Many of Munch’s paintings from the 1890s have this distinctly iconic character, for example Vampire with its visual fusing of the female and the male, or The Scream with its striking emblem of anxiety, the open mouth and the hands pressed to the ears, or Jealousy with the anguished face in front of the couple in the background. Puberty with the naked, vulnerable girl sitting with her knees together, her arms protectively crossed and a large shadow looming to her right, By the Deathbed with the five heads hovering over the coffin.
None of these paintings are about facing something without preconceptions and then painting what one sees. Nor are they about the process of creating the painting or about its painterly aspects; the centred figures dominate everything else, the rest is there merely to emphasise what the figures represent. The pictures strive towards the most precise expression of a state or a phenomenon, they search for the point where everything can be brought together, and this makes them extremely monologic internally, closed to everything else in the world but the one thing they represent. And the landscapes they are set in have an air of seriality about them – the background in The Scream is also the background in Despair, Anxiety and Sick Mood at Sunset, Despair, while the line of the beach forms the background in, for example, Melancholy, Woman, Summer Night’s Dream (The Voice) and Separation, and through repetition appears as a stage set where interchangeable events occur. All this, both that the figures are supposed to represent something universal and that the space they inhabit is serial, diminishes their uniqueness, and comes in addition to the Jugendstil quality of the wavy lines, which belong to the time and the culture as much as to the painter.
According to my aesthetic preferences, or what in literary terms is called poetics, all of these aspects are weaknesses of the paintings. What Deleuze wrote – ‘To write is certainly not to impose a form (of expression) on the matter of lived experience’ – is exactly what Munch does in his paintings from the 1890s. Furthermore, in the world of literature a dominant idea, which I have always shared, is that only what cannot be transposed into other media is of literary value. Quality lies in what is specific to the medium – you can’t successfully film a novel by Jon Fosse because the essential thing in his novels lies in the writing, that is where the essential is expressed. In Munch’s paintings from the 1890s it is the other way round – he searches for precisely those forms of expression which can be transposed into other media, and reduces his pictures to the lowest common denominator of expression, which is the iconic, as both Grøgaard and Tøjner point out. And Munch also transposes in the other direction – he transposes elements typical of literature into pictures, and he creates spaces resembling those found in the theatre.
But these are arguments. And you can’t argue against feelings. For despite their weaknesses, despite the obvious banality, Munch’s paintings from the 1890s possess unique emotional power. And their monologic quality makes it impossible to remain unaffected by this emotional power; for that one would have to turn one’s back on the paintings. It is precisely everything that is wrong with them, aesthetically speaking, which makes them effective: that they are closed in on themselves, have no real pictorial space and are almost exaggeratedly iconographic.
Every time I look at Melancholy I am struck by the mild and mournful waves in the sky, they also arise within me, in a place far beyond the reach of reflection. Then, when reflection intervenes, it might be with the thought that the sad face in the foreground actually looks rather foolish and makes the painting a bit silly, as if thought wants to correct feeling, to shame it. Every time I look at the woman and the man on the beach, I am struck by their loneliness, and my own loneliness attaches itself to theirs, but not in a painful way, it is more that I catch sight of it and realise that it is a fundamental condition shared by everyone, something life is really about overcoming. For all these paintings are existentially charged, and their charge lies in their emotional power, which overshadows the otherwise banal. That, I think, is the only reason Munch’s pictures in particular have survived from that time and stylistic epoch. Symbolism itself was dead almost before it emerged.
The comparison with Dostoevsky’s novels still seems relevant to me, for Dostoevsky placed as little weight on the description of rooms and landscapes, the construction of scenes and the development of his characters as Munch did on pictorial space and the people within it, and for the same reason: they both wanted to get straight to the urgent and important thing, what was burning within them. Compared to his contemporary Tolstoy’s novels, Dostoevsky’s seem sketch-like, ramshackle, his solutions are hasty and the mood feverish, verging on the hysterical. Tolstoy describes every room and every character elaborately and fully, and regardless of how dramatic the events are, they are always rendered in meticulous detail and take place against a background which lends them depth and complexity and not least aesthetic perfection. Dostoevsky was always imperfect because he put feelings and the life of emotions before everything else. Tolstoy was the greater writer, that becomes clearer to me every time I read him, but Dostoevsky in some areas accomplished more, went deeper, into what only intensity could open up: grace, self-annihilation, the mystery of the divine. The events in his novels may be unconvincing in their melodrama, but this is overshadowed by their power.
Munch possessed the same kind of intensity, he wanted to get straight to the essential, and although his temperament was cooler, he had less insight into life, and divinity and grace were entirely absent from his pictures, still their power is so great that it nullifies aesthetic judgement. Munch’s domain was not ecstasy and religion, good and evil, but life and death, woman and sexuality, and above all loneliness. I am certain that he personally sought the essential, that is the unchanging truth, but his view of woman, for example, founded as it was on fear and desire, and his view of death as an omnipresent entity, never far away from sexuality, is now apparent to us as something typical of the age, that fin de siècle atmosphere which pervaded art and literature in the final decade of the nineteenth century. It belonged to Munch and his private experience of loss, and it belonged to the age he lived in, but it doesn’t belong to us. And in this too there lies a power of fascination, for that something personal and typical of the age is presented as something universal and valid for everyone, makes it seem almost monumentally alien, as if sent to us from another world: the world of loneliness, the world of sexual anxiety, the world of the death-woman temptress.
