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About two years after I gave the lecture about Munch on the evening he would have turned 150 years old, in the festively decorated House of Culture in Elverum, I was contacted by the Munch Museum in Oslo, they wondered whether I would curate an exhibition for them.
Although I have never done anything similar, not even anything remotely like it, and although I didn’t know exactly what it would entail, I said yes without a second thought. It was a clear case of hubris, for my only qualification was that I liked looking at paintings and often browsed through art books. The hubris was of course connected with my lack of knowledge, it is always easy to say yes to something one doesn’t understand the scope of. Stupidity can also be liberating.
Some weeks later I visited the museum to have an initial meeting with them. It was late summer and sunny, I sat out on the terrace in front of the museum building together with the director of exhibitions and collections, Jon-Ove Steihaug, who took me through the very basics. That they had roughly one thousand paintings and twenty thousand prints in storage, and the major part of the exhibition would have to be based on these, but that it was also possible to borrow a few pictures from elsewhere. That there were four exhibition rooms. That the exhibition would first be done virtually, in something he called SketchUp, and that everything had to be ready a year before the opening. I realised that the museum’s processes were slower than I was used to. I told him it wouldn’t be a problem. Later he showed me around the four exhibition rooms and some of the other rooms that lie off long and labyrinthine corridors on several floors. The building is from the 1960s, and I liked the cumbersome and uncompromising aura it has, there were no open-plan offices or practical arrangements of rooms, and nothing to indicate that their business was visual art, just white walls and small cube-shaped rooms, brick walls, wood panelling and linoleum floors, not unlike some of the schools I went to as a child, built in the same period, based on the same notions of what an institution, a society and a human being was or should be.
In a few years the whole museum was to move to a brand-new, modern building, and that was why I had been invited to curate, Jon-Ove said, they wanted to take the opportunity to upend everything by inviting people from the outside, mostly artists such as Bjarne Melgaard, Per Inge Bjørlo and Lena Cronqvist, but also a cultural theorist, Mieke Bal, in addition to which they had had and would have a series of exhibitions which viewed Munch alongside the work of other artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe, van Gogh, Jasper Johns, Gustav Vigeland and Asger Jorn.
We arranged a further meeting, where I would present my initial thoughts for the exhibition. I already knew one thing, namely that I didn’t want to show any of the famous paintings. For what had struck me as I leafed through Munch’s collected works that first time was how much of it I had never seen before, how many-sided his pictures had been, and how interesting it was to follow the various currents, how they seemed to narrow and coalesce in certain motifs before they let go and flowed on into something different. When I looked at the famous pictures, I saw ‘Munch’, when I looked at the unknown works, I saw paintings.
All Munch’s paintings, including the best-known ones of course, were seen for the first time when he was still active, and in order to show who he was as a painter, I decided to try to select pictures that didn’t evoke ‘Munch’, based on the notion that ‘Munch’ was an obstacle that led all thoughts and feelings into a particular form.
Was it possible to see Munch without seeing ‘Munch’, in other words was it possible to see him the way he was when seen for the first time? Was it still possible to view pictures by Munch without knowing what to think?
Another thing I had noticed was that he had painted so many pictures that seemed harmonious, that weren’t charged with anxiety and darkness, but on the contrary were filled with sunlight and calm and people engaged in daily tasks out in the open. Bathing women and men, farmers harvesting or ploughing, sun-filled gardens, beaches and coves, horses, dogs and trees, everywhere trees, all kinds of trees, apple trees, chestnuts, elms, oaks, pines, spruces.
What if the exhibition were to begin there, with a room full of harmony? And if the landscape was then gradually emptied of people, shifting towards his empty but existentially charged landscape, and from there went on into his innermost self? And then back out again?
No chronology, no dates, no titles, no text, just a flood of pictures from the outer towards the inner and back to the outer again.
It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was all I had when I met Jon-Ove again, together with the woman who would be my co-curator on the project, Kari Brandtzæg. I was so embarrassed about my proposal that I spent more time excusing it than presenting it.
They said they thought it was a good starting point. Of course they had to say that, but although I knew this, I chose to disregard that possibility, and when I got home I began to select possible pictures in four different categories: harmony, forest, the inner world, portraits.
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At home I spent a long time cutting out pictures from the volumes of Munch’s collected works, placing them on the floor in the guest house, arranging them in four imaginary rooms, moving the cuttings back and forth between the various walls and different rooms, searching for a rhythm, a connection, an interrelatedness which would move through the pictures.
Munch was concerned with seriality, all his life he put pictures in and out of the series he called the Frieze of Life; what he was interested in was how the pictures worked in relation to each other. He himself wrote as follows about this:
I have always worked best with my paintings around me. I arranged them together and felt that some of the pictures were connected to each other in content. When they were positioned together there immediately arose a resonance between them and they became totally different than when displayed individually. It became a symphony.
