Munch himself wrote about the painting,
When I saw the sick child for the first time – the pale head with the vibrant red hair against the white cushion – it made an impression that disappeared as I worked on it. I achieved a good yet different picture on the canvas. I painted the picture numerous times in the course of a year – scraped it – dissolved it in generous applications of paint – and endeavoured again and again to attain the first impression. The quivering mouth – the translucent pale complexion – against the canvas – the quivering mouth – the quivering hands. I finally ceased – exhausted. I had achieved a great deal of the first impression. The quivering mouth – the translucent skin – the weary eyes. Yet the colour of the picture was not complete – it was pale grey. The picture had become heavy as lead.
I took it up again two years later – then I achieved more of the vibrant palette that I had wished to give it. I painted three different ones. These are all different from one another and each contributes something to elicit what I felt during the first impression . . .
I had overdone the chair and the glass – it distracted from the head. When I first looked at the picture I could only make out the glass and the surroundings. Should I remove it completely? No, it contributed to deepening and accentuating the head. I scraped away the surroundings halfway and allowed them to remain as masses, which one could see above the head and glass.
I discovered furthermore that my own eyelashes had contributed to the visual impression. I therefore included a hint of them as shadows on the surface of the picture. The head became the picture in a way – wavy lines appeared in the picture – in the peripheries – with the head as the central element. I often made use of these wavy lines later.5
As Grøgaard points out, Munch wrote this many years later and it is marked by ex post facto rationalisation, he sees the painting in the light of what he painted later and includes The Sick Child in the Frieze of Life in a kind of self-canonisation. In any case it remains a key picture in Munch’s oeuvre, and fairly unique in that the break with paradigm is so visible, represents such a major part of the painting’s character, it is almost as if the battle between the two spaces, the inner subjective and the outer objective, can be seen. One is brought close to the process itself, what it is to paint, what a painting is, for the conflict has not been resolved, it remains open: between the will to express and the means of expression, the very basis of art, is visible. In periods when a single paradigm holds sway that basis is not visible, the connection between what is expressed and how it is expressed seems obvious, the form appears natural, as unproblematic as the shape of the hand or the foot. Here, where the divergence is so great, form becomes a problem, and we understand that it always is, that it is never natural, always arbitrary.
Yet the greatness of the painting is not found here, at least not as I see it. Its greatness lies in the two figures and the relation between them, in the girl’s tender gaze, how she, who is dying, looks comfortingly or encouragingly at the mother, who will be left behind and is sitting with her head bent and her arm on the daughter’s arm. The absence of a unified space leaves the figures somewhere between the realistic, that which relates to reality, and the iconic, and makes them movable, as if one moment they belong to the specific, the personal – it is this child and this mother at this very moment – and the next moment to the general, in other words that the feeling of grief, loss, courage, reconciliation to death and denial of death have been given iconic form.
The different possibilities inherent in the figures open up for different types of identification and relevance, and it is this openness, or this not-yet-closedness, which makes the painting so alive: the conflict, both in terms of motif and of form, is reawakened every time the picture is viewed. We can view other paintings of similar motifs from the same period and judge them good or less good, but from a distance, and if we involve ourselves in the emotions that have been invested in them, that is a choice we make, we don’t have to. When we stand in front of The Sick Child, that choice doesn’t exist. To look at it is to set it going.
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The space in which The Sick Child exists, with all its ambivalences, is not a place a painter can remain in for very long, there is so much there that is unrealised, it is nearly all a searching for form and no form. It is an interstice. At the same time I think it is true to say that all artistic work at some stage is there, in the moment before something becomes something else, before it falls into place in a form and is locked to it.
If we move ahead ten years in time, to the mid-1890s, we see that Munch has found a solution to the problems he wrestled with as a twenty-year-old. These pictures are radically simplified; as Grøgaard points out, they are no longer based on meticulous observation of models or landscapes. The faces tend towards the detail-less and non-individual, many of them are merely pale fields with dark shadows for eyes, moonlight on a nocturnal surface of water is a yellow pillar, stones are beige and brown circles, indicated and referred to rather than seen and painted.
It was this aesthetic that allowed Munch to say that he didn’t paint what he sees but what he saw. It was also this aesthetic that made Poul Erik Tøjner, the director of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, compare Edvard Munch with Andy Warhol; everything is on the surface. Munch’s paintings from the 1890s are charged to the highest degree, but they are not charged with reality, it isn’t visual reality they bring us close to, but emotional reality, which is transmitted through symbols. The remainder of naturalism and tradition in The Sick Child, that which made an identification with something other than emotion possible, is completely absent. This means that the essential thing does not take place in relation to any concrete reality, nor in the painting itself, in its painterly aspects – there is nothing to immerse oneself in there, since it is so schematic – but solely in the emotions it elicits.
