However, it is also true that all people have a very particular aura, something unique to them. Often it is barely perceptible, and in social life it can be difficult to distinguish, their aura doesn’t penetrate our guard. Think of all the hundreds of faces and bodies we see when we walk through a city, how they just pass us by without leaving a trace in us. It is the same way with everything, every object or plant, every tree or landscape, every animal and every bird has its own aura, everything is unique, both in time and in space. And in the same way as with people who have a powerful charisma, we notice it when it becomes striking: the view of the mountains and fjords on the west coast of Norway makes us stop in our tracks, it can take our breath away, while the view of the outskirts of a city, with railway tracks, tufts of grass, car parks and supermarkets is something we hardly register. But this protective mechanism is not the same for everyone, in some people it is very strong, they are the robust ones, others hardly have it at all, and to them even a simple thing like travelling, with the flood of new impressions, chaos and unpredictability that entails, can be more than they can handle. And being with many people at the same time is unbearable, the different personalities and the many opposed wills are like a bombardment of the soul. Such people used to be called nervous – their nerves were too sensitive, they were thin-skinned – while nowadays we say that they are highly sensitive or, if they are paralysed by it, that they suffer from anxiety.
There is no doubt that Munch belonged to the latter category. His biographer Rolf Stenersen, who interacted with him over a period of twenty years, writes that Munch found it difficult to be with many people at the same time, he preferred to meet people singly and if possible only people he had known for a long time, and during such encounters he talked incessantly, which Stenersen thought of as another way he had of protecting himself, of shutting the other person out. This of course is the myth of the artist as being extra-delicate and sensitive, nearly unfit for life, but it has become a myth because it is so often the case. It is also relevant to our understanding of what art is, not least in regard to Munch’s art and especially the five paintings from Thüringen, for that is the essential thing about them, that Munch sees what is unique about this landscape – not that it differs from other landscapes, but the unique aura it possesses, which only this place has – and this is what he paints. He stands there unprotected against it, and it arises within him. He paints his encounter with the landscape, and the note it gives rise to within him, he awakens in us.
* * *
*
After a couple of hours I had finished writing the lecture. I wasn’t very pleased with it, because it was really more about all artists and all art than specifically about Munch, and because many of his pictures pointed towards something very different – no one could say that Woman in Three Stages stood open to the world and the unique radiance of people; on the contrary, everything in it was shut up within Munch’s own mind, which was hardly in touch with reality at all in that particular painting – but I was already late, so it would have to do.
I put my suit in a garment bag, packed a small suitcase and went out into the yard. The children’s grandmothers had borrowed the car and taken the dog to the vet, but they knew when I had to leave and would probably be here soon, I thought. The plan was to pick up a friend, visit the library in Malmö and listen to an interview with a writer, have dinner with the writer and her editor afterwards, and then take the train to Kastrup airport outside Copenhagen, spend the night there, fly to Oslo the next morning, stop at my publisher’s offices, take the train out to Løten and deliver my speech. I didn’t want to go, didn’t feel up to it, but I had to.
I was still standing in the darkness outside the house when they arrived. I picked up my friend, drove to Malmö, went into the library, it was packed, there were four hundred people in there, and we found a place to sit behind some shelves, where we could hear what was being said but not see anything.
I got a little drunk during the dinner at La Belle Epoque, I think the place was called, and didn’t feel the biting cold as around midnight I walked towards the railway station. My bank card wasn’t accepted by the ticket vending machine, so I got on the train without a ticket, they rarely check, but sure enough, on this particular night a conductor came, and she was angry and irritated when I explained the situation, she said she’d come back and give me a fine, but when I got off at Kastrup she still hadn’t come. Slept there, got on the plane, landed at Gardermoen, took the airport train to the National Theatre, went to Oktober publishing house to meet my editor. I had brought with me a picture I had painted for his fiftieth birthday, it was embarrassing, I handed it to him wrapped in a plastic bag, he asked me whether he should look at it now or later, I said later and got an SMS when I was on the train to Løten, saying that the painting was nice and that he liked it. Oh no, how awkward. I had wanted to give him something that wasn’t just an easy purchase but had required some effort, so the point wasn’t really for the picture to be good. But it was a foolish thought, for who wants an amateur painting? What can you do with it except put it in the attic? It is, as is so often the case with me, thrusting yourself on other people.
Can’t remember anything else from the publisher’s offices that day. I remember the train, the two people who were sitting in the seats near me, at the end of the first-class compartment, and the conductor who came, and I remember this because a man from the phone company here in Skåne called while I was sitting there, he was installing fibre-optic cable and wondered where I wanted it, a conversation which was cut off after a few minutes when my mobile phone ran out of money.
