At precisely this time, in the same year, another painter also paints his very first paintings, which are not that unlike Munch’s; some of them too depict country landscapes with small figures in the foreground and have the same air of being painting exercises. This was in the Netherlands, the painter was Vincent van Gogh. He was already twenty-seven by then, ten years older than Munch, and only ten years later, when Munch was twenty-seven and just setting out upon his career as a painter, van Gogh committed suicide.
In the autumn of 2015 the two artists were brought together in a large comparative exhibition, and, viewing it, it was easy to think that they were akin to each other and had many points in common, both in style and aesthetics as well as world view and perspective on human life. But actually few artists have been more different in temperament and talent than these two; almost the only thing they shared was the desire to paint and the time in which they painted. Munch was a masterful drawer who gradually perfected his technique. He received lessons from Christian Krohg, and from the very beginning he was surrounded by other technically skilled painters, among whom he stood out. He mastered various styles, there is something eclectic about his paintings prior to 1890, some of them resemble Frits Thaulow’s pictures, especially those of Akerselva, Oslo’s main river, some of them are close to Krohg’s, some of his portraits tend towards the baroque, some of the street scenes tend towards Impressionism. Even after he developed his signature style, such elements occasionally reappear in his paintings. So, in order to paint the way we now think of as typical of Munch, he had to rid himself of what he knew, since knowledge stood between him and what he painted, a process which Stian Grøgaard in his book about Munch terms ‘unlearning’. Things stood very differently, almost diametrically opposed, in the case of van Gogh, who must be the least eclectic painter the world has ever seen, in the sense that the correspondence between what he had in him and what he painted was so great. It is as if nothing stood between him and his pictures. No unlearning, just a continual process of learning, in a life’s work which is strikingly consistent and which at least in retrospect seems to move towards something it eventually attains, in the explosions of light and colour which dominate his very last paintings.
Van Gogh’s early paintings are dark, brownish, earthbound, lumpen, heavy. He paints still lifes of potatoes! Then gradually they change, it is as if they gain in colour, gain in light, and as if only then do they realise that light exists and want more and more of it, more light, more colour, until they end up drunk on beauty and life’s intensity.
I never understood the force that light possesses in van Gogh’s pictures until I saw the originals in the museum in Amsterdam, for the reproductions are unable to render it, since the light isn’t graduated and modulated in the motif but belongs to the colours, their physicality.
As incredible as it may seem, all those pictures, that whole universe, were produced in the course of ten years. Munch, who as we have seen began to paint in the same year as van Gogh, spent the same period exploring the medium, in paintings that are infinitely more cool and controlled, still marked by the naturalism then dominant in Norway, and he was concerned with technical issues, as for example in Morning from 1884, which was one of the first paintings he exhibited.
To his friend Olav Paulsen, he writes this about the painting:
I am at work on a ‘girl’. Yes I suppose you find it odd that once again I am at it with a girl in a morning mood but the motif was far too beautiful for me not to make use of it. It is quite simply a girl who is rising from her chaste repose and, seated on the edge of her bed, pulling on her stockings – The bed is whitish and in addition there are white sheets, a white nightgown, a bedside table with a white cover, white curtains and a blue wall. That is the colour effect. I don’t know whether I will be able to pull it off since it is very difficult, but I hope it will work.2
And it did work, all that white really does give a chaste impression, as he wanted it to, at the same time that he managed to give life to the white, depth to the room and volume and weight to the woman’s body. It is a beautiful painting, and it was made by a twenty-year-old who, like the eighteen-year-old, must have desired the materiality of colour more than that of reality, or at least must have valued them equally; the blue wall against all that white, the beauty of it, is what brings this painting to life.
The same desire is evident in another picture he painted that year, The Infirmary at Helgelandsmoen, with its blue-green firewall against the reddish slanted ceiling and wooden wall, colours which almost completely neutralise the presence of the three people in the room, or make it secondary. The painting lives in its colours, it is the wall and the firewall the painter has invested himself in, not in the human figures.
In some sense, all of Munch’s pictures from this period are exercises, not necessarily because they are unfinished, but because they are either responses to technical challenges, explorations of new territory or self-infatuated, and therefore not enough in themselves to stand alone. The first picture which does, the first painting by Munch to present itself in its own right, is in my view another one that he painted as a twenty-year-old, Inger Munch in Black.
It is a simple half-length portrait of his sister Inger, wearing a black dress against a black background, her hands down by her sides, her gaze turned slightly to the left. She is sixteen years old and she has dressed up in her confirmation dress, which alone sets the mood of the picture, the joining of youthfulness with solemnity.