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I remember well the first time I saw Munch’s pictures. It was in Oslo, at the National Gallery, I was in my late teens and up till then had hardly visited a single museum, nor was I particularly interested in art. Music and literature were my thing, but not due to any hunger for understanding or longing for insight – music was partly a means to define my identity, it said something about who I wanted to be, and partly a place where emotions were given free rein, where all the moods I had within me could be unleashed, without me ever reflecting on it, the relationship was an unconscious one, while literature was primarily an escape from reality, the joy at being able to step into other and unknown worlds.
I don’t remember why I was in Oslo, nothing of the context has been preserved in my memory, but presumably it was on a trip with my gymnas class. What I remember are all the national romantic paintings, that I was delighted with them and impressed by how true they were to nature. And then I remember how the room with Munch’s paintings knocked them out. That Munch’s paintings had such a powerful aura that they overshadowed all the others. It was as if they existed on another, higher plane. This I felt to be beyond doubt, that as works of art they were better, although I had never reflected on what art was, or what quality was. I just knew it. As an experience it reminded me of when I read Dostoevsky for the first time, the feeling of acute relevance was the same.
While the preceding paintings had opened up to me and as it were received my gaze, with Munch’s paintings it was the other way round, it was as if they came towards me, that they were active while my gaze was passive. That kind of intensity, that a picture could take possession of a room and dominate it, was something I hadn’t experienced before. They were trembling!
That initial experience has been present in me whenever I have seen those Munch paintings again, but fainter and less intense each time. I imagined that this was due to the paintings’ status, that they are so well known that what they contain vanishes behind their fame, which I bring with me when I view them, so that they a
re already finished within me and therefore little or nothing happens when the initial effect wears off.
Not until I read Grøgaard’s book did I realise that it might be due to something in the paintings themselves, that they were finished beforehand and therefore closed. That they lived in their effect, which diminished with each viewing. And that this is why Symbolism became a dead end, a kind of backwater of art which the main current left behind and never returned to. It would not be Munch’s paintings from the 1890s that led to modernism, but Paul Cézanne’s.
This idea is in line with my own experience as a writer, namely that it has to happen in the actual writing, that it must always remain open to the unpredictable and the accidental, which establishes patterns that the text then follows, and that this process has to be intuitive and subject to continual improvisation. Writing cannot merely reconstruct a moment, it must itself be a moment, only then is it in touch with the world, not as depiction but as action. In other words, the distance between thought and emotion and language must be as small as possible. And the same, I suppose, is true of painting. That the art of painting is seeing and then making the distance between the seen and the painted as minimal as possible. Think of a musician who is one with his instrument, one with the music, think of Miles Davis, think of Glenn Gould, think of Aretha Franklin. No time for thought, no time for calculation, everything happens now, in the moment, in one movement, one stream. Fundamental to all creation is that it is not about transferring something one possesses and wishes to express, but about what is expressed emerging as something in itself. Only then can it come alive. It must not exist beforehand but come into being in the moment it is expressed. If that happens, it will also come into being in the moment we see it or read it, and it is this coming into being which justifies a word like ‘alive’ used about art and literature, which in themselves are merely dead colours on a dead canvas or dead letters on a dead book page. Knowledge is therefore not an advantage for an artist, because knowledge exists beforehand. Experience, intuitive, bodily experience, on the other hand, is crucial. It wasn’t merely to learn how a body is constructed that artists previously drew countless nude studies, it was also so that they would learn to draw without thinking, to minimise the distance between the gaze and the hand.
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This notion, that what is expressed doesn’t have to do with transferring but with coming into being, I saw formulated for the first time in the above-mentioned essay by Deleuze, in a passage which I underlined: ‘To write is certainly not to impose a form (of expression) on the matter of lived experience. Literature rather moves in the direction of the ill-formed or the incomplete, as Witold Gombrowicz said as well as practiced. Writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any liveable or lived experience. It is a process, that is, a passage of Life that traverses both the liveable and the lived.’6
When I read Deleuze’s short essay for the first time in 1995, I didn’t know how to write. I made up stories, and nothing happened in the language except what advanced the story. I thought out what was going to happen, and I rewrote sentences to make them serve the story better. Technically they were meaningful, and the language wasn’t that bad, but it was as if they were created beyond myself and existed there – one image to suggest this way of writing might be a laboratory in which the objects being studied are kept in a glass case, within which they are manipulated by scientists by means of a pair of fixed gloves, the only physical connection between them and the object of their work. That is what my writing was like, like something on the other side of a glass wall, touched through a pair of stiff gloves.