At the train station in Løten a woman was waiting for me. She worked at the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design and had studied art history, was perhaps a few years younger than me, and had a devil-may-care air about her. Said she had Tourette’s syndrome, or was that just a thought that came to my mind? She asked if I wanted to come with her to the farm where Munch had been born and have coffee with the people who owned it now. I wanted to say no, I didn’t want to meet anyone or talk to anyone, but I couldn’t, I never can when someone asks something of me face to face.
As we drove into the farmyard, dusk was falling. The farm buildings lay on a low hill, white fields stretched out all around. The farm must have been wealthy going back a long time, and it was well kept. Plenty of buildings, storehouse and outhouses and stable and barn, and a large main house painted white. The owners were around sixty, well dressed, well suited and hospitable, and they showed us the floor upstairs where the Munch family had lived in 1863 when the father Christian worked as an army doctor in Hedmark.
What was now one large room had then been three, I gathered. But several of their pieces of furniture had been preserved, including the bed where Edvard had been born, which stood against the wall. A cabinet with doctor’s implements stood by another wall.
It was completely still in there. The faint light reflected by the snow-covered fields outside barely shone through the windows.
He was born on this day, I thought. In this light and in this silence.
Much had changed during the 150 years that had passed since then, but not that.
That thought, that the light was unchanging, made it feel as if something stood open. And though I knew it was in me, it felt as if it was in the room.
Of course Munch was just another human being, and people are born all over the place all the time, but in the past few weeks I had looked at and studied his pictures so many times, in addition to reading and thinking about him a good deal, that I was close to his mental world, or perhaps rather to the states of mind through which he experienced the world, so on that afternoon I was particularly susceptible.
The woman who gave birth to him was named Laura Cathrine, she was considerably younger than Christian, and she would die only five years later, of consumption, and one of her children, Sophie, would die of consumption seven years
after that, another daughter, Laura, would become mentally ill and end up in an institution, while her second son, Andreas, would die as a young man, he too of consumption. Of their flock of children only Edvard and Inger would grow old, but neither of them would live a happy life, least of all Edvard, who despite all his successes and fame remained troubled, if we are to believe Stenersen, who draws a portrait of an unhappy, inhibited man, full of longings he was unable to fulfil, as if shut out from life with others.
The Munch family belonged to the official class, Christian’s paternal grandfather had been a parish priest, his father was a diocesan priest in Kristiania, his uncle was a bishop in Kristiansand, his brother was P. A. Munch, Norway’s most famous historian, their cousin was the poet Andreas Munch. So even though his father had financial difficulties while Edvard was growing up, and they at times lived close to the poverty line, I imagine that Edvard’s identity was linked to the standing of his family name, which would explain at least partly how as a young man of relatively limited means he could have such confidence in himself and his own talent that he was able to follow it to places none of his contemporaries wanted or were able to go.
They lived here once, in this room, Sophie, Edvard, Laura Cathrine and Christian. Little did they know that people of the future would be preoccupied with them, write books and read about their character traits, their lives and how they lived. I know more about them than I know about my own family, for the murk of history begins to gather over the parents of my grandparents, who must have been born at about the same time as Edvard Munch. There are no houses left in which they lived, no rooms where they stayed, no beds where they were born, everything has vanished into the darkness of the past.
I went over to the window and looked out at the white fields glimmering faintly in the twilight, almost completely drained of light now, turned back towards the room again, threw one last glance at the bed and went out, we were invited for coffee downstairs in the living room.
There was something so comforting about being there, I think now. December in the dusk on an old Norwegian farm, that was nice in itself, and the pictures and letters which Munch had sent to the family during the course of his life and which now hung on the walls on the ground floor, they were fine too, but what I felt was something else, something deeper, more moving, hopeful.
Perhaps that something began there, without anyone knowing it. And that something is beginning around us all the time, without us knowing.
* * *
*
Late last night, while I was selecting pictures for this book, I got an email from the artist Anna Bjerger. I have promised to write a piece for a book of her pictures which she is publishing. She had attached a file containing thirty photographed paintings, so that I had something to refer to. I had seen many of them before, but some were new to me, among them a fantastic picture of a landscape of fields, it is viewed from straight above, as if from a plane, the colours are predominantly yellow, but also orange, brown and green, the whole picture glows with colour, and the pattern of fields leading away into the background creates a delightful pull and a depth in the otherwise utterly flat landscape. Another picture, just as fantastic, as glowing with colour and as dominated by large fields, depicts a greenish ocean and a grey concrete pier where a boy in swimming trunks is sitting, his back is turned to the viewer, this motif too is viewed from above, at a slight angle. But my absolute favourite is the painting of a woman swimming underwater, the greenish and dizzying underwater space in it, the world of light one senses above her but cannot see, the green colours darkening towards the depths.