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With his sharp and sober gaze, which sometimes places inordinate demands upon the painting, Grøgaard strips Munch bare in canvas after canvas, but he does so with respect and insight, and always with differentiation, so that The Scream, for example, is held above the other Frieze of Life paintings and viewed as almost incomprehensibly ground-breaking and advanced in its wildness. Grøgaard writes that Munch struggled to maintain his standard and seems surprised whenever he actually succeeded, and I think that view of Munch must be close to Munch’s own, for of course he was aware of his own limitations and knew well when he had gone beyond them. But these considerations of painterly processes, of which possibilities stood open to him, which were made use of and which were left untried, what he succeeded in and where he failed, viewed against the painting’s own premises, are merely a part of the picture – the other part concerns us, the lay viewers of his paintings, and what they give us. In Poul Erik Tøjner’s book on Munch that is the perspective to a greater degree, so although Tøjner identifies the same problem areas in Munch’s pictures from the 1890s as Grøgaard does, he understands them differently. At times he seems almost shocked at how good they are.
Munch has the dexterity of the poster artist, yet for all that his pictures are not poster-like; he is still a painter with a grasp of the multiplicity of the senses, but first and foremost he is aware of the surface of his painting and its profound power of statement. He stamps out his subjects, and even though they may be executed with the most slovenly o
f brushes, they are still astonishingly accurately balanced in relation to what they are meant to express. It is like when, in the course of a long conversation, the decisive single words fall just so. Over and over again. A kind of taciturn eloquence, precision in naked form.
And then there are all the characteristics of confrontational aesthetics. Wildly unfolding, always, in Munch’s work. He arranges the space with a characteristic sloping foreground. The pictures dip, and it is almost a miracle that Munch’s figures haven’t fallen out of the paintings over time, quite simply slid down the wall, for that’s how the whole thing is constructed: the paintings are like chutes sending the depicted subject straight into the arms of the viewer. And there YOU stand, and have to answer for yourself.8
There are no rules in art, only conventions, and this makes judgements about quality so complicated, for criteria of quality also change of course and are based on conventions that are as difficult to see and identify as the tone of the times or the dominant pictorial language; as with these, arbitrary opinion comes to seem something natural and indisputable, at least in its broad outlines. My notions that a painting should explore that which is specific to painting, that is, colours and shapes, that literature should explore what is specific to literature, that is, writing, belong to modernism and were not operative as art theory during the 1890s, although many artistic practices embodied them. Munch’s paintings from the 1890s have really always been wrong – back then they were too unfinished and too flat, now they are too banal and too medium-unspecific – and when they have seemed right, this has been based on other premises, as precursors to expressionism, for example. Paradoxically, they have also always been considered significant, works of art produced by an artist we still have to engage with.
For me the pictures have always been there in a way which makes them easy to forget or to underestimate, which seems incomprehensible as soon as one stands in front of them again. This is so, I think, because the familiarity I feel in relation to the pictures after having seen them so many times and in so many settings is contrary to their fundamental character, which is the opposite of familiarity, namely strangeness. Realistic paintings create a sense of familiarity because they are set in a space we know, and when Munch broke with that convention it was in order to establish another, for him deeper, familiarity, through the iconic, where the figures expressed something universally true and came alive in the tension between the alien, the Sigbjørn Obstfelder-like strangeness of everything and the familiarity of the iconic.
The iconographer of strangeness, that might be an epithet for the Munch of the 1890s.
TWO
On 11 December 2013 I was sitting as I am sitting now, behind my desk, looking out at the snow-covered lawn, the sky above the trees up by the churchyard, while the light slowly began to fade. I remember the exact date because the next day I was supposed to give a speech at the House of Culture in Elverum to mark the 150th anniversary of Edvard Munch’s birth in the neighbouring municipality of Løten. Also, I was keeping a diary at the time.
Only a few hours remained until I had to set off, and I still hadn’t written anything I could use in my lecture. The previous weeks had been chaotic, I had been alone with the children, had had to drive here and there, the car had been at the mechanic’s, one of the children was having a hard time at school, which had repercussions at home, and the kind but stupid and for me unmanageable dog had a sore on its chest that I hadn’t had time to attend to. Then first one and then the other of the children’s grandmothers had come here to visit, since I was going to Norway, and new tensions filled the house. I was so worn out that I only kept going out of sheer willpower, but when the day – the high point of which was always the journey home from school with the children in the car, across the fields where darkness lay like an ocean and the lights of the tractors that often drove along in the far distance filled me with peace – was over, I always sat up late in the office, I needed time to myself, it felt more important than sleep. I would sit in the chair beneath the lamp, drinking coffee and smoking and looking at the pictures in the four books I had containing Munch’s collected paintings. I gazed at picture after picture, and eventually I became familiar with almost all of them, yet for all that I still couldn’t come up with anything to say about them.