This painting too is unfinished, there is something sketchy about the hands, and a rather unmotivated or poorly defined field of red in the lower right-hand corner, while at the same time the left arm is indistinctly painted, but the air of incompleteness no longer feels like a shortcoming, since the person portrayed has such a powerful presence, a presence which does away with everything else. She is all that matters. Not how she is painted, not how the volume of head and torso have been rendered, but who she is, standing there. In this painting it is as if Munch himself has stepped back a little, let go of his own self in order to make room for hers, and I can’t help thinking it must mean something that this happened when he painted a motif that was close to him, a motif from his own life. Only then did the sensitivity he possessed become free enough to find expression. Something in this motif was more important than the technical challenges of the painting and relegated the painterly issues to the background, while at the same time it was only then that his painting really began. This ability, to both step aside for the motif, make room for it, see it and sense it, which demands a great openness to the world, and at the same time be able to bring out one’s own vision in a painting, is perhaps the decisive quality for every artist. Therein lay van Gogh’s genius, in his total self-effacement when he painted, entirely faithful to what he saw, which paradoxically became filled with himself. Self-effacement, isn’t that too a kind of responsiveness? That one’s pitch is perfect because there is no self there to correct it? Munch had to bridge a greater distance between his eye and his hand, there is rarely anything ecstatic about his paintings, almost always something calculated. I think that is why he eventually began to paint so rapidly, why so often there was something sketch-like about his pictures, because he was trying to get to the picture before thought did. About this he himself wrote, ‘I act either precipitously and with Inspiration hastily (thoughtlessly and unhappily – and with Inspiration and happy effect) or with long Deliberation – and anxiously – the Result is then often weaker and can be a failure – the Result can become the work’s Undoing.’3
I think that was also why as a young man he began to paint closer to his own experiences and his own life, in which emotion balanced calculation and might even erase it, and the relation between what he had within him and what he painted became more immediate.
Inger Munch in Black has been one of my favourite pictures since the first time I saw it, yet I have never been able to pinpoint exactly what
it is that makes it so appealing. Whatever the painting communicates, it does so silently and wordlessly, and what I understand it with is similarly silent and wordless. Can one then speak of ‘understanding’ at all? Yes, for intuitive knowledge exists, silent wisdom exists, instinctive insight exists, and I believe this unarticulated understanding of the world comprises a much larger part of our self than we usually imagine. Precisely that it is based on intuitions and sensations, never explicitly formulated or argued for, allows it to evade the apparatus with which we usually comprehend the world, reason and the language of reason, and in this way remain almost invisible and unacknowledged.
To write about a painting deepens the same problem. A painting addresses itself directly to the emotions, and when the emotions are explained and words assigned to what is wordless, it becomes something else. It doesn’t help, somehow, to point to the picture’s use of diagonals, how the lines of the two white hands amid all that blackness lead one’s attention to the face, which is the centre of the picture, since this only says something about how the painting works but nothing about what kind of effect we are dealing with.
There is little to indicate that Munch was a good judge of human nature, he seems to have been too full of himself to understand others, but this portrait isn’t an analysis of his sister, it is a sensing of her. It is filled with the emotions that her presence evokes, so if anything he was a feeler of human nature. One who sensed souls, sensed objects and landscapes. If someone had asked Munch to say who his sister was, or if he had written down what he thought of her personality, what he said or wrote might have given us a vague idea of her, but her uniqueness, what made Inger Inger, would escape us. It doesn’t in this painting, we see at once who she is, and it is this presence that is the subject of the picture.
I am filled with something resembling happiness when I look at it. Something unconditionally good.
Why?
I think it has to do with dignity. And thereby with hope. The skin beside her left eye, where it meets the cheekbone, is accentuated with bright light, one’s attention is involuntarily drawn to it, towards that field, which darkens into a shadow beneath the eye. While her gaze seems remote, with a hint of pride in it, the skin below it is faintly reddish, and this colours her gaze, it is as if she had just now been crying. The wholly black background creates a sense that she has come from something, that she is piercing something, and the black confirmation dress ties her closely to it, as if she is still in it and looking out from it. In that gaze, looking out from grief but still not free of it, there is pride, it is as if her gaze says that this grief is not me, it is merely something that has befallen me. There is no struggle in the painting, no conflict in her eyes, but acceptance. These are the conditions of my life. Hence the dignity, and hence hope. It also has to do with being young, when one’s feeling of being alive is at its most intense and has an existence of its own wholly independent of whatever else might happen in one’s life. It is as if the twenty-year-old Munch has managed to capture precisely this in his portrait of his sister, what she is and what the conditions of her life are, that which binds and that which sets one free. I doubt this is something he thought about or reflected upon, he would have been too young. But emotions are ageless, they connect us directly to the world, and it is through emotion that he has approached his sister’s presence and ‘understood’ it.
* * *
* * *
Whether he himself felt that he had come closer to something essential, something truer when he painted the portrait of Inger, I obviously don’t know, but he clearly did when he began to paint The Sick Child the following year, in 1885, taking as his starting point the memory he had of his sister’s sickbed and death, and in which for the first time he sought a way to express his inner world of feelings and sensations pictorially, and by doing so, alone among the young painters in Kristiania during the 1880s and 1890s, he broke radically with the prevailing artistic idiom.
