There is something slightly humorous about the picture too, the small and crookedly set up ladder, the man’s arm far above his head, while at the same time there is also a respect for the work, simply through the fact that Munch found the motif worthy of a painting, nothing elevated, just worthy of note. When we know that Munch was seventy-eight years old when he painted it and was considered to be beyond doubt his country’s greatest artist, to many the very emblem of The Artist, it is difficult not to see the picture as an ironic comment on his own life’s work. The man on the ladder is painting a house, Munch is painting a picture – what difference is there, really?
Munch painted a self-portrait at about the same time, it is one of his best-known pictures, it is entitled Between the Clock and the Bed, and it is unlike almost all his other self-portraits in that he depicts himself humbly, as a humble man. He is standing between a clock with no hands and a bed, in front of a wall hung with pictures and paintings, of which some are recognisable as his own. His hands are down by his sides, in a neutral position verging on the subservient or self-effacing, it says, Here I am as I really am. His facial expression is also neutral, conveying neither affect nor inner drama. His gaze, which has been so central to his work and his position in the world, isn’t visible, his eyes are almost entirely in shadow. It is as if he has positioned himself in front of us and in doing so is saying that this is all there is, this is me, neither more nor less.
Oh, how different it is from the self-portrait he made at the age of nineteen, which is so haughty! But also different from another late self-portrait, in which he is sitting in a chair with a blanket over his legs and turning his head towards us in a movement that is almost a snarl, odd because he is both exhibiting himself and guarding himself in one and the same motion. The man between the clock and the bed isn’t guarding himself, he is just standing there, very erect.
Or the self-portrait from Ekely a few years earlier, where he is peering at the sun with paintbrush in hand and being the great painter, to say nothing of Self-Portrait in Hell, where he gives his own suffering biblical proportions. But this? An aged man standing very erect in his bedroom, dressed in a suit and shirt, as if to answer to death, which is evidently waiting just around the corner. Maybe it wasn’t much, he seems to be saying, but it was still something! And there is plenty you don’t know about me.
The picture of the house painter is not a self-portrait, but it invites reflection about what painting meant to Munch, through the difference between the man who is painting the house, there amid the world, and Munch, who is painting a picture of it, he too standing amid the world, but not in it in the same way, for while the colour with which the house painter coats the walls is also in the world, as matter, the colours which Munch lays upon the canvas in addition create another world. It is this world we see when we look at the picture. The connection between the two worlds can be more or less obvious, but Munch never let go of it, not even in his wildest experiments, and here it is as if the connection itself were the main thing, that the world in itself and the painting of it are placed side by side through the similarity between the two acts, the painter painting the house, Munch painting the picture. Unlike the self-portrait between the clock and the bed, this picture is full of the joy of living, humour and a faint undercurrent of melancholy. For although the painting in itself is insignificant and perhaps hardly worth a mention – it has never been exhibited – it is part of a clear and strong theme in Munch, of people working, people in nature, and these pictures are harmonious and beautiful – often the people are stretching their arms into the air, they are picking berries, they are lifting wooden planks, they are gripping branches, they are painting a house wall – and their faces are never visible, their identity is not what is important, not who they are but that they are, and that they merge with nature as a part of it.
These pictures are invariably melancholy, for they are always seen from a distance, the person seeing them is not there himself, is not himself part of the harmony, other than the one found in the act of painting itself, the only way of celebrating life that he knew, by turning away from it.
* * *
*
Some days before Christmas I drove to Malmö to pick up the picture I had bought. I thought the auction firm’s offices lay in the centre of town, but the GPS on my mobile led me along railway tracks and past warehouses and workshops to a barrack-like building with a large gravelled yard outside. When it was my turn and the sales assistant fetched the picture from the storeroom and handed it to me, it was the first time I had held anything Munch had made: this he had had printed in Berlin and signed with a pencil in 1904, now I was holding it between my hands in an industrial area outside Malmö 112 years later.
