Edvard Munch – The Island
In the early years of 1900 Munch exhibits many places in Germany, Paris, Vienna, Prague, Copenhagen and Budapest and paints one masterpiece after the other: Girls on the Bridge, Dance of Life, Fertility, and Melancholy.
Concurrently with these works Munch paints a number of Norwegian landscapes almost without figuration. These works in their consciously simplified manner, where details are toned down, attains a great monumentality.
Munch paints amongst others a series of paintings from Ljan by the Olso fiord, autumn images with view from the north beach during sunset and winter images with dark blue spruce and pine trees and moon coloured snow.
The painting The Island was also painted here. The island appears in the horizon as a dark rock formation, the sea is painted deep blue. It’s the twilight hour around sunset. The sky is golden in the left side of the horizon and draws towards a, more pastel yellow and light blue above the island. The sea mirrors this late beautiful light in yellow, blue and green nuances with its darker violet tones in the shade.
In the front of the painting it looks like a small puddle of water has gathered at the rocky coast. In the left side a dark figure or shadow appears. Is it a branch that reaches over the water from a tree near by? None the less it is a figure that draws the viewer’s attention. It is a small physiognomy that gives a kind of presence of something or someone to this rather deserted scene. Some of Munch’s spruce and pine tree landscapes may from time to time appear almost troll-like.
Upon closer inspection of the coast, this little puddle resembles one of the ghostlike figures that Munch has also painted in other works such as for example ”Mystery on the Beach”.
The beauty of nature is striking in The Island. There is an almost dramatic silence and melancholic tranquillity present in this work. Shadows, movement and light play the overall dominating role. It is a painting that seems to convey strong emotions and that awakens strong emotions, as with the sunset over the sea and nature may in reality.
Edvard Munch – SEATED YOUNG WOMAN
After some hectic years in Europe with a large production and a life style including many late hours in bars, Munch has a nervous breakdown in 1909 and goes to a clinic in Copenhagen. Upon recovery he moves back to Norway where he rents a mansion at Kragerø and succumbs to a self imposed isolation; an isolation that is intensified because of the 1. World War with the travel and trading restrictions following from this.
Munch had long been a recognised painter in Europe and was now finally recognised in Norway and given a number of exhibitions. It is though the old Munch, ’the painter of the soul’ in a symbolic style that is recognised, and at this time Munch had removed himself from this and was painting in yet another way.
Already Munch’s images of bathing men from Warnemünde before his breakdown ushers in a new epoch: Munch shows a much more immediate and extrovert relation to not least people but also nature. Visible is a new simplicity, immediacy and vitality in his paintings from this period. He paints landscapes, portraits, workers or season- scenes in this more realistic and expressive manner as visible in for example Winter, Kragerø from this period.
During these years Munch works on the large decoration for the assembly hall at Oslo University. A decoration the he won in a competition and which is completed in 1916 and which praises Nature, History and Science.
Seated Young Woman was painted the same year, 1916. Munch had for several years lived at Kragerø, and had also bought a large house in Ekely, Oslo. He used these spacious houses as studios and also built large outdoor studios where his paintings could “harden”. Munch filled all the rooms of the houses with his paintings as he enjoyed being surrounded by these which he even called his children or warriors. Thus he also has a considerable number of portraits of friends, collectors and patrons that he did not wish to sell. “Some friends one has to have around”, Munch ironically commented on his self-imposed isolation.
Munch had been paintings portraits all his life. There were portraits that had been ordered but increasingly also paintings of friends and acquaintances that he could use as models. Munch thus asked his visiting friends and local people to sit as models for him.
Seated Young Woman is exactly such a model paining. In this case it is his friend Frøydis Mjølstad that had been sitting for him, a woman Munch painted several times from 1916 and onwards.
The painting was painted in a manner much alike the German expressionism that Munch was a forerunner for with the emphasis on moods rather than the realistic representation of the outer, physical world.
In 1913 Munch states: ”Now it’s the turn of shadows. For realism it was facades. For Impressionism, character, Now it’s shadows and movements.”
Shadows and movements – these are exactly the principal elements in the painting of the sitting woman dressed in black. Remarkable are all the things happening in the picture-plane surrounding her which gives the painting of the model a powerful emotional atmosphere rather than being a mere realistic representation.
