So Much Longing in So Little Space

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  Frightens?

  What is it about her that could possibly be frightening?

  Am I reading what I know about Munch into the painting, his dread of intimacy and his fear of involving himself with women, and simply making it my own, which isn’t difficult, since both dread of intimacy and fear of women are familiar to me?

  That may well be.

  But the space of the painting has no depth, so that it doesn’t open, and the trees stand there like the bars of a cage, blocking the way, shutting one in. And in Munch’s pictorial world trees and verticality are masculine entities, while the sea and the horizontal are feminine.

  She is appealing to someone, someone who is looking at her, and the invitation suggested by her posture, this play-acting directed at the viewer, makes her a siren-like figure. Understood in this way, the painting opens a space where desire and destruction are juxtaposed.

  It is as if in this picture Munch has painted not only the woman, but also the person looking at the woman. And the picture therefore changes depending on the experience of the viewer. Of course one might object that this applies to all pictures, even one of a garden, but this particular picture is confrontational in quite another way, it demands something of the viewer, who is forced to respond. It is not that the male gaze, with which I approach the painting, sexualises the woman and dominates her, it is more complicated than that, for this woman is free, she is connected with the open and the unbound, and if one sets aside the obvious erotic overtones of the painting, freedom is also a choice the viewer is forced to confront. Since no choice has been made in the painting, it is also full of longing. Yes, it is as if longing itself is its real subject.

  But what was ‘the painting before painting’ here? What images were in his head before he began to paint, what stood in his way, and which possibilities did he see?

  Almost everything he had learned about painting stood in his way here; everything he knew about creating volume and building up space with light, whatever connected it with a particular moment in time and thereby gave the painting a presence both contemporaneous and convincing, all this he had to ignore. What he wanted, the possibility he saw, was to paint a memory, in other words not the world as he saw it but as he remembered it. But not just any memory, not an insignificant and everyday episode – as the garden was an insignificant and everyday garden – but a memory which in some way or other was essential, expressing something over and beyond itself about something that was always the case. What is always the case exists outside of time, so he didn’t need any of the things that connected the motif with time, nor anything that connected it to visible space, for what he was after was the space of memory. The trees become signposts for trees, the boat becomes a signpost for boat, the moon becomes a signpost for moon, the woman becomes a signpost for woman. The objects relate to reality because memory relates to reality, but this relation isn’t binding. Munch is clearly painting his own longing, desire and fear when confronted with the feminine, or perhaps confronted with life, what it means to be truly alive, based on a memory of something that happened to him one night in Åsgårdstrand, but the almost wild reduction of detail obliterates everything that initially linked the memory to himself and to the actual place.

  To have the skill to paint a tree trunk with convincing naturalism and instead choose to merely indicate it with a couple of brushstrokes of brown paint, in this lies a freedom but also the potential for new compulsion, for if one does it a few times, paints trees in that way, this soon becomes the image one has transferred to the canvas before one even begins to paint, against which one has to struggle.

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  If we now consider some of the trees Munch painted in the final phase of his life, for example in a painting called Elm Forest in Spring from the mid-1920s, we are once again transported to a radically different pictorial language. The motif is leafless trees in a forest, and as with the painting of the garden this picture is devoid of people, but unlike it there is no sky here and nothing in it is man-made. A red-orange forest floor, greyish trees with touches of bright green, most of them gnarled and crooked, some more upright in the background, where they blend and merge into vague blue-grey stripes. This space is even more closed up than the one in front of the beach, yet it doesn’t feel claustrophobic to me, presumably because it isn’t charged with anything human, no situation, no memories, no romance, no sexual drive or dread of intimacy. The garden painting isn’t charged with any of this either, but the human is still present in it through the objects left behind, the house and the garden – and perhaps the peacefulness of that painting derives precisely from the absence of people? The picture of the elm forest holds no such peace within it. It seems to hold nothing at all, really, it isn’t charged with anything. The life of this painting lies in the tension between what it is a picture of, the shapes of the trees, the spring light upon them, and what the painting is in itself, its colours, forms and strokes of paint. The light is at one and the same time light and an orange layer of paint in which the brushstroke is clearly visible. The shadow on the dominant tree, which is an oak, is painted green, with a thin layer that appears to have run a little. We are very far from the naturalistic fruit tree in the garden, but also very far from the flat tree trunk signposts in the summer night painting.

  What does this painting want with us?