There are pictures of more than 1,700 oil paintings in those books, they span more than sixty-five years, a whole lifetime and two world wars. They begin in a world where the horse and cart were the usual means of transportation and end in a world with aeroplanes, cars, radios, films, cameras, submarines, aircraft carriers and rockets. They begin in a world where paintings reproduce scenes representing reality, rooms where people sit knitting or reading in the light of oil lamps, and end in a world where painting has broken away from its task of representation and become abstract. Dadaism, Futurism, surrealism and cubism have all by then briefly been the future, but are already the past.
Viewed in the light of historical and cultural developments, Munch’s pictures are relatively consistent, it is possible to see or at least to understand that they were painted by the same man, but seen as a whole, as a closed pictorial universe, as Gerd Woll invites the reader to do in those four volumes, the pictures are remarkably different, and that is why I struggled to write that speech – what could I say about Munch’s art that would be applicable to all his pictures? What, if anything, was the unifying element?
I thought of a Munch painting I had seen once in Bergen, of a snow-covered landscape, I had been unprepared for it, and my eyes grew moist. I was nineteen years old, and the loneliness in the painting seemed infinite.
Now I looked it up and studied it again. It was from Thüringen in Germany, one of five motifs he painted there in 1906.
It didn’t have the same effect on me now, it is something quite different to see a photographed painting reproduced in a book than to see it in reality, especially when it comes to Munch’s paintings. When they are photographed their colours become dense and the paintings seem glossy, whereas in reality the colours are so thin that they barely cover the canvas and are often rather dry. This unfinished look adds to the character of each painting, it is not just a picture, it is this picture, a particular object in the world. And the unfinishedness points back to the moment the painting was made and to the person who made it.
But I wasn’t thinking of that the first time I stood in front of the painting. It opened up vast spaces within me, as only art can do, when it feels as if my emotions are greater than me, that they stand open to the world, almost as if they are the world.
The fundamental feeling was one of loneliness, of being alone in the world. Not without friends and family, not without other people nearby, not actual tangible loneliness, but a wild and existential one: I am here, on earth, and I am here alone.
Where in this painting was loneliness? Where was it located?
The landscape was deserted, but many painted landscapes are, and yet they don’t evoke a feeling of loneliness.
I assumed the reason Munch had found this landscape worthy of five paintings had to do with the snow, that the snow cover was so thin that the colours beneath shone through it everywhere. A field leads away into the picture, the whiteness is broken up by reddish and brownish stripes. To the left is a field of green, to the right a field of yellow. Beyond the field there is a downward-sloping hill, also reddish, and behind it lies a forest, painted as one continual field of dark green. The sky above is dirty white, almost yellow. The forest and a solitary tree growing at the foot of the hill distinguish this painting from the other four, which only depict fields.
Which is to say practically nothing, for what matters is that the painting is alive. It has a resonance, it oscillates, it is almost like music. This resonance is what the emotions latch on to and what lifts them, as music can lift one’s emotions.
The painting blends with the feelings, a harmony arises. But only if one is open to it, if
not the painting is merely a few lines and colours. It was the same thing when Munch stood before this landscape 111 years ago. He was open to it and it began to live within him, the oscillations in the landscape became oscillations in his feelings. If he hadn’t been open to it, it would have been merely some lines and colours, a field and a hill.
This openness to the world is what I ended up writing about in my speech. For the world is not something in itself, ready to be observed. The world comes into being in our gaze all the time. It isn’t, it becomes. It is impossible to live in this becoming, it is impossible to grasp, therefore we have developed a whole range of different ways of managing it. We call it knowledge. We know that the sky is blue and consists of air, we know that trees are green and consist of trunk, branches and leaves. We know that sand is light when it is dry and dark when it is wet. We know that sugar is grainy and tastes sweet, we know that a bathtub is smooth and hard and that water doesn’t disappear into it the way it does with more porous surfaces. We know that what is far away looks small, while what is close looks big. We know that our neighbour likes to talk a lot, that one of our colleagues often uses too much eau de cologne, and roughly how heavy a shopping bag with four litres of milk in it will feel. We know what our father was like, and our mother, and we know what our friends are like. We know what it is like to climb out of a plane in southern Europe when it arrives from Scandinavia: the air is like a wall of heat. We know what a tulip looks like, and a glass of water when it has been left on the dining table after dinner and is full of little bubbles, we even know how the water will taste, lukewarm and flat. All the knowledge we have about the world acts like a shield, something we hold up against the world so as not to be overwhelmed by new impressions. It is a practical strategy, and it isn’t something we think about, it applies to everyone, presumably also to animals. We can’t just feel, we have to live too. Once in a while we meet someone who pierces all this, the people who change a room as they enter it, or take possession of it. They have what we call charisma, a peculiar quality that is difficult to define, it has nothing to do with looks, but rather with who they are. It has nothing to do with what they can do, whether they are skilled or knowledgeable, it is something more primitive than that, it is their way of being which is attractive.
So Much Longing in So Little Space Page 9
