The storage space resembles above all a bomb shelter, its walls, floor and ceiling made of concrete and the door of solid iron, but unlike a bomb shelter it has a high ceiling, perhaps five metres, and along the entire length of one of the walls there are closely spaced partitions reaching to about the middle of the room. There are pictures hanging on both sides of them, but the partitions are so close together, almost like the filing jackets in a filing cabinet, that one cannot see the pictures until they are pulled out into the room. Only the conservators are allowed to touch them, so there we stood, Kari Brandtzæg and I, looking on as a conservator wearing white gloves slowly pulled out one of the enormous partitions, and picture after picture appeared. They were not in chronological order, and it was impossible to predict which pictures would emerge. It was as if they were naked, it occurred to me, or unprotected. When exhibited in a museum each picture is hung in accordance with a carefully thought-out system, covered with glass and furnished with a plaque printed with the title and date and perhaps also an interpretative or contextual comment. These pictures seemed to hang just anyhow, few of them were glazed, and striking masterpieces hung side by side with the most unassuming sketches, wild experiments hung next to conventional landscapes, pictures from the 1880s alongside pictures from the 1930s, portraits and self-portraits with pictures of interiors, construction sites, city streets, shorelines, smooth rocky slopes, copses, fields, gardens. Some paintings were impressionistic, some were dark and as heavily glowing as Rembrandt’s, some were naturalistic, some symbolistic, some almost abstract.
To see all these paintings, and in this way, filled me with excitement, something febrile and boundless, for a whole life lay behind them filled with intensity, suffering, joy and creative force, which I had never before been so close to, and a whole epoch, which also seemed strangely present.
We looked at the pictures I wanted to include in the exhibition, occasionally Kari directed my attention to some I hadn’t noticed or hadn’t thought would fit in, we included some and rejected others, and it was a difficult task, since the criteria were unclear. A picture might fit thematically in a given room and yet I felt there was something about it I didn’t like, it didn’t do anything for me or it was banal, like the painting of a woman and hands reaching for her body and wanting to touch her, which qualified for the inner room, where gender was perhaps the most important factor, but which didn’t match my notion of quality, while at the same time it was undoubtedly Munch and represented his notion. So was I trying to ‘save’ him from himself? Was I creating an image of him which didn’t actually fit him, but rather me – and if so, with what right? Could I place myself ‘above’ Munch and direct his pictures into something which didn’t really accord with his view of reality? And then there were pictures I intuitively didn’t like but included anyway because they fitted the criteria, that is, they weren’t typical of Munch yet could be subsumed under one of the four themes, and because I felt I didn’t have a right to gainsay him – since he had painted them, surely they had to be good?
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When I read Stian Grøgaard’s book, the selection had already been made, in principle the exhibition was finished. Only then did I realise how naive I had been, simply snatching up pictures, for what Grøgaard did, which was rather unusual in the literature about Munch, was to judge the painterly quality of individual works in a way I perceived as being if not purely objective then at least clear-sighted and convincing.
Would the pictures I had selected withstand such an objective, critical, pre-canonical gaze? I noticed that Grøgaard called many of the pictures in the Munch Museum’s collection ‘basement drudges’, and I was seized by a bottomless anxiety: had I selected all the poor paintings by Munch based on an underlying notion that they were good because Munch had painted them?
At about the same time I sent an email to David Hockney – his knowledge of painting is enormous, and I thought it would be a good idea to invite him to an onstage conversation about Munch in connection with the exhibition opening. I received a nice reply, he wrote that he had several major exhibitions during the coming year and that his hearing was almost gone, but that he was interested in Munch and didn’t rule out coming. I sent him the list of works and the virtual exhibition, and then I didn’t hear from him again.
Did he fail to reply because the pictures were so weak? He, if anyone, would be qualified to judge them, I didn’t know anyone who could speak better or more interestingly and insightfully about painting in all its aspects than Hockney.
Why hadn’t I thought of this before? Why hadn’t I chosen some of the masterpieces, those that were as safe as the bank in terms of quality, why, oh why this endless row of sketch-like paintings lacking any charge?
It was at about this time that I sent Grøgaard an email asking if he might be willing to be interviewed about Munch for this book. He was, and I suggested that we meet in the basement storage space and look at pictures together.
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*
Slim, dressed in black, with sharp features I thought of as somewhat 1930s-ish and greying, combed-back hair, Stian Grøgaard stood next to me in the storage space a few weeks later. His eyes reminded me vaguely of Paul Auster’s, something about the faintly pouch-like wrinkles beneath them, perhaps, while his gaze was at once friendly and sharp.
– We don’t have any plan, I told the gloved conservator who had given me a half-questioning, half-encouraging look. – There are no particular pictures we want to look at. When I was here the first time, you just pulled pictures out, so one didn’t know what was coming.
– Is there a chronology here? Grøgaard said. – Is it thematic?
– It’s partly thematic, and partly chronological, but then suddenly it jumps again, the conservator said.