The dress is painted beautifully in stern expressive brushstrokes and she sits with her hands together in her lap. Her gaze is looking downwards, she certainly seems downhearted. Remarkable is how Munch brings forth the melancholy in her face, especially around the eyes. Here Munch is close to Matisse in regards of bold colour scheme, and simplicity.
The extremely expressive background makes this painting intriguing. The painting is of an almost turbulent character; there is a suggestive emphasis of the three dimensional element and a movement outwards in the otherwise so quiet portrait. The ochre-yellow wall is painted with brushstrokes that appear to encircle her figure and round her like a protecting cave. A dark figure, a blanket thrown over the furniture or a part of her dress is draped around her neck and gives a dark, meaningful and perhaps ominous shadow? It is not easily decipherable as with the entrance to the room which seems like a dark-blue stairwell. Behind her it seems a fireplace is burning. The powerful yellow colour from the fire sends it’s sparks into the space and illuminates and warms her. It is almost as if the room protects her. Her face expresses melancholy, yet is at the same time wrapped in passion. She appears encircled by a protectable heat that may keep the dark shadows in check. Without one knowing anything about this woman one is able, from the painterly technique, to sense affection towards this woman and her possible worries.
Munch has throughout his oeuvre used shadows in symbolic manner. The shadows take up a significant space in his works, enough for them to be of importance and often the shadows may resemble human figures as is visible in The Island.
Georg Baselitz - edvard
Georg Baselitz is one of Germany’s most significant contemporary artists. Throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s he was deeply involved in the debate about the relation between art, society and history. As predecessor of the neo-expressive group of painters, who during the 1970’s were known as the “Neue Wilden”, Baselitz was instrumental in the development of a new figurative and expressive painting. This had a partly conceptual starting point and was engaged, with a certain amount of irony, with the role of the artist and with discussions on the significance and meaning in paintings as such. Baselitz and many of his contemporaries confronted the difficult question of the role of the German artist in the wake of National Socialism and Holocaust.
Baselitz is known for turning his motives upside down. Thus he deconstructs the painting and highlights the viewers’ role as spectator and forces him to think about meanings in a very concrete manner.
Edvard Munch was of inspiration to many of the painters who had their break through with the new German painting in the 1980’s. Georg Baselitz has always been fascinated by Edvard Munch and his work. In an interview with a Danish newspaper in 2004, he says:
”I am related to all the painters who explore painting. However already during my school years I felt almost biologically related to Edvard Munch. (..) And I still love his works. I understood him immediately and I still continue to use quotations and formal practices from Munch.”
Baselitz has from the onset made works with Munch’s characteristics: Stylistically in his intense and quick brush strokes, and thematically in the numerous works connoting to Munch’s works. Baselitz has also throughout the years made paintings that are direct portraits and dedications to Edvard Munch, not least in recent works on paper that in watercolour and loose lines brilliantly capture Munch as he appeared shortly before his death.
Edvard (1988) is a classic Baselitz portrait upside down. Turning things on its head has been a strategy for Baselitz over decades as to avoid the narrative painting. Baselitz thus turns our relationship with reality upside down and forces us to look at things in a new manner. The painting is cut vertically intro two parts; in the left side is ”Edvard”, whom in that case appears as a man also with female breasts and in the right side two trees that mirror one another horizontally. Knowing Munch’s works the hermaphrodite echoes Munch’s androgynous self-portrait from 1926.
This painting was a study for his large painting ”The Human Mountain”, that he made while preparing for the commission he had won for the University of Oslo.
Baselitz is most definitely familiar with Munch’s androgynous self-portrait and Edvard visibly gather inspiration from this work not least in the colour scheme that Baselitz amplify in a more bright and powerful palette. The background is strong yellow, the body strong green, pink, red, white, black and grey blue. The contrasts are powerful and the painting highlights expressive brush strokes.
In addition to the reference to Munch’s self-portrait, the face with the open oval mouth carries references to Munch’s most famous painting ”The Scream”, an artwork that has become synonymous with Modernity and the basic human conditions of the Twentieth Century: Existential loneliness and fear.