The Sick Child was like a feeler, a venture out into the unknown, the painting was mocked, ridiculed and reviled, and in the next few years it was as if he fell back to something safer, at the same time as he was learning, until his pictorial world exploded at the beginning of the 1890s, and the pictures we primarily associate with him were painted in an unprecedented burst of force and radicality.
If one is to compare him to anyone else from that time, no painters seem relevant, but rather an author, namely Knut Hamsun. They were of the same generation, Hamsun was born four years before Munch, in 1859, and his first novel, Hunger (1890), came to define the literary decade of the 1890s in Norway in a way similar to how Munch’s pictures from that decade did in the world of painting. Before Hunger literary realism dominated, with novels such as Alexander Kielland’s Garman & Worse, where the whole of society was depicted through myriad characters in a densified drama where the individual characters’ psychologies, which were woven together with the social class they belonged to, decided their fate, whether they would rise or sink or remain in their place. Balance was decisive, it ensured that not even the most irrational act or character disrupted the whole but instead conformed with the greater picture, which seemed to moderate everything human. That is how Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is narrated too. The space in which the story unfolds is as important as the story. This space does not perish when Emma Bovary perishes – the space is the place, understood both geographically, culturally and existentially, in which the story unfolds, and it is fundamentally stable.
Hunger disrupts this space with a radicality that even now, 130 years after it was written, is startling. Not only is perspective situated within one person who sees the world from his point of view – first-person novels of course existed then as now – but that perspective itself is the novel’s main concern: it is about the place from which the world is viewed. There is no plot, no construction of characters, everything centres on the person seeing, and thereby more on the way he sees it than on what is seen. The effect is great even today, for it is as if Hamsun through this describes the world as it comes into being, as it arises for the main protagonist, from the weather on the day he wakes up in his place of shelter to the things he sees and the people he encounters. The world is in the present tense, the world is here and now, and this renders a plot wholly superfluous, for anything at all can happen! We live in this excitement every day, for in our lives too anything can happen. The expectations we have, based on recognition and prior knowledge, remove the excitement from daily life rather in the same way that plot structure and the construction of characters can do in classic novels and films. We are not exposed, we are safe, we live in a secure and predictable space. The novel and the film look after us.
Hamsun’s protagonist is starving, he has no money, he lives from hand to mouth, but it isn’t this which creates the intense presence or destabilises the space of the novel, it is the way the novel is narrated, the inner perspective, how the external action is steeped in the emotions and thoughts it evokes, or even that what happens, happens in the emotions and thoughts, before our very eyes. In Hunger the world is the world of the starving protagonist; when he dies, it dies with him.
Hamsun found a new literary space, one which came into being as he wrote, and perhaps the most striking thing about it is that both the past and the future are practically non-existent. This makes the space unpredictable and as if quivering, like a flickering image on a TV screen in the second before it stabilises and becomes sharp and clear, which happens every time the protagonist leaves the room and enters a new one.
Edvard Munch grew up in the same culture as Hamsun, they must have been imbued with the same values and exposed to similar influences, and realism and naturalism in painting, which is what Munch primarily related to, was not unlike the realism prevalent in literature. Erik Werenskiold’s painting Peasant Burial from 1883, Eilif Peterssen’s Mother Utne from 1888 and Christian Krohg’s Albertine at the Police Doctor’s Waiting Room
from 1886 were all painted while Munch was a young man, and in different ways represented the prevailing norm for what a painting was supposed to portray and how it was supposed to look. Death, poverty, ageing, sex and prostitution were the themes of the day, all of them viewed from a distance in spaces so stable that they are not threatened by what they contain. For Krohg this was presumably a concrete issue, like Kielland he was a socially conscious man from the bourgeoisie, indignant about poverty and injustice, and if he was able to identify with the conditions under which Albertine the prostitute lived, he couldn’t communicate it in his painting except through a considerable distance, which the space and the rules of art maintained. One could look at destitution, suffering, poverty and sexuality only if one’s gaze was not itself part of what is seen, but external to it. We follow the same principle today: to feel compassion for what we see is fine, the most extreme misery, sex and death are fine, but only within a system that doesn’t bring us too close to it or make us a part of it.
No art is free of morals, for the simple reason that all art entails a set of assessments of reality, and they are always social in nature, since no such thing as non-social art has ever existed, but – and this is important – art is moral first and foremost through form, since it is form which establishes a relation between the viewer and the viewed. Considered in this way, Hunger is a more significant moral work than Garman & Worse, although the latter expresses a set of high-minded humanist opinions while in Hunger there isn’t a single sentence that can be cited in support of anything either high-minded or humanistic.
So Much Longing in So Little Space Page 4