  It doesn’t want anything. This picture is a matter between the painter and what he is painting. If it communicates anything, it communicates the way trees communicate. Without a word, through their presence, embodied through their form, as if infinitely slowly contorting. They don’t mean anything, they are. And what they are, they are in a particular way. The trees in this painting are not masculinity, the forest is not death, nor is spring, heralded by the light, life. The forest is forest, the trees are trees, and this painting is a picture of them. The painter painting it does so almost selflessly, it is as if he is painting on the forest’s terms. As a consequence, there isn’t a great deal of meaning to be extracted from this picture, there isn’t much to write about, because the picture is what it is, just as the trees are what they are.

  Munch’s method had been to use himself, not by painting what he saw but by trying to visualise what he felt while seeing, so that even a picture of a snow-covered, deserted forest was charged with loneliness and longing, but in the end he came here, to a place where he cancelled out himself and didn’t invest more of his being than his painterly experience and routine, which is a logical and understandable step. This forest is not a place anyone starts out, there is far too much within a human being that seeks expression and wants out, there is far too much that rattles and clatters, radiates and burns, too much will, too many ambitions, too great a thirst for honour, too much pride and longing and love. This is the place one comes when everything has faded away, this is what the world looks like then, to a painter who can do anything but wants nothing – except to paint.

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  One thing that complicates this line of development in Munch’s art and disturbs the idea of a conflict between what is there beforehand and what comes into being through the struggle against it, is the fact that throughout his long life Munch painted certain motifs over and over again. That he returned to The Sick Child, returned to Girls on the Bridge, returned to Jealousy, returned to the scenes in the death chamber, and each time his approach became more technical, less heart-felt. Sometimes he probably did it because he needed the money and these were his most popular pictures, other times it may have been that he had sold the pictures but wanted to have them too. What had once been searching and impulse was now repeated as manner. The feeling or impression he had once sought to capture, and which the initial painting was a response to, a search for, was now not one step away but two. But once in a rare while it could happen that this too released something, that the insight and painterly experience he had acquired brought forth someth
ing new in an old motif.

  In 1882 and 1883, when he was nineteen years old, he painted three different pictures of his younger brother Andreas as he sat reading. He painted one of them again in 1936, when he was seventy-two, and his brother had been dead for more than forty years. The picture was probably painted as a gift to his brother’s daughter, who was then middle-aged. The first picture of Andreas is painted realistically, he is seated in a chair by a window with a book in his hands, reading, one leg is crossed over the other, a wintry sunless light falls almost imperceptibly in through the window and settles softly over his left side, while his right side lies in shadow. He is wearing a blue suit, and much of the painting has to do with the lie of the cloth and how the light plays on it and the room where he is sitting. The curtains, heavy and bourgeois, are a faint green, and the wall in the corner behind the left curtain lies in total shadow except for at the bottom, where something that might be a bed or a table with its flap folded down glows faintly in the murk. Beyond the window an empty grey square is visible, on the other side of it stands a row of blocks of flats; beneath their ochre and mint-green walls lies a white stripe that looks like snow. The blocks of flats are painted more simply and with less sophistication than the interior, they give an impression of something a little naive and clumsy, which can be found elsewhere in the painting too – there is something wrong with the knee in relation to the thigh, as if we were seeing it foreshortened at once from the front and from the side, and the ear which is turned towards the window is a little too red considering what the light and the skin elsewhere seem to indicate, and one hand is more like a log than a hand.

  What we see is a picture by a talented young painter who is still inexperienced, and who paints pictures of what he has at hand. There is nothing in this painting of what we associate with Munch, no trace of his distinctiveness in either the motif or its execution.

  The version he painted fifty-three years later has kept all the elements – the brother’s face looks similar, he is seated in exactly the same position in the same chair, the window is there, the blocks of flats in the background, the curtains and the bed or table in the corner – but the impression it gives, the painting’s aura, is radically different. Firstly all the elements have been simplified, they are no longer painted with a sensitive awareness of texture and softness, in saturated and gently graded colours, the way the motif presumably looked to him when he painted it for the first time, but are now presented as painted fields almost entirely independent of each other, since the light and its modulations in colour no longer connect them. The suit, for example, is cut off from all the other elements, it is as if the play of light on it now belongs to it alone – rather like the way shadows and folds in medieval icon paintings are painted independently of the light and the physical space and do not seek to create an illusion of shadows and folds but simply indicate them – and the earlier nuances of grey on the white-painted wall are now represented merely by a couple of coarse, abrupt, greenish brushstrokes, while the windowsill and the window frame above are outlined rather than painted. The curtains are now yellow and red as well as green – this is presumably intended to suggest the light – and the previously deep, impenetrable shadow in the corner is now light and reddish. The block of flats on the other side of the square outside is even more stylised, and the angle is somewhat different, so that it no longer extends the depth of the background, as in the original, but rather cuts it off. The odd perspective at the knee, on the other hand, has been retained, and even the redness of the ear, but in this version it doesn’t strike one as a shortcoming: this painting’s claim to reality is a different one.