The tress in the right hand side of the painting appears like a column. They are trees of a graphic character also known from Munch’s numerous bare landscape paintings. As often with Munch they almost have an anthropomorphic character, as bodies or here as hands that appear to be reaching out for one another.
Baselitz often apply motives from his close surroundings; the hand, the chair, the house, or the tree. As motives they are objects applied as to activate the painting’s surface: “No painter starts off looking for motifs. That would be a paradox because the motif is in the painter’s head, a thinking mechanism”.
The motif is thus crucial for the pictorial plane and only very incidentally so for its meaning. When Baselitz encloses his motif in a grid or rests it upon a lattice, when he leans it against a tree, it is in order to connect the figure to the background with the same awareness as Cézanne, who held fast to his motif (“je tiens mon motif”), knowing full well that without the thread of a construction leading it back to him, everything would fall apart.
Georg Baselitz – Blauer Mann
Blauer Mann is a Baselitz painting with significant references to the work of Edvard Munch. In Baselitz’ characteristic upside down optic we see a blue figure on a brown, coarsely painted background. The figure holds his hands in front of him in something that resembles a gesture of praying. On the right side of the figure another head is attached seemingly holding his hands to cover his ears. Both faces have an open mouth.
This work clearly connote to The Scream, Munch’ s most famous work from 1893 with its characteristic figure with the open mouth, iconic of the human despair, powerlessness and angst of Modern society. The intense colours, the perspective and the waving lines are an expression of the depicted person’s deep despair. He is approaching us with his mask-like face whilst his hands are covering his ears and screaming without the passers by on the bridge even noticing.
Recognisable in Blauer Mann is also Munch’s late self portrait “Between the Clock and the Bed“, (1940-42). This painting has Munch as an old man in a blue suit and this male figure seems to be mirrored in the blue clad male figure in the Baselitz painting.
Baselitz seems to remix both of these Munch paintings in Blauer Mann. The Munch figure has though been given a white goatee by Baselitz and a pink halo above his head, as in Christian iconography. His arms are not drooped along the body but in stead joined in front of him as in a posture of praying, so that he almost becomes a saint like status. Perhaps this is a humoristic gesture from Baselitz? Is Munch perceived by him as Godlike? Of notice is also the face at the right side of the painting holding his hands to cover his ears as in The Scream, but in this version wearing sunglasses.
With Baselitz echoing Munch’s self portraits in many of his works it is obvious to see this painting in comparison to Munch. The colours are the same as in The Scream and the expressive and very coarse brush strokes encapsulates the same perspective around the figure.
Louise Bourgeois – cell xiv (Portrait)
Louise Bourgeois’ career spans the 20th century. The recognised American artist was born in 1911 in France and was a young woman in Paris at the time of surrealism. Shortly hereafter she moved to America, where her own production gathered speed concurrently with the success of abstract painting in the late 1940’s. Bourgeois has since the 1960’s and onwards been a leading figure in the revolt against exactly Modernist abstraction in art. In the 1980’s she had her great international breakthrough and she is today considered one of the internationally most respected contemporary artists.
Louise Bourgeois has throughout the years experimented with as differing media such as sculpture, painting, drawing, graphics, installation and sound. She has expressed herself in materials spanning the classical marble and bronze, latex and nylon; ripped and recycled garments, and found ready-mades.
Louise Bourgeois’ oeuvre is as Munch’s centred on human existential conditions. As with Munch her works are based on her own experiences – the deeply personal is the foundation of her art. Bourgeois’ art is about the human in relation to its surrounding, the traces of childhood, family relations, dreams, and the subconscious making itself felt. It is about the painful love relations between the sexes and about questions of sex and gender as such.
Cell XIV is a large cell made of steel, containing a podium with a sculpture of three heads made of red fabric. It is distinctly Munch’s Scream at play in this piece. In the later years these fabric heads have often been a theme of Bourgeois’ art. Most of her heads look straight ahead and are placed just below the spectators’ eye level, encaged in a cabinet. All these heads are unique; they have varying facial expressions and differ from the each other by the fabric they are made from i.e. tapestry fragments, towels, striped ticking and pink gaze. These handmade sculptures are complex and refined in their execution. They are finely assembled by many pieces of fabric yet have a degree of coarseness. They appear both as death masks and as faces that have been gazed after a serious burn.
