(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
The ever-present decay and a deceased mother waiting for the family to be reunited in the afterlife have left a deep mark on the child Edvard and shaped him as an adult. But what about the rest of growing up? What people did he meet, what did the family do?
The older ones defined the artist role for the younger ones.
The new Munch biography by Ivo de Figueiredo does not try to break into the family either, they are allowed to live their 1800th century life in peace. Perhaps you sometimes have to read between the lines. After his mother Laura died – then Edvard Munch was five years old – her little sister Karen came to step into a female role in the family. But there was never any erotic play that took place between the father Christian Munch and the sister-in-law Karen Bjølstad. At least not that anyone knows about. It can be imagined that growing up in a home where lovemaking seems to have been reserved for the deceased had an impact on Munch's rather complicated relationship with physical love. As is so often the case, love also appears rather vaguely in Munch's life story – and often described is the kiss Frits Thaulow's sister-in-law Milly gave him in Borre in the summer of 1885. He was then 22 years old and had been exhibited several times. Certainly it was an extramarital relationship that stretched over a certain time, reasonably embarrassing with kinship on all sides.
The biographies
The first two biographies of Edvard Munch came on his 50th birthday, in 1933. Both were written by people who knew the artist: art historian and director of the National Gallery, Jens Thiis, and visual artist Pola Gauguin. The latter was not only the son of Paul Gauguin and himself a skilled painter and painting school teacher, but also a diligent art writer in the daily press. What Thiis and Gauguin have in common is that they knew the artist, but they were still faced with a much leaner supply of sources than what exists today, even though the majority of the people mentioned in the books were still alive – with all the advantages and disadvantages that might have entail. Nevertheless, we should be able to ask ourselves if it still exists stoff to dig out or new ones perspectives on known material justifying de Figueiredo's two-volume work. The first volume is called Stormen and is now available.
The third generation
There is a strong tradition of seeing Edvard Munch's life and art in context. An interesting part of his life unfolds in the time between the two major works from his youth: Study from 1886 – which since 1889 has been called Sick of Myself - and from 1927 The sick child – and Scream, 1893. De Figueiredo makes some interesting observations about how Munch with The sick child "broke the boundaries of people's perception of what a work of art could be". Was the naturalism or realism that characterized the so-called third generation in Norwegian art history about to play out its role? And between the lines we also seem to glimpse a second generation, which counts the exponents of the golden age itself: Thaulow, Krohg, Werenskiold, who basically held their own unashamedly well, at least as artists, which meant that 'the young', where Munch basically is the only name that remained as a pillar in the narrative of art, had to use all his strength to achieve the excess.
Munch arrived at a painterly form where painterly simplification enables a suggestive form.
Krohg concluded that Munch alone was the third generation in Norwegian art. When we think of the slightly older painters' hopes for the younger ones, it is not only of polite interest. That generation of painters had set themselves the task of creating an art environment on Norwegian soil – with living institutions and even an interested public – and the effort they put into this could have benefited from being more deeply embedded in de Figueiredo. The older defined the artist role for the younger ones, including a transmission of the idea that the new is never understood by the general public – as Ibsen proclaimed in En folkefiende.
A revolution without a manifesto
The sick child is not only the mature Munch's first work, but just as much a picture of a new era, so clearly referenced through Hans Jæger's lack of understanding of the work. Jæger stood together with Krohg as the ideological center of the bohemian circle around which the young flocked. But this had suddenly acquired an age-old patina over it. The sick child was a work that was enough by itself. Whatever that might mean, it in any case meant that it was not a means for something else, as, for example, Christian Krohg's paintings of sypics and prostitutes were.
De Figueiredo calls the work "a revolution without a manifesto", before leading into the field a demonstrably artistic flower meadow that Munch prepared for himself. For a short while, if nothing else. The last years of the 1880s show a complex artistry, and in the years leading up to his first solo exhibition – in 1889 – we see an artist with many ways of painting, but who rarely goes beyond what someone else was already doing.
Works like Ginger on the beach, malt i Åsgård beachand Spring, painted at home in the family's living room with the housekeeper Betzy Nilsen, who also modeled for Study / The sick child, allows man to be depicted more or less left to his own thoughts – as Jappe Nilssen also appeared a few years later in Melancholy. In the latter, Munch has also arrived at a painterly form where painterly simplification enables a suggestive form. The lonely person is a prerequisite for the expressive world artist who appeared in the 1890s.
And Europeans world art
Munch's canon in particular came to be created through some hectic working years in Berlin and Åsgårdstrand in the early 1890s. Through the biography, one can almost experience that the frivolous reality bohemians swarmed for in 1880s Christiania, had come to reality in 1890s Berlin, where Munch was part of a milieu which – according to de Figueiredo – led conversations that revolved around "naturalism and socialism, decadence and Darwinism and psychology – as well as an ever-so-small dose of Satanism”. Nevertheless, there is much evidence that Germany was still characterized by an unprogressive art public. Perhaps even narrower than in the home country. Before Munch's third solo exhibition in Berlin could open on 3 December 1893, Munch could write home to aunt Karen that "there will probably be a terrible outcry over the exhibition". His laconic puns hit the spot. The negative response must have been palpable. Scream is an iconic work, with an interpretive history, to which many ingredients are added: hysterical women, slaughterhouses, volcanic eruptions – and a wide range of personal relationships.
Shot in Åsgårdstrand
Ivo de Figueiredo's first volume ends with an unclear situation that leads to a shot in Munch's left hand. We may not know exactly how this happened – did Munch prevent a suicide, or did chance let him avoid becoming a murderer? In any case, de Figueiredo cites an important date: September 11, 1902 – the day the art vant over the woman in Edvard Munch's life. The relationship the artist had with Come on Larsen, has been given a lot of space in the Munch literature. So here too, but it is put in context with a century which is also about to disappear, and an artist's role which in the new century must be different.
Did Munch prevent a suicide, or did chance let him avoid becoming a murderer?
In this sense, the shot in Åsgårdstrand can also be understood as a full stop and at the same time an opening for what was to come.
We draw readers' attention to the larger Munch exhibition magic of the north, will be visiting Berlin at the Berlinische Galerie – Museum für Moderne Kunst until January 22, 2024. Se https://berlinischegalerie.de/ausstellungen/vorschau/edvard-munch/
