(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
It is not color splendor that strikes one on the third floor of the National Museum in Stockholm. The writer and playwright August Strindberg was in love with gray. Glowing gray.
Whether it is clouds, waves or mountain scenery that tower on the canvas is not always easy to see. Often it is also not the most important thing. Strindberg painted when he couldn't write. He painted the storm of jealousy and the creative power of nature. Although he couldn't really do the craft.
In the autobiography "The Son of the Service Woman" he described it this way: "He had no intention of becoming a painter, exhibiting in the art society or the like. Going to the easel was like sitting down to sing. ”
International size
The exhibition "Strindberg – the painter and photographer" opened in Stockholm on 9 February. At the end of May, the around 60 photos will travel on to Copenhagen and in the autumn, France's turn. August Strindberg still has an international audience, also as a painter.
His interest in his paintings has been growing over the past forty years, both among art historians and collectors. His expression was contemporary to the contemporary, while the images are biographically interesting because they complement the authorship. Money is in them too. In 1990, one of his pictures, "Wonderland", went for almost 23 million Swedish kroner in the auction market. It's a Swedish record.
Jan Myrdal, who also has a Strindberg biography on the merit list, interprets Strindberg's commercial value as a combination of three conditions: The author is famous, his images are few in number and the style is uniform and easily recognizable.
The game of chance
When Strindberg imagined him painting, the process lasted only a few hours at a time. The painting was there and then. He carried on emotions to be expressed, and then the color palette got the rest arranged.
In the essay «New art directions! or The Slum in Artistic Creation, "he describes a way of thinking art that anticipates both 1920 century surrealists and postwar expressionism.
He depicts a process in which the spectator is involved in creating the image. The meaning is not given by the motif, it emerges in dialogue between the image – not the artist – and the viewer. That way, the image is always new. Its message varies with the way the light falls, with the viewer's state of mind. The artist's intention to paint the picture is of secondary importance and only for the initiates.
This was a new way of thinking about art, and it was not only due to his personal shortcomings as an executive painter. He himself was without formal painting education, and he had only a limited number of motifs to which he constantly returned. Mountain landscapes, cliffs and oceans, oceans and sky are recursive, as well as foliage that opens to light, storm or water.
He never painted people, and evil tongues mean it was too difficult for him. But it is also part of the story that the technical quality of his images developed over the years, even though the subject circuit remained the same.
And as an art theorist, he had a lot of ballast. He gained early recognition as an art critic in Sweden, and was, among other things, the first to introduce French Impressionism in Swedish newspaper columns. Throughout his life, he used to work closely with a number of painters, both in his home country, during his two Paris periods and in Berlin, where among others Edvard Munch was one of his close friends. Painting continues as a theme in his writing, as well as painters constantly appearing in various roles in his literature.
Literary photographs
Although Strindberg, in "The Woman's Son," so modestly compared painting with singing, it is obvious that at times he had ambitions as a visual artist. The painting helped him especially in the 1890 years, when he was unable to write. He was constantly working on exhibitions, and for a while he had his own agent to help him break through the Parisian market.
From 1886, however, he also worked on another visual form of expression, namely photography. And in these pictures we meet a completely different Strindberg, a man who experiments in a number of different genres.
Strindberg tried several times to embark on longer reporting trips, in order to depict the living conditions of French peasants as well as Swedish everyday life. The intention was that photographs should accompany the text, but the images failed every single time. Therefore, he never became a great photojournalist.
For a while, however, he and his first wife, Siri von Essen, worked on a photo series in which Strindberg himself is the main character in 25 of 37 images. The pictures are portraits showing the Author, the Family Father, the Dandy and a number of other stylized types. Unlike the paintings, the photographs are clearly more literary and narrative. These pictures were successful and their purpose was to become a book. But it was never finished.
Magic and science
However, he later developed the perhaps most exciting period in Strindberg's work as a photographer, side by side with the expression of his scientific interest, which followed in parallel with the painting after the divorce from Siri von Essen.
Strindberg did not rely on photo lenses, nor did he rely on the human eye. Therefore, he would rather take pictures with lensless cameras. An image emerged without the lens manipulation stood to him as more true and genuine. Preferably, he wanted to create portraits with such cameras, so-called "psychological portraits" where the model would be subjected to suggestion during the long exposure period and the camera would capture the soul's characteristics. It never came to that.
However, he came closer to nature's transformations. Strindberg was for a time an alchemist, trying to uncover the secrets of gold. Not primarily to make gold from lead and silicon, but to approach nature's creative mystery.
"The rock lives and can give birth to life" he writes in "Stenernas sucken" in the mid-1890s. And although Strindberg, in contrast to many of his friends who were influenced by symbolism and decadence, always had his work clearly rooted in reality, his relationship with nature was of a magical-poetic nature.
Strindberg believed that one could learn from nature's creative ability. Not to copy nature, though creation process.
Therefore, he also worked with two different photographic processes – one called crystallizations and the other celestographies. Both without the use of photographic lenses.
The crystallizations are photographic images of – salt crystals – which in their small, almost invisible richness of detail are reminiscent of plants, moss, various small plants.
In his celestography he tries to capture the starry sky, the cosmos, the life force itself. These images are dark earthy, almost black. And the little bright spots in them, which Strindberg thought were stars, were probably due to errors in the chemical operation of developing the images.
None of these images have strikingly great artistic value, nor do they hold goals as science.
What they testify most about is Strindberg's magnificent cosmic dream – his notions of the big in the small and the small in the big, of the earth and the dialogue of heaven with each other.