Louise Bourgeois began constructing these cages to ensure independency from the exhibition space for her installations. In this way she could guarantee a specific size and control the manner in which the viewer interacts with her objects. These cells often work as a kind of materialization of nightmares. In many of her installations these cells are like cabinets containing objects from childhood, from the subconscious, from her father’s tapestry workshop etc. The cells are a rendering of an “inner prison”:
“The Cells represent different types of pain: the physical, the emotional, the psychological; the mental and the intellectual. But the question is when the physical becomes emotional? It’s a circle going round and round….Each cell deals with the pleasure of the voyeur, the thrill of looking and being looked at.”
Louise Bourgeois is a strong heir to the early Munch. Her works deal with themes of the life lived, the sexually problematic, motherhood, parenthood, and what has been emotionally repressed – as the dreams of the night in daylight.
To include traumas and images from childhood is keeping in with Munch.
Her representations of embraces of being two alone together are as with Munch often ambiguous. She has said that her works are true to childhood optics, to a time where she did not comprehend what the adults were doing: Are they enjoying themselves? Are they fighting? Is the one about to kill the other?
Louise Bourgeois has made several embracing couples in terry cloth, and she is in fact using materials from her own home in many of her sculptures. She should have said that she wants to use up all linen, underclothes, dresses, towels and other fabric from her house before she dies. In this “cannibalism” something new is brought to life.
There are many versions of these embraces in Louise Bourgeois’ work - some even with several couples. The latter can be related to her own childhood with many brothers and sisters, and several persons sleeping in the same bed.
Others are more sinister - as i.e. Couple IV, 1997, where bodies wrapped in black cloth and with no heads are having sexual intercourse in a Victorian glass case. They are uncanny in their bulging anonymity; one of them has an artificial limb, which can be seen as a symbol of emotional amputation, a lack or a pain.
Louise Bourgeois’ work is about human life, about what she calls the drama of the one among the other. Her art is about how to create connections and passages to the inner emotions. She always uses her own in her art, and her works reflect this dynamic between brawn and fragility.
Peter Doig – Night Fishing
Peter Doig is one of the most interesting contemporary painters. Due to the lightness of his multiple layers of colour, his paintings have a dreamlike and suggestive quality. Even though they are oil on canvas they have the character of watercolours. Peter Doig posses a completely unique painterly expression which draws association to painters as different as Edvard Munch, Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, Caspar David Friedrich and Gustave Klimt.
Doig usually works from a conceptual starting point; it may be from one of his photographs, images found in books, papers, magazines or films. There are recurring themes in Doig’s works: deserted landscapes, houses, beaches, trees and a lone canoe on the water. His childhood in Canada seems to be of significance to the many amazingly beautiful winter landscapes. Likewise his present residence in Trinidad is reflected in his many tropical beach motives. Doig’s paintings are not reproductions or recalls of memories from these places, but rather investigations of different conditions such as “homeliness” or “folklore” or of imaginary places such as a “wilderness”.
Doig’s reworking of a motive from a photograph or from memory onto the canvas’ imaginary landscape is conveyed with intuition and empathy as well as an intrepid, almost romantic colouration. The thoroughly worked through surfaces expresses an emotional transfer, that is transmitted on to the viewer. Many feel they have experienced what is taking place in Doig’s works. His colleague Daniel Richter have remarked the following: ”Doig’s simulated memories [select] the kind of approximated and casual ”moments” that immediately click with everybody”.
One of the recurring themes in his works is the lonely person in a canoe out on the water or fishing in a boat as in Night Fishing. This painting represents a man who is out fishing, at night, in a red canoe. It is difficult to distinguish the details in the darkness, but one definitely gets the feeling of being in a tropical landscape with the great lushness surrounding the man in the boat. The man in a boat is a classical symbol of death throughout art history and Doig’s work also conveys this connotation.
The painting is a gem and shows in essence Doig’s ability to create atmospheres that touches the viewer. There is a quietude and melancholy in the silent night image that bears likeness to Munch’s melancholic landscapes of the same emotional and tense atmosphere.
