In nearly all of Munch’s pictures, even in the landscapes emptied of meaning, there is a certain solemnity, perhaps only through the act of selection, as if the picture is saying, I have seen this. And that this is thereby elevated, by becoming art. Doig’s pictures seem to be striving to eliminate the solemnity, and if so, it must be because they can give a truer picture of reality without it. In Munch the world comes out to meet us, with Doig it is neutral in terms of meaning, closer to ground zero, which of course should not be understood as something in the world itself, for the world is full of shapes and patterns, light and shadow, but rather as something within ourselves when we look at it. It is possible to think that art itself has charged it, and that Doig’s pictures from the 1990s use art to neutralise the charge, that this is why the information they contain is minimised as far as is possible without the world itself disappearing. Their contemporaneity lies in the absence of solemnity, for solemnity is no longer a part of our lives; the vertical axis running between man and God, man and the sublime, man and fate, has become historical, in that we now relate to the horizontal, to the grid, where everything is connected at the same level. But what Doig retains even as he neutralises the world is the mood it gives off. The resonance of a rainy day, the resonance of a snow-filled sky, the resonance of a deserted road outside an empty house.
Other of Doig’s pictures seek the iconic, but not in order to capture the universally human, as Munch did, Doig attempts rather to capture visually striking moments. A man in a red canoe on a blue ocean with a green island in the background. A man walking along a wall carrying a parasol. A girl high up in a tree with long branches. Or the wonderfully evocative picture of a red articulated lorry crossing a field with dense forest in the background as twilight falls. That painting, which is called Hitch-Hiker and is from 1989, wakens some of the same feelings as Munch’s Cabbage Field.
But if one looks at Munch’s and Doig’s paintings side by side, the differences are often greater than the similarities. Isn’t the connection merely that both painted figuratively, people and landscapes, and that the commonalities between them belong to figurative painting itself, in the most general sense?
That’s what I thought until I saw Doig’s painting Echo Lake from 1999. It is so like Munch’s painting Ashes from 1895 that it can’t be a coincidence, Doig’s must be a direct reference to Munch’s picture.
Ashes shows a woman lifting her hands to her head in a wild and desperate gesture, with her hair loose and looking straight ahead. Next to her a man dressed all in black is seated, his head bent. The male figure is cut off below the waist and everything about him signals a turning away: the blackness, the bowed head, the missing facial features. Around them there are light-coloured rocks, behind them the forest stands like a dark wall. No horizon, just the vertical tree trunks and the darkness shutting them in.
Echo Lake depicts a man standing on a beach in front of a lake, with black forest behind him. He is lifting his arms in the same way as the woman in Ashes, but he is seen at a greater distance, so the gesture might be expressing something very different, he might for example have shaped his hands into a megaphone – a possibility suggested to me by the title. Some metres behind him to the left a police car is parked, while a few metres behind him to the right there is a tree which repeats the shape of the male figure – or the shape of the woman in Ashes – only enlarged.
The forest, the rocks, the iconic posture is the same, and even though Doig’s picture contains other things too – a lake, a police car, a lamp post – we are definitely in the same pictorial world. Doig’s world is filled with something else, for while Munch’s picture tells a story about a man and a woman, about desire and desperation, about openness and closedness, and about the loneliness that can arise between people, Doig’s picture tells a story about a policeman who has driven to a lake, got out of his car and is standing in front of it. That story is commonplace and very particular, the generality lies in what Echo Lake takes from Ashes as a kind of stage or scene for the human, where the human isn’t fixed, as in Munch – for there is no escaping that situation, it belongs to the universally human, that is what Munch’s picture expresses – but is something that can appear in ever-changing forms. What kind of power do the place, the trees, the forest, the beach, the emotions that flow through us really have over what we are? Doig’s picture seems to ask – but only if we set it next to Munch’s picture one hundred years older.
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Art is as much about searching as it is about creating. But if so, for what? For entrances to reality, openings into the world. When sometime during 1885 Munch began to paint a picture of a dying girl in her sickbed, the problems he posed himself were essentially the same as Peter Doig’s or Stephen Gill’s. Form determines what can be shown or said.
So what does one do when the determining form makes it impossible to say what one wants to say, show what one wants to show? Then the form has to be broken down, has to be destroyed. Then one is forced in a sense to become an iconoclast. For only when the form has been broken down can a new form arise, allowing room for what until then did not exist, or what until then there was no room for. Then a new entrance to reality has been created.
Far and away the best book on Munch I have read is about this. I found it by chance in the shop at the Munch Museum a few months ago, it was somewhat hidden away on the shelves, and since I had never heard of it, I took it out. It lacked the colourful and visually attractive dust covers which art books often have. Something that looked like an X-ray image of The Sick Child dominated the otherwise entirely black cover of the book, which was entitled Edvard Munch: An Exposed Life and was written by Stian Grøgaard. I had seen the name before but knew nothing about him, though I vaguely associated him with art criticism and the weekly newspaper Morgenbladet. I browsed through the book, decided it couldn’t do any harm to buy a copy, and on the train to Gardermoen airport that afternoon I began to read. I read while I waited for my flight, I read sitting in the plane, I read on the train to Ystad, and if it hadn’t been so dark in the taxi home from the train station I would have read there too.
