considered an insignificant part of his oeuvre.
‘It is a mistake to think that the painter works on a white surface,’ Gilles Deleuze writes in his book about the Irish-British painter Francis Bacon. By this he means that one can never simply transfer a motif to an empty canvas, because the canvas is never empty but filled with images and notions the painter already carries within himself, so that painting is really more about emptying, cleansing, removing things, than about filling a blank surface. The painter paints ‘in order to produce a canvas whose functioning will reverse the relations between model and copy. In short, what we have to define are those “givens” [données] that are on the canvas before the painter’s work begins, and determine, among those givens, which are an obstacle, which are a help, or even the effects of a preparatory work.’1
This is the starting position, the basis for all painterly activity, and actually for all other forms of artistic production too, including writing, if not in quite the same way. Deleuze called this chapter ‘The painting before painting’, and that which is always there beforehand, standing between the painter and the motif even before he begins to paint, is on the one hand cliché and all it entails, on the other hand possibility and all it entails. To paint is to enter into the cliché and into possibility, and, Deleuze writes, the painter enters into the painting precisely because he knows what he wants to do but not how to do it, and the only path to that certainty leads through the painting and out of it.
For Munch as a young man in Kristiania, cliché – the idiom most immediately at his disposal – was not those romantic, pedantically painted pictures, those he had already put behind him, but naturalism’s more realistic contemporary paintings. The possibilities – in other words, what he wanted and in some way or other imagined or sensed – must for their part have been tied to his own experiences and to his encounter with Dostoevsky’s brutally direct depiction of the outer world, seen through or tempered by the inner. The conflict must have been intense, since the divergence between Munch’s inner life and the external reality he moved in appears to have been so comprehensive.
When we view an artist’s oeuvre in retrospect, one phase succeeds the other with a certain naturalness, since we already know what is coming, and that certainty can never be entirely disregarded. But for the artist nothing was obvious at the time, all that existed was what had already been painted and what was just then being painted. As the eighteen-year-old Munch stands painting a garden on a lovely summer day, he knows nothing about The Scream, he knows nothing about Melancholy, he knows nothing about The Sun or Elm Forest in Spring. If there is a conflict within him between the internal and the external, it isn’t articulated, nor is it necessarily the case that this conflict points to something further ahead. The painting is more than a place where inner conflicts are given expression, it is also a place where these conflicts are bearable, that is, a place of peace and joy. To paint is to see and to articulate what is seen in colours and shapes. That is what Munch did as he stood before that garden: he looked at it, and he painted what he saw. Nothing of the trauma he carried within is represented in the picture, but his ability to see is, and his ability to transpose what he sees into a painting.
Konsten att se, the art of seeing, is the Swedish title of art critic and novelist John Berger’s book Ways of Seeing (1972). And that might sound odd, for don’t we all know how to see? Hardly an art, is it? Each of us can stand in front of a tree and look at it, its branches and leaves, its bark and roots, the play of light and shadow which seems to sift down upon the lawn it grows in when the sea breeze makes it sway back and forth. But much of what we see, we see because we know it is there, often it is more a matter of recognition, of registering something which already exists within us. Names play an important role in this, so much of what we see lies in the name; that is an apple tree, that is an elm, that is a cherry tree, that is a spruce. If we look at it for longer, we might get beneath the name and see it as a unique, singular tree and not merely as a representative of the category it belongs to. And eventually we may even be able to see what it ‘is’, its presence in the world. But by then we will have come to know it so well that it will seem familiar to us, which in turn creates a distance, for that’s how it is with the familiar, isn’t it, friends we’ve known for years – we no longer see them, we just note their presence, allowing it to fill the category we have created for them.
If we were to paint that tree, not only would all the different ways of seeing it lie between us and the tree, but also all the different ways of depicting it. The trees of the baroque, the trees of Impressionism, the trees of naturalism, the trees of Symbolism, the trees of modernism and postmodernism, van Gogh’s trees, David Hockney’s trees, Anna Bjerger’s trees, Peter Doig’s trees, Vanessa Baird’s trees. But also the trees of natural science books, the trees of brochures advertising banking services, the trees in video games, the trees photographed for newspapers and magazines, the trees of nature programmes on TV, the trees of children’s drawings.
‘Many had painted oaks before,’ Olav H. Hauge wrote in a poem. ‘Nevertheless Munch painted an oak.’ The line captures the essence of Edvard Munch’s work, since it says so much about why he painted, what he was attempting to do. And the way he painted trees can be as good an entry point as any to his art, for he painted trees from his very first painting in 1880 until his last in 1944, and faced with each and every one of them he found himself in the situation described by Deleuze: the battle between cliché and possibility, of which the painting is the outcome.