What is “homely” is a theme of interest to Doig, and it is remarkable that many of his paintings depict houses; local houses, international architectural wonders villas, lodges, log houses and farms. To Doig what is homely emanates from human experience, as with the transfer from the hand onto the painting. Doig’s paintings can sometimes be almost sentimental and bordering on kitsch – but, as with Munch, there is always something “unhomely” in his paintings as well. There is as described by Sigmund Freud in “Das Unheimliche” a situation where the familiar and safe is reverted into something uncanny. There is an ambiguity in Doig’s works, an ambiguity that also plays on the relationship between dream and reality, metaphor and concrete.
All Doig’s houses appear uninhabited. With their dark windows they look uninviting rather than cosy and homely. His red house must relate to Munch’s “Red Virginia Creeper”. Munch’s house is likewise deserted and abandoned, towering on the top of the hill and with the human figure caught up in angst in the foreground.
The beautiful moments of silence and beauty are in contrast to the more disturbing elements. Doig’s remarkable colour combinations emphasise the ambience of a magic realism. An example of this is Gasthof zur Muldentalsperre which gives rise to yet another Munch comparison: the starry sky, the symbolic nature, the people on the bridge.
ASGER JORN – L’abominable homme des neiges
Edvard Munch was one of the greatest inspirations for Asger Jorn in his artistic development of a spontaneous, renewing and abstract expressionism. In 1945, right after the war, Jorn travelled to Oslo to see the first great Munch exhibition. Jorn was not the only artist, who was inspired by Edvard Munch in the following decades – this was also true for the artists Egill Jacobsen and Carl-Henning Pedersen. Thus Munch was of great importance to the COBRA-movement.
First and foremost, it is the way Munch links content and form in his art that fascinates Jorn. In Munch’s art, Jorn saw a completely natural connection between the brush stroke and what is expressed. Particularly, the way organic lines both frame and draw the figures fascinated Jorn, and it is an artistic method Jorn applies when making his own art.
The influence from Munch is a more spiritual or thematic inspiration rather than a formal adaption. A common motif by both painters is the confrontation between man and woman. Formally there are also similarities; Munch’s rhythmic lines are in harmony with Jorn’s organic brushstrokes.
To Munch painting was a direct expression of the soul – to Jorn art was the realization of the unconscious.
Occasionally the spatulas and the brush was a detour for Jorn who often applied paint with his fingers, nails and matches to get in a more direct contact with the canvas. His creative goal was to explore the human relation to nature and its latent powers. The energy with which he forms his plastic metaphors stems from this fundamental attention to life, on the forces of nature, to the continual re-creation of life.
Common to Munch and Jorn was also their attitude towards the role of the artist. Both saw the artist as an active ideological agent in society occupied with tradition and renewal, politics, science and art.
PER KIRKEBY - Untitled
Per Kirkeby, is without doubt one of the most significant painters in Europe today. With reason his works are often put into perspective of great Scandinavian painters like Edvard Munch and Asger Jorn. Per Kirkeby has often acknowledged the importance of these painters for his art and he has written books about these artists.
Per Kirkeby is known for his large, complex and partly abstract landscapes. They are landscapes painted expressively, however Per Kirkeby is not considered an expressionistic painter in the classical sense where the artist transfers his intuitive gestures spontaneously and directly onto the canvas. Kirkebys art is formed by the 1960’ies American Pop Art and Conceptualism. From the onset he has included visual quotes, patterns, images, comic strips etc. from the modern media world.
Kirkeby often forms his paintings around a principle he has termed “the structural of the motive”. His background in geology and his interest for the natural sciences has importance for the structure of his paintings where DNA-molecules, constellations, geological layers, and organic structures are the pillars of his works. Even though his works are abstract, they are often built up of numerous of such more concrete layers.
Untitled from 2006 is an abstract painting, but obviously a kind of landscape.
One finds turf-like earth in dark brown shadows in the top of the painting, an ochre delta, a river bed? Below are dark green fan-like figures, like bushes? And a grey shell-like object in the left side of the painting.
Some of these motives – or figures, are well-known from other Kirkeby paintings. Like Munch, Kirkeby often works in repetitions and series, and motives are turned over and used again and again.