– OK, he said.
– One of the most exciting things I have experienced in my professional life was coming here to look at pictures, I said. – Not knowing what would come next. All kinds of strange stuff appeared.
– Actually I’ve never been here before, Grøgaard said. – And I haven’t pulled anything out. I’ve only been to the library here when I’ve been working on Munch.
– Very few people are allowed down here, the conservator said as she slowly pulled out one of the partitions with pictures, most of them drawings or half-painted sketches.
– These are probably sketches he made while he was working on History, he said. – And they may have been made in Kragerø, where I come from.
– You’ve painted yourself, haven’t you?
– I studied at the art academy and was a professional painter for a few years. And then I married a painter, and one of us had to find paid employment, so I became a teacher. But I also have a philosophy degree. So it’s kind of a combination. Philosophers love concepts, and I try to enter Munch’s universe armed with a few concepts that help one see it a little clearer. But of course I do bring with me some technical and practical competence from my training as a painter. I would sit copying in the National Gallery sometimes, including early Munch paintings. I was actually born in the place where Munch painted the sunrise! On the hill where he stood, and where he painted the portrait of Christian Gierløff. Right across from there is where I grew up. Ten metres away.
– One of the things you wrote in your book which made the greatest impression on me, which I believe is entirely true and which must have come from an actual experience, is what you say about style. That style is a way of controlling information. I have never seen this expressed anywhere else. But in that case, what is it like to copy Munch? Since then you are actually entering the same process and facing the same problems, except that they have already been solved?
– Yes, then you are coming to a sort of ready-made process. But a picture contains enormous amounts of information. In the old days one copied plaster or marble statues to learn how to draw, because monochrome sculptur
es were so well suited for analysing the play of light and shadow. And then one went over to drawing live models. So I have some of that old-fashioned training. I’m not sure I actually learned anything from it, but you become very familiar with the paintings!
We moved around to the other side of the partition.
– More sketches, I said. Grøgaard moved up close to the pictures and traced the contours of one of them in the air with his hand.
– This is a painter who made 1,789 paintings. In addition to drawings and graphic works and prints. You can almost see the pace at which the paintings were made. How quickly they were painted.
– What you said, that they would paint from plaster sculptures and paintings and models in order to learn technique, is interesting in Munch’s case. You write that it had to do with processing information and acquiring methods for this. And that Munch ran into difficulties with that when he painted The Sick Child. Why was that, do you think? What was it that hindered him, why didn’t he have it in him – and why just him? Why did he of all people encounter this difficulty?
– It is said about the architecture of Vienna, and its cultural life as a whole, that around the turn of the century there was a panic of style. If one considers the whole span from art nouveau to its opposite, functionalism, there was a desperate search going on for a kind of overarching form. And it hit Munch smack in the face as a young student at the joint studio Pultosten. His early years are marked by this kind of panic of style.
– Just him, or everyone?
– Especially him. Some had the patience required to become even more outré naturalists than Christian Krohg and Frits Thaulow, who would come to Pultosten and correct their work. In Gustav Wentzel and Kalle Løchen, for example, who belonged to the same milieu as Munch, one can see that they took pleasure in detail. Wentzel in particular was consistently naturalistic, he seemed to outdo the previous generation of naturalists with details and a kind of anti-composition. But Munch simply lacks the will for that, he is lazier than them, in a way. He would rather learn from Christian Krohg’s somewhat more impressionistic way of working. And then he has a problem. He can’t simply repeat Krohg’s naturalism or realism, it doesn’t come as easily to him, and he doesn’t go in the direction of a highly detailed style, clamping on to the motif and taking in an enormous amount of information the way Wentzel does. So what does he do? The Sick Child is an example of this despair. For in addition to observing a model taking the place of his sister, and Aunt Karen in Aunt Karen’s place from the time when Sophie died – she died in 1878, and he began painting The Sick Child in 1885 – he is also recreating that experience, what the English call re-enacting. What he wants to do is to create a remembered image. Somewhere around there is where things begin to happen. He wants to bring forth an emotion and to observe it at the same time. You might say that in The Sick Child there is a conflict of aesthetics. You have an aesthetics of observation, and you have a kind of aesthetics of remembering.
– Do you think Munch himself was aware of the conflict in that way? Or do you think he was just trying to do something but didn’t know what it was?
– I don’t think he was aware of it in that way, but I do think he was ambitious, and he wanted to expand Krohg and Thaulow’s painterly programme with remembering. After all, it was in the air. They were probably more au courant than we think! Symbolism was under way internationally, there was Arnhold Böcklin in Switzerland, for example, who painted memory paintings with a few minor observations which make them look as if they had been seen, as in Isle of the Dead, Die Toteninsel (1880–6). It is skilfully painted, but it is also a kind of memory or dream painting, a picture that isn’t observed. So it was in the air. From Munch’s writings it isn’t easy to determine how much he knew about French or German Symbolism, for example, but they probably knew something, and Krohg was relatively well informed. But a more philosophical point is that two styles or two views of painting collide in The Sick Child. And it is interesting to note that he didn’t repeat the solution he found in that painting later. That painting didn’t become Edvard Munch. But it could have! Apparently Hans Jæger told him that he mustn’t paint any more pictures like that. But I also think it’s possible that he didn’t go back to it because the picture itself became traumatic for him. He lost his sister, and he worked on that painting for a whole year. That tells us something.