That is when I decided to paint friezes.9
If one looks at photographs of Munch from Ekely, most often he is surrounded by pictures from all periods, and the impression this gives is of a work in progress, a continual painterly movement that he is in the middle of. It is as if he lives in his painting, a little like Proust during the final years of his life lived in the novel. And if one looks at the exhibitions he held, pictures from his entire career are included, as if he didn’t weigh or grade the different periods and styles against each other, but they were all part of the same. And yet it is as a painter of individual works that he is remembered. The German art historian Ulrich Bischoff writes in his book Edvard Munch 1863–1944: Images of Life and Death:
So central is the Frieze in Munch’s work that one might conclude that his art must be understood in terms of context and sequence. But every important work of art transcends the historical moment, the social background, and the formal conditions of its creation; and this is eminently true of Munch’s art too. It is the power of individual paintings that gives Munch’s work its enduring force.10
But I can’t help being fascinated by the other image, of the man who painted throughout his entire life and who in his final thirty years did so alone in large houses filled with paintings, which not only surrounded him but also depicted what surrounded him – the rooms of the house, the garden outside, the forest nearby, the image of himself in the mirror. And if one unlocks Munch’s position as the painter of individual works and allows the pictures to flow, perhaps other patterns and connections will be revealed. All those people standing in the landscape with their hands stretched up towards a tree or a berry bush who thereby resemble trees themselves. All the people without facial features, those who cannot be seen. All the trees mysteriously giving shape to themselves, some of them almost dissolved into the landscape by the movements of the wind, others bare and splayed, others again full of apples. The people around the apple trees, perhaps the most frequently recurring motif in all of Munch’s works, most oft
en a man and a woman, sometimes charged with powerful emotion, sometimes not. The empty landscapes, the bare smooth rocks along the shore, the forests, the strips of land, the fields. The cabbage field, painted at dusk, the colours green-blue and dark yellow, the line heading straight into the darkness, the atmosphere of peace and death it radiates.
Taken separately, few of these paintings can compare with his most powerful paintings from the 1890s, some of them are downright weak, but together they bring with them something else, I thought. Together they tell a different story.
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I also had an idea that the external forest should gradually turn into an inner forest, something chaotic and irrepressible, something untamed and almost unarticulated, and that this inner forest would be connected to the outer one through the materials, matter, art as objects. A wooden board with an image cut into it, filled with ink and pressed onto paper, a face etched into copper and printed, or into stone and printed. The oil paints’ own life, the spots and the stiff lumps of impasto, the layers of paint so thin the canvas shone through.
But what kind of an entity is ‘the inner’ when applied to painting?
Munch himself wrote about his paintings from the 1890s:
I painted picture upon picture in keeping with the impression made on my eye in a moment of heightened emotion – painted the lines and colours that remained fastened to my inner eye – to the retina.
I painted only what I remembered without adding anything to it – without the details that I no longer saw. Hence the simplicity of the pictures – the apparent emptiness.
I painted impressions from childhood – the faded colours from that time.
By painting the colours and lines and shapes I had seen in an emotional state – I wished to recapture the quivering quality of the emotional atmosphere like a phonograph.
This is how the pictures of the Frieze of Life came into being.11
In other words, he painted his memories and sought to recapture the emotions they had awakened in him at the time. These were defining memories, or they became such when he painted them; they were the basis of his understanding of himself, in them he could seek out what had made him who he was. Memories have this function for all of us. Without memories the thoughts and experiences we have and the feelings we experience would be as new every time, and our self would not have the force to maintain itself but would dissolve into the moment, would be boundless and unfathomable. This tells us that the self is something beyond our thoughts and emotions, perhaps merely a perspective on them.
That processes occurring in the brain can be fixed must at some point during the beginnings of life have come about through a practical need, so that the methods for staying alive, that is, the obeying of inherited drives, didn’t have to be reinvented each time. What characterises human beings is that everything which is experienced can in principle be fixed, so that the mass of elements against which the self views its thoughts and emotions becomes so overwhelming that the self becomes the primary thing, in other words the experience of existing, while maintaining this existence becomes secondary.
In the earliest art we know of, cave paintings some 40,000 years old, it is as if the two levels, experience and the maintaining of existence, are found side by side. The motifs are animals, around which early men’s lives must have been centred, since they lived off hunting, and it may well be that painting pictures of them meant conjuring them up, but what remains for us is the existential surplus, the joy and wonder that the animals exist, the manifest feeling of belonging with them, which the paintings not only show but also intensify because through the paintings the animals are drawn into the notional world of human beings. This notional world stands in the same relation to the external world as the self does in relation to the inner world: it prevents us from vanishing into it.