It is particularly the landscapes that connects Munch and Kirkeby. Kirkeby likes to let sketches and outlines of the painterly process remain visible in the completed work, as Munch also did.
The kinship between these artists is perhaps strongest in the way emotions emanates from their landscapes. There is a great material and textural effect in both painters works, which give their work a powerful sensuous effect that transmits to the viewer.
Bjarne Melgaard – An Excuse for a Reflection
Bjarne Melgaard's works have often been compared to Edvard Munch’s not least due to his amazing ability to create expressive spaces of a strong sensuous atmosphere.
Bjarne Melgaard’s paintings and installations are expressions of a very personal universe where experiences from his own life and interests are elaborated upon intellectually.
His universe has from the onset focused on masculine sexuality and identity and has in the exploration of this been in touch with the black metal culture, steroids in hardcore gay environment, glamour and staging of the self, the scene around Andy Warhol’s ”The Factory”, Asger Jorn and Guy Debord’s ”Situationism”, Norwegian farmer culture and Greenlandic ethnographic.
His exhibitions often resemble a sort of collages, mental landscapes or three dimensional narratives that sample numerous expressions and materials with his paintings and drawings as the striking centre.
His paintings are often built up from roughly drawn figures in broad, black lines onto a background of thick layers of paint in bright expressive colours. This is combined with playful, lyrical, and soft brushstrokes. Melgaard has invented different characters or alter-egos: monsters, elephants, Chihuahuas, ghosts, male figures made of penises, or small men with either several or oversize heads.
The painting An Excuse for a Reflection has one of Bjarne Melgaard’s characteristic figures with pet-like facial features in its centre. The painting has broad crossing black lines cutting up the painting into sections, and layers of soft coloured stokes in beautiful pastels. Writing which deconstructs or comments on the painting is to be found all over: ”Not important line”, ”Abstract”, ”Important line” – and the title of the work: ”An Excuse for a Reflection”. “Reflection” has the ambiguous meaning of both ‘mirroring’ and ‘thinking’ which are both descriptive terms for Melgaard’s work: He uses painting as a mirror for his self, as Munch did it, and he does it with the same intrepid exposure of himself; laying bare sides others would rather keep for themselves.
Bjarne Melgaard is an authentic voice in contemporary expressive painting. His idiosyncrasy, his expressive and barrier-breaking style, is close to artists such as Jorn and Munch. The power and the energy are characteristics of Bjarne Melgaard’s works and his amazing ability to create powerful spaces.
Erik Parker – Snitch
Erik Parker is well known for his very personal and visually seducing paintings. With his large, brightly coloured images that twine human-like figures, organic shapes, and psychedelic patterns, he invites us into his private universe.
Apart from shapes and colours, words are an important ingredient in Erik Parker’s universe. Often the theme or the title of the painting is announced in large letters across the canvas, or the words grow from a figure, or are enclosed as text inside the figure’s head. Present in the significant writing that from time to time carry both personal (mis)spellings and dyslexic reversals, are humour and a blunt sarcasm – as when he refers to art collectors and auctions in the art world; an economic circuit which his own works have become a part of.
Often eavesdropped snippets of conversations can be the onset for a theme in a painting. In the execution of the work Parker then freely lets his associations flow along as a stream of consciousness. Music is a significant precondition for this work. His studio in Brooklyn, New York is dominated by a large table in the middle upon which all the paint pots are arranged in tone in tone colour coordination so that his working rhythm is not disturbed by looking for a particular colour. Adjacent is another table upon which his Mac and a record player is placed, and his vinyl records in boxes on the floor. Thus the whole process of creation is influenced by a rhythmic groove also visibly expressed in the works.
Parker has been invited for the Munch exhibition to include a current interpretation. The result first seems far from the aesthetic of Munch as the figure more looks like a brightly coloured Arcimboldo. It is as if the face of the figure is without skin so that one is able to view the inside of the underlying mechanic and bones. Something internal has been exposed, and the mouth is open as in a choking scream. Is it perhaps a contemporary interpretation of Munch’s Scream?
The title of the work, ”Snitch”, means to steal or gossip, perhaps alluding to the artist as someone who always borrow or lean against others?
Parker has previously challenged himself in relation to Picasso which Why Me? is an example of.