  What does it say?

  The simplification emphasises the reading boy, the subject is his particular presence. And the moment of the painting is no longer just any moment – which is the impression one gets looking at the first painting, where the brother will soon get up and do something else, the day will pass into evening – what matters is this particular moment, not as a part of time but almost torn from it. The brother’s face is painted much more simply; the cheeks are beige while the forehead and the chin are orange, and in a strange way we see him more clearly, in particular just how young he is. But the first thing one notices is the shadow upon his downturned eyes, since it is so prominent through not being integrated with the rest. In the first painting the shadow was a part of the room, here it is not, here it lies over the eyes like a band, and it is difficult not to think that Munch in his painting of this boy has marked him with death.

  The nineteen-year-old painter naturally knew nothing of what the future would bring, certainly not in painterly terms; he continued to try things out, to grope his way, to search in the years that followed with an ever surer hand, staying within the same pictorial language, driven by a great and manifest desire for colour and the materiality of colour. The seventy-two-year-old painter, for his part, had most of his life behind him, and he didn’t grope around, he knew what he was after.

  What was it?

  It was not to paint the living, but to make the painted come alive. To him that meant capturing the essential in what he saw. That is what he did when he painted the portrait of his brother over again. The light and the room were not essential, he merely indicated them as expeditiously as he could, nor were the details of his brother’s figure and face essential, they too were merely noted. That his brother had once sat there in just that way was essential, and it was the feeling he left behind in the room, a feeling not found in the first portrait, his aura, that Munch painted the second time. And the death awaiting him.

  What is strange is that even this last portrait of his brother has something naive about it. The naivety of the first picture has to do with the errors in it, since the errors betray a painter who is not fully in control of his subject matter. We see the painter making an effort without quite succeeding. The later picture is made by an experienced painter in full command of his artistic means. Here the naivety has to do with simplification, it is as if the picture through simplification approaches children’s drawings, that there is a remnant of something helpless in it, a remnant of the child in Munch. The radical simplifications of the expressionists usually have none of this about them; in the paintings of Emil Nolde and Oskar Kokoschka, for instance, the simplifications often carry undertones of brutality, force and primitiveness. Munch’s pictures are seldom brutal. They are open towards violence but more often towards innocence. This is at once a strength and a weakness of his pictures, they are not sophisticated but so open towards the world that it seems to reveal itself defencelessly, as if it is the world that is unguarded, not the artist.

  It is difficult to imagine that Munch could have repainted the picture of his brother in 1936 without thinking back to the time when he made the first version, Kristiania in the 1880s, and of who he was when he lived at home with his father, brother and sisters, cared for by his aunt, his mother’s sister. We will never know of course, either whether he thought about that time as he walked around alone at Ekely, in all the rooms that were geared solely towards producing pictures, full of paintings and prints, or what it had been like to be him as a nineteen-year-old, nor is there any reason to wish for this, since the reason we still concern ourselves with this wildly solitary man are his paintings, they were his way of expressing himself, that is what he was doing both at nineteen and at seventy-two, and it is this biography, the one that is visible in his paintings, which is relevant and interesting, not because of their connection to his life, but as something in themselves: life as painted reality.

  The earliest extant painting by Edvard Munch was made in 1880, when he was sixteen. It depicts Telthusbakken, a hillside street lined with wooden houses in Kristiania, with Gamle Aker church looming above it. The sky is light blue, a few white clouds hover in it, otherwise the picture is dominated by a row of white, yellow and ochre houses, the dark green trees in the churchyard, the greyish wall there, a grassy plain i
n lighter green in front of the houses. It is a wonderful painting, filled with light, but there is something terribly wrong about the dimensions and the perspective, the houses look like doll’s houses, and the church appears almost nearer to the viewer than the houses it lies behind. His next paintings are all of country landscapes, often in muted colours, with a peasant woman in the foreground and birches on one side. Munch had already been drawing for several years; these are exercises in a medium that was new to him, and we must assume that his choice of both motifs and mode of expression was based on the kinds of paintings he had seen until then.