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One of Munch’s first good paintings is Garden With Red House from 1882, the summer he was eighteen. The format is small, only 23 by 30.5 centimetres, the motif is a garden in summer, lush foliage and grass flooded with sunlight, in many nuances of green, with a red cottage beneath a blue sky in the background, which sets up a yearning within the painting and also a sense of pleasure, for if his ambition in painting was perhaps a modest one and extended no further than a wish to master the motif and his joy in the colours and the light, it works nevertheless; it is difficult to look at the painting and not feel uplifted.
In the very foreground, at the lower left edge of the painting, stands the leafless trunk of a tree, it appears to have been an old fruit tree, covered here and there by mint-green moss, elsewhere light grey where it reflects the sun, dark grey where it lies in shadow. Next to it there is a grey bench and a table that looks rust-red in the shade, both appear rickety, and behind them there is a lawn, luminous in the sunlight, wreathed by dense foliage and opulent flower beds, yellow by the wall of the house, three distinctly red flowers at the right edge of the painting. Both motif and atmosphere are impressionistic, while the execution is heavier and has the solidity of naturalism but without naturalism’s sometimes almost hyperrealistic reproduction of detail. The main thing here is colour, colour and depth.
What was ‘the painting before painting’ here? What images were in his mind before he began painting, and which possibilities did he see?
Presumably the only thing he really wanted was to make the painting cohere, based on what he had learned in the two years since he had begun to paint and on the pictures he had seen in the form accessible to him, which was realism or naturalism. There is no trace of national romanticism in the picture, which some of his earlier paintings in some ways come close to with their birches and small peasant figures in the foreground. Munch never painted tall mountains, never deep valleys, never fjords or landscapes that were dramatic in other ways. Here too it isn’t grandeur he is after, rather it must have been the very insignificance of the motif that attracted him, and the beauty or charm it possessed. If he was co
ntent simply to be able to represent the garden and give form to the old fruit tree as he saw it, and found no reason to reject the prevailing painterly means, but instead worked hard to achieve them, such as the depth of the garden, the volume of the tree trunk, the connections between light and colour, then the delight in colour, or the desire for it, must at some point have taken over, for that is what predominates in this painting, the physicality of colour more than what the colour represents: the sunlit red of the cottage, the shady red of the table, the three flower heads, also red, amid a sea of green.
I don’t think it is possible to paint a painting like this without being light-hearted, full of the joy of living. It may be that I am naive, and that it certainly is possible, but I for one am unable to look at this painting without being affected by its peaceful mood and contagious thirst for colour.
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If we consider a picture he painted eleven years later, at the age of twenty-nine, Summer Night’s Dream (The Voice), which also has a summery outdoor motif with trees as a key element, it is so different in all its aspects that it is difficult to grasp that it was made by the same man. The painting shows a white-clad female figure who appears to be leaning against a tree; behind her, between tree trunks, lies the sea, above it, roughly in the middle of the picture, hangs the moon, mirrored in a column in the water, and to the right a boat is glimpsed. That is all. The elements are realistic in the sense that they belong to visible reality, but they are painted so differently from the elements in the sun-dappled summer garden that something very different is clearly at stake here from a painterly and thematic point of view. The forest floor in the foreground is a nearly even field of dark green, the beach in the middle distance is a nearly even field of white with a red border, and the sea in the background is a perfectly even field of blue. The trees are flat, practically without volume. The painting therefore has hardly any depth, and it is clear that the pictorial space is not a realistic one. It lives in the play between the horizontal lines of beach and sea and the obtrusive, grid-like verticality of the trees, which is intensified or deepened by the column of moonlight. This should have made the painting verge on the abstract and the decorative, turning it into a thing to be contemplated from a distance, quite unlike the realistic garden scene, which comes to life by being convincing and recognisable. But that is not the case. Even if it doesn’t quite cancel out the various elements of the painting, the woman’s presence and pose puts them into play in a different way. She is standing with her hands behind her back while bending forward slightly, looking straight at the viewer. In the painting she is alone, but it doesn’t feel like a picture of a woman alone by the sea, on the contrary, the picture is emotionally charged in the manner of a scene, everything about her posture and body language indicates that there is someone else there, to whom she is turning. Looking at the picture, it is impossible not to become this figure and in that way be forced to confront her directly. It is me she is looking at, it is me she is leaning towards. And it is me she frightens.
So Much Longing in So Little Space Page 2