The world of Bjerger’s motifs is not unlike Munch’s – there are shorelines, there are fields, there are people in gardens, there are people in towns, there are portraits of faces and half-length portraits – but what they express is something very different. Whereas Munch charged all his pictures with himself – his own memories, his own moods and his own personal experiences – and did so in his own style with his own circle of motifs, so that we, if we are open to his pictures, can see what he saw and feel what he felt, Anna Bjerger uses photographs as the starting point for her paintings – not her own, but photos she finds at flea markets, in old magazines and weeklies, newspapers, books and user manuals. Her strategy is thus as far removed from Munch’s as it is possible to get, it might even make sense to say that it is the exact opposite. In Bjerger’s pictures the angle, the perspective, the motif and the framing have been chosen by someone else. Naturally, she invests something of herself in the choice of colours, style and the way the motif is reduced, but the personal, the deep-felt is already displaced through the difference between the person seeing and the person painting. The relation between the personal and the epochal becomes the theme of her paintings, that is what they explore and where they derive their force.
When I saw one of Bjerger’s paintings for the first time I knew nothing about this, but it was still present, there was a distance in the picture, something foreign which I was unable to locate but which still filled with me with a certain melancholy. It was probably precisely because the motifs so clearly belong to our shared visual experience, and that the impersonal in it, that stream of expectations flowing through it, which is an unacknowledged part of all of us, suddenly became visible, jolted out of the otherwise invisible context by the colours and Bjerger’s style.
Why melancholy?
I saw our loneliness, not the individual loneliness that Munch painted but the collective, that which arises when we disappear into each other. We cannot disappear in that way to ourselves, but others can disappear to us, and this allows us to see that we too disappear to them.
At the same time all of Bjerger’s pictures are beautiful, the colours are uniquely intense, glowing, not in the darkness but in the light. It is as if they celebrate at one and the same time the world and the loneliness within it.
* * *
* * *
I sent her some questions about who Munch was to her and whether she related to his pictures in any way in her own work, what strengths and weaknesses she saw in them, why it was that she always painted using photographs as her starting point.
I just received her reply.
I can’t remember the first time I saw a painting by Munch, it is as if his paintings have always been there, in my mind. His strength lies in his absolute integrity as a painter. His language is so self-evident, so wilful and clear. In his choice of colours and shapes he was ruled by his own logic, it is impossible to categorise him. The autobiographical is always present, but it doesn’t take over or become self-pitying, since his paintings are so clearly grounded in a tradition that is his own. Life and suffering are present in his brushstrokes, in the choice of colours and the composition.
I think that one goes through different stages in one’s relationship to the work of other artists. It is something changeable that allows one to continually discover new things and new works that feel more relevant. Munch often went back to the same motif, that is why I tend to think of his motifs rather than of specific paintings. What I notice most in his paintings is often something purely technical, how he paints hair, a kiss, a sunset or logs in the forest (bright yellow).
In my paintings I take as my starting point a prosaic gaze that isn’t my own, I use anonymous photographs as models. The universal gaze represented in these pictures interests me, since it conforms to a tradition inherited from the history of art. There is a stability and a neutrality in the motif which challenges me to make it my own, through painting it.
I am trying to remember how it came about that I began to paint from photographs, but it was something that happened gradually. In the beginning I used my own photographs, later the personal photos of others, but I decided that there was too much nostalgia in this, that wasn’t what I wanted to explore.
I am interested in the transformative moment when a photographic motif is reinterpreted as a painting, how obvious
one’s own mood can be in brushstrokes and colour. How much information and experience a certain colour tone can convey as compared to another, and how close to the non-figurative one can get before the motif dissolves completely.
I think that my pictures are often unassertive and open to several interpretations, while Munch’s pictures have a distinct and forceful aura. We don’t have much in common except that we are both painters, but I would never deny that I have been influenced by his paintings. To me he is a source of inspiration because he is such an obvious example of how painting can feel intimate, relevant and intense regardless of time and space.
I just thought of a late painting, Self-Portrait between the Clock and the Bed, from 1940–3. He is standing erect in the door opening, an old and frail man, diagonally behind him a clock is symbolically placed. Yellow light falls into the room and spills upon the floor. It is a playful painting, it feels as if he has executed it with rapid brushwork. For some reason or other my gaze is held by the bedspread. Something moves me about the way the pattern has been painted on a nearly untouched surface. There is such gravity in this painting, and the execution of it is so contradictory. Perhaps this is what his greatness consists of, that he succeeds in changing our notions about how the great questions in life can manifest themselves.
So Much Longing in So Little Space Page 10