I placed it on the back seat of the car with the lights from the windows shining in the darkness behind me, turned on the ignition and drove home with the roads full of cars just before the holiday.
It was a simple picture, but it was beautiful, and its aura was so strong that it took a long time to find a place for it on the wall where it didn’t totally obliterate the other pictures hanging there.
Thousands of human faces are drawn around the world every day. Children do it all the time, and all art students, amateur artists and professionals. They draw the same thing: forehead, eyes, nose, mouth and chin. Cheeks, ears, hair. And it isn’t difficult, all it takes is a little practice and a face emerges on the paper.
So what made this particular drawing unique?
For it was.
The amount of information had been reduced to a minimum, but without the presence of the face diminishing, on the contrary it was as if this gave it room to unfold in.
And that is what it’s all about, isn’t it? Presence? The presence of a human being, the presence of a landscape, the presence of a room, the presence of an apple – and the presence of the painting or drawing which lifts the human being, the landscape, the room, the apple to the fore.
In themselves pictures are beyond words, beyond concepts, beyond thought, they invoke the presence of the world on the world’s terms, which also means that everything that has been thought and written in this book stops being valid the moment your gaze meets the canvas.
Notes
1. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, translated by Daniel W. Smith, London 2003.
2. MM.PN.858, Munch Museum, eMunch.no. Translation © Francesca M. Nichols.
3. MM.T.2734, Munch Museum, eMunch.no. Translation © Francesca M. Nichols.
4. Stian Grøgaard, Edvard Munch: Et utsatt liv, Oslo 2013, pp. 48–9.
5. Edvard Munch, Livsfrisens tilblivelse, Oslo c. 1928, MM.UT.13, Munch Museum, eMunch.no. Translation © Francesca M. Nichols.
6. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Literature and Life’, translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, in Critical Inquiry Vol. 23, No. 2, 1997, University of Chicago Press.
7. Poul Erik Tøjner, Munch: Med Egne Ord, Oslo 2003, p. 43. Available in English, published with the title Munch: In His Own Words, translated by Jennifer Lloyd and Ian Lukins, London 2003.
8. Ibid. pp. 24–6.
9. MM.N.46, Munch Museum, eMunch.no. Translation © Francesca M. Nichols.
10. Ulrich Bischoff, Edvard Munch: Images of Life and Death, Cologne 2016, p. 63.
11. Edvard Munch, Livsfrisens tilblivelse.
12. Rolf Stenersen, Edvard Munch: Close-up of a Genius, translated and edited by Reidar Dittmann, Oslo 1994, p. 142.
Paintings
Unless otherwise stated, the paintings belong to the Munch Museum collection. Photographs © Munch Museum. All measurements in centimetres.
1: Cabbage Field, 1915. Oil on canvas, 67 x 90.
2: Rugged Tree Trunk in Snow, 1923. Oil on canvas, 95 x 100.
3: Garden with Red House, 1882. Oil on board, 23 x 30.5. Privately owned.
4: Elm Forest in Spring, 1923–5. Oil on canvas, 1
54 x 165.5.
5: The Infirmary at Helgelandsmoen, 1884. Oil on board, 67 x 58.5.
6: Inger Munch in Black, 1884. Oil on canvas, 97 x 67. The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo.
7: Snow Landscape, Thüringen, 1906. Oil on canvas, 84 x 109.
8: Under the Stars, 1900–5. Oil on canvas, 90 x 120.
9: Winter Night by the Coast, 1910–13. Oil on canvas, 92 x 112.
10: The Storm: Right middle part, 1926–7. Oil on canvas, 205 x 61.
11: Apple Tree in the Garden, 1932–42. Oil on canvas, 100.5 x 77.5.
12: Male Nude in the Woods, 1919. Oil on canvas, 160 x 110.
13: Model by the Wicker Chair, 1919–21. Oil on canvas, 120 x 100.
14: Painter by the Wall, 1942. Oil on canvas, 90 x 68.
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So Much Longing in So Little Space Page 19