– What happens to his painting after The Sick Child?
– He goes towards the opposite extreme. While he begins his career with close observation, where things happen as the painting is under way and he is almost passive in the painting process, keeping uncorrected lucky accidents which occur on the canvas as he paints, during the 1890s he becomes an intention-driven, calculating painter, for whom observation is no longer essential. He practically fantasises his way into the painting. You might say that he has become a kind of conceptual painter, he more or less settles on an iconography, a dramatic solution to a situation, and paints it into the picture without necessarily needing a model as he paints. It is as if after 1890 he is governed by a certain iconography. And that is what he has become known for.
– If he is painting a shoe, for instance, he does it in the same way everywhere, as if it is already finished before he begins to paint?
– Yes.
– That’s like with icon paintings, isn’t it?
– You could well say that, it is something like that. His work is full of mannerisms. One of his mannerisms is the wavy lines. They appeared before he had arrived at a Symbolist conviction. As early as 1887–8 the curved lines are there, and the gentle rounding of the figures. Often the drawing is what I would call sloppy. I wonder if he himself was aware of it? At drawing school he had been taught that there should be a variation of lines, a mixture of straight and curved lines, but he keeps giving in to these curves. It is almost as if there is a regression. In my book I talk about deskilling, and in his mannerist way of drawing there would seem to be a willed deskilling.
– But couldn’t that also be a sign of great strength and not just sloppiness? That he goes against what he knows? Would you say that Munch was a strong painter?
– Well, he was an excellent draughtsman, in his paintings he comes across as a draughtsman. As a draughtsman he is fairly dry, but there is something drawn about his paintings. And that may be one of the reasons why his position within the history of modernism is a bit dubious. In the narrow history of abstraction from Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso and onwards.
– His pictures from the 1890s were very successful, they made his name. Why do you think he stopped painting that way, why did he abandon that project?
– Well, he was sensitive to ideological shifts, and by around the year 1900 Symbolism was a dead horse. In 1902–3 he understands that piling up dramatic and literary items in his paintings is not what he ought to be doing. You can see this in Girls on the Bridge, for example, it has some of the same sinuous style, but it’s just an ordinary everyday situation, a Sunday on the pier in Åsgårdstrand. So you might say he is emptied of his own dramaticism around 1900.
– From your point of view, does that make his pictures better or weaker?
– I must say that I admire The Scream, for one would think it really couldn’t work, and Melancholy and Despair and others, they are fantastic, but that hasn’t been my main interest in Munch. I think his skill at observation, and for that matter his way of negotiating with observation when it comes to style, is very interesting. What he starts to do after 1900 is to produce paintings based more on observation. One might say that Symbolism consists of solemn or grandiose motifs painted in a careful or pusillanimous way. That is true of Gustave Moreau and Böcklin, for example. And one could say that expressionism is trivial motifs painted in a wild way. What is striking about Munch, and what makes him special, is that he paints solemn motifs, like The Scream and Despair and Melancholy, in a wild way. He stands midway between the two s
chools. So even though it appears calculated, this iconography, there is something rough and precarious about the way he works. And this to me makes him always interesting. But then expressionism comes along right after the turn of the century, and Munch too moves on to more trivial motifs, like the expressionists in France and Germany. It is difficult to say which way the influence went, in other words what he saw. But he was probably influenced by the fauvists, and they were probably not influenced by him, although some Munch experts have concluded that Matisse may have been looking over Munch’s shoulder in the 1890s and so on, but I don’t really think so.
– But if he returned to a way of painting that was more based on observation, what happened then to the problems he ran into with The Sick Child? Did he carry the idea of mannerism, the idea of simplification, with him, is that what enabled him to go back there, for it seems as if the problem no longer existed for him?
– He has figured out how he wants to do things, so in a way one might say that after 1900 he changes his theme but sticks to his way of working. He straightens out his lines a little, he doesn’t have the waviness to the same extent, but he never loses it entirely.
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In his book on Munch Grøgaard is particularly interested in a few pictures that Munch painted when he had his studio at Pultosten in the early 1880s together with other young artists in Kristiania. These are portraits, Munch himself called them ‘heads’, glowing heavily against a black or brown background, and there is something classical, almost Rembrandtesque about them.
When the conservator pulled out the next partition, we were faced with one of them. A young man with a reddish moustache, a ruddy face, red-brown hair, blue, somewhat evasive eyes.
– This is a very early picture, isn’t it? I said. – Munch wasn’t very old when he did this, was he?
So Much Longing in So Little Space Page 12