That I underlined the Deleuze passage must have been because it accorded with something I knew, in that vague, undefinable and latent way one sometimes knows things. And then, one year later, something happened. I changed my language, from a radical form of bokmål (one of the two official forms of written Norwegian) to a more conservative form, so that what I wrote felt slightly foreign, and that space, between my real self and the ‘I’ of the text, made me feel freer, suddenly things happened in the text which I hadn’t foreseen, which I had never thought before, and at once I knew that this was writing. I looked at it, it didn’t express me or my world, it expressed the text, what had happened there at that particular moment. That moment could not be reconstructed, it belonged solely to the situation in which it had emerged. The art of writing was to find another such moment, and then another and another again.
The result became my first novel. It is the work of a beginner, and it is blemished by an at times obtrusive self-infatuation, the joy of being able to write. Moreover it has an air of naivety about it, but so does everything I have written since, I recognise it at once on the rare occasions when I reread something I have written. The naivety is a consequence of this way of writing, that I try to evade reflection, never think about how something seems or looks, but be as free in the moment as at all possible. Reflection is the opposite of naivety, but also of life, of which it is the superstructure.
I am not describing this experience in such detail because I think it is universally valid, but because it forms the background to how I understand Munch’s pictures. When at the beginning of this book I wrote about the conflict between what exists beforehand and what comes into being without precedent, and how this was absolutely fundamental to Munch, this is where it came from. And when I call some of Munch’s pictures from the 1890s ‘closed’, it is for the same reason.
I assume that the parameters of Munch’s era were different but just as powerful. And the striking thing about Munch’s oeuvre is that he fought free of them and found something that was his own – not without resonance with the rest of the age of course, but without obvious models – which he later left behind to paint very different pictures during the last forty years of his life, when it seems that less was at stake, where he himself took up less space, and where nothing was centred any longer.
At the same time that he sought his way into the open in this way, he continued to paint the old motifs again and again. He must have done so because he thought he could, because it seemed relevant. Thus, he cannot have seen the process, the actual coming into being, which is so visible in The Sick Child, as the most important thing. Presumably, what he took away from The Sick Child was the opposite, namely the iconic, that is what he found there and learned from. The girl’s gaze, the mother’s bent neck – that was the essence. He found his way to the iconic, which as soon as it was found, could be repeated, since it wasn’t the way there that was essential, that is, the changeable, but the opposite, what was unchanging about it.
Poul Erik Tøjner writes about this in his book Munch in his Own Words:
This may be the key to the ‘Munchian mystery’ – to that tormented search for escape from the encroaching world. Perhaps it is possible to imagine that works of art have a share in certain ideas, so that these ideas in a certain sense have independent life, but can only be seen when they are put into practice? Munch can. And that, so to speak, becomes his final formula for a successful picture: that it exists – and then it must be made.
When Munch had sold a picture it was not unusual for him to recall it for a while, making a replica of it for himself. Neither was it unusual for him to make several versions of the same picture, and the serial nature of his printmaking production speaks for itself in this connection. His whole working method indicates this strangely metaphysical approach: pictures are found, and are made, in that order. He often took a canvas and sketched on it, then took a new one when he had the feeling that a picture had been found. At that point it was simply a question of carrying it out.7
That Munch so often copied his own paintings has always seemed an oddity in his artistic career, and I have thought of it as a blemish, a form of cowardice, that he clung to what he had once made back when he was innovative and in the centre of
things. It had never struck me as a possibility that he might actually have considered the replicas as having the same value as the originals, that it was their iconic aspect that had value, that is, the motif itself and its form, and that finding them was the artistic achievement, as Tøjner suggests. That would also explain why after painting The Sick Child he didn’t turn towards a more processual approach and focus on the materiality of painting, which was another obvious possibility latent in it, and which other contemporaneous painters such as Monet and Cézanne moved towards, but instead towards the symbolic and literarily illustrative.
Monet and Cézanne also worked with repetition and seriality – Monet with his haystacks and his church facade, Cézanne with his Mont Sainte-Victoire – but in these pictures the repetition of the motif is a way of establishing differences between them, of relativising them in relation to the varying effects of light in the course of one day and to different viewpoints and variations of the seasons, in other words of dissolving the spatial into time, which also includes the artist himself, who in every picture is present in a way that makes simple repetition impossible, since faced with the motif the painting is created anew each time.
Munch for his part did not paint the motif again but rather the painting, as if it was unaffected by him or by the time that had passed, captured once and for all. So to him the picture cannot have been relative, it must have been the opposite: essential. And if we consider what he wrote about the creation of The Sick Child, that is in fact what he says. First he saw an image, which disappeared as he worked on it, and the rest of the years-long process was about finding again that image, which he had within him and which was nearly unaffected by what he had in front of him. The painting is finished when it touches on the image he first saw. Then it exists and can be repeated in every other possible medium without being diminished by the multiplication.
So Much Longing in So Little Space Page 8