Both the self and the notional world are immaterial entities, they don’t exist in the same way elements of physical reality do, but represent a perspective on them, and in a certain sense it may be meaningful to call them fictions. But even though we understand the self through stories and are unable to represent it through anything else (Freud’s story about the self being the best known), in itself it forms no story, in itself it has no form. The inner world itself is unconveyed, that is its nature. The conveying of it, that is, the fiction or the story, is our way of understanding the self.
Munch’s ambition was to paint the story about the self, and the method he found was stylised and dream-like representations of inner experiences which were unified enough and lay close enough to known stories or archetypes to be decoded and understood. He removed everything specific and detailed, allowing only the unspecified sweep of memory to remain around the essential, which emerged with the force of a sudden and terrible memory.
But what is the self beyond the story? One way of seeing it is as a place that is continually becoming, where what is happening is continually merging with what has happened in ways and forms determined by previous experiences more or less powerful and decisive, but regardless of how rigid they might become eventually, there will still be movement, albeit along the same channels. The self is a work in progress, it understands itself through its memories but lives its life between them, in bits and pieces, in the present and in the past, in thoughts and emotions. And that is my story about the inner: something chaotic that one seeks to control through habits and experiences, sketch-like, unfinished, raw and unrefined.
For the third exhibition room, following the harmonious first room filled with people and the deserted second room, I therefore chose fragmented, unfinished and rough pictures: an old man with a mask-like face sitting with a young girl on his lap; the famous jealousy motif reduced to its very essence; the faces of a man and a woman in the background with a man’s face in the foreground; a woman’s back; a cascade of blood; a standing man and a seated woman in a picture that radiates unease and aggression; a triptych with twisted bodies; people in a death room more drawn than painted, in strong reds and greens; a seated woman with a mask on the floor in a painting so damaged that it appears to be something from antiquity, a wall in Pompeii. Everything is Munch, everything comes from him, and everything can be incorporated within the inner structures that the paintings in the Frieze of Life established, while at the same time this unity is purely notional.
Moving on from this room one then enters the last one, which has only pictures from the external world, in the form of a row of full-length portraits along one wall, along the others etchings, lithographs and woodcuts of faces. All were of people Munch had met and related to. Some of them he had loved, some he had feared, some had been drinking companions, others he had discussed art with or sold pictures to. But most importantly they were all people he had seen. For that too was a distinguishing feature of Munch and his character as a painter, how open he was to other people, not necessarily to their inner world, but to their aura. The portraits often live in the tension between the momentary impression and what it tells us about the character, and they differ from his self-portraits, which to a greater extent seem founded on something lasting, they are weightier and less fleeting than the portraits. The self-portraits show a human being as he is, while in the portraits one can easily imagine that the portrayed, as soon as they are out of sight and by themselves, will show something very different. Some of the pictures have an aura almost like that of real people, especially, to my mind, the portrait of Aase Nørregaard, who is incomparably alive. That he was close to her is obvious, he paints her as she is to him, and we can see the effect she has on him. Place the portrait of Aase next to The Scream, and you see not only the span of Munch’s emotions but also of a life.
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Its storage space must be the Munch Museum’s inner sanctum, that is where the main body of the collection is found, more than a thousand paintings that were in Munch’s possession when he died and which he wille
d to the Municipality of Oslo, in other words those paintings he didn’t sell and the versions of well-known paintings which he painted again in order to have after he had sold the originals. Time-wise they span the decades from the 1870s to the 1940s. The selection of paintings in this large collection was in a sense dictated by the art market, since the pictures which museums and art dealers in Munch’s time were interested in and acquired are not part of it. The most significant Munch collection in the world belongs to the Norwegian National Museum, it comprises almost exclusively pictures now considered masterpieces, bought at the beginning of the twentieth century by its then director Jens Thiis. The Munch Museum’s collection is vastly larger and much more interesting, since it covers every epoch, track and sidetrack in his artistic career, but it is also much more difficult to evaluate in terms of quality, since such a large part of it consists of uncanonical works, and it contains pictures that have never been shown, including sloppy or trifling works, complete failures, first attempts and experiments.
Munch kept everything; even the heavy stones he used to print lithographs, which it would have been natural to reuse or throw away, he dragged home with him from Europe and saved. Since Munch was such a careless painter, often uninterested in finishing his canvases, it can be difficult to say what status he himself assigned to his pictures, whether he considered them finished works, sketches or failures. One possible way of evaluating the collection is to say that it contains all his less successful works, in other words, one considers the pictures he sold his most successful. At the same time we know that Munch sold his work reluctantly, he called his pictures his ‘children’, and it is difficult to know how he judged the pictures that weren’t canonised in his lifetime.
So Much Longing in So Little Space Page 11