The avidness with which I read this monograph on Munch reminded me of the greed that sometimes came over me while I was studying more than twenty years ago, not literature but art history. Literature is writing, it is invariably couched in language, which literary theorists can channel and explore but rarely if ever revolutionise. After all, there are only so many ways of reading Madame Bovary. Visual art is languageless, theories about it are presented in a very different medium, which doesn’t touch the original work. The language of theory can be more or less relevant of course, closer or more distant, but the reflections it presents are always something wholly other than the experience one has when looking at a picture. This is obvious. The books and texts which made me greedy, which made me feel that I was on to something, were often about the basis of a work of art, its genesis, the moment when it goes from being nothing to being something. Martin Heidegger’s essay The Origin of the Work of Art was one such text, because it was so simple, not simple to understand but simple in the sense that all its concepts and its entire thinking concerned entities that were simple and familiar to everybody. Statues by Michel Serres was another; of all the books I have read, this is probably the one I have quoted from most often. And a short essay by Deleuze about becoming, entitled ‘Literature and Life’, printed in the Danish magazine Kritik sometime during the 1990s, which I have returned to for nearly twenty years now, where among other things he writes, ‘To become is not to attain a form (identification, imitation, Mimesis) but to find the zone of proximity, indiscernibility, or undifferentiation . . .’
What these texts did, I think, was to find words for something I didn’t know that I knew. That I read Grøgaard’s book about Munch with the same avidity is because it focuses on the actual genesis of the paintings with a technical expertise that I lack, and it does so
soberly – for a picture being painted is never great, hasn’t been canonised or mythologised, it is something else and far lesser, something concrete, a canvas in a room, unfinished and changeable. ‘Munch’ is a static entity, so great and autocratic that it is barely in contact with anything but itself. What Grøgaard does is to bring ‘Munch’ into contact with the world again, and he does so in two ways: firstly by moving in a distinctly practical way closer to the situation Munch was in when he painted individual pictures – Grøgaard himself trained to be a painter, and when he writes about Munch’s pictures he does so based on the technical challenges that Munch was confronted with and the technical means he had at his disposal, how they are resolved or not in the painting. What was he trying to do? What did he succeed in doing? Why, why not? This practical viewpoint sees the picture as unfinished, as something that still hasn’t come into being, and thus takes away everything finished, that is, elevated and iconic, that Munch’s art is burdened with. This practical viewpoint also brings the picture into contact with other pictures that were painted at the same time, and thereby with the time in which they were painted.
The other way in which Grøgaard brings the pictures into contact with the world is through theory, philosophical aesthetics, in other words by drawing them into the realm of the general and the universal, that which is true of all art.
I have never come as close to an understanding of Munch as when I read this book, precisely because it doesn’t focus on the finished pictures, in other words the pictures as they appear to us, but on the problems that working on them posed, that is, the pictures as they appeared to Munch. Grøgaard’s reasoning cuts like a knife through the general reception of Munch. Reading about Munch in this way is like being sober at a party where everyone else is drunk. About the portrait of his sister that he painted at the age of nineteen, for example, Grøgaard writes:
Inger in Black 1884 is a half-length portrait in a black dress painted against a black background. The face and the hands are the only parts that stand out in another colour. The torso itself proved recalcitrant. Even at the lower end of the scale the bright light upon the dress appears exterior to it, and it is too sharply cut off against the neck, an insensitivity that is repeated in the red necklace. The face alone makes up the painting, and it seems almost to loosen from the rest of the head. Pink and yellow predominate – too yellow – with a few cool shaded areas with hints of black. The slightly too warm skin may be due to transparent colour applied to parts of the painting, possibly in raw sienna, but is counterbalanced by some acidic mixed hues. Apart from this, Inger has large eyes reflecting the light, always fascinating and easy to resort to. That the face separates itself from the rest of the figure and becomes the whole painting is actually the one thing one doesn’t forget about Inger in Black. This doesn’t have to be a criticism, at least not based on the criteria which the picture itself establishes.
Despite these features, which give away the novice, the banal contrast of light works well. Portraits are said to be penetrating, and that is no cliché in the case of Inger in Black. The painting is made with a seriousness that no naturalist of the previous generation would have owned up to.
Yet seriousness is not what the painting was intended to convey. First and foremost it was meant to demonstrate skill as an observer in a more public format, of a model whose time was at Munch’s disposal. The liberal use of black creates a mood which likely is not yet neo-romantic, in the sense of ideologically conscious and opposed to the aesthetics of Krohg’s generation. The colour black is an exaggeration, an economical move intended to avoid too many variables in a larger format.
The model probably had to endure hours in front of the easel, in mute solidarity with the eldest son in the family, who had already made his debut at the National Art Exhibition (Høstutstillingen). As in many of Munch’s portraits, the face is of a different – both distant and insistent – order, while the rest of the figure is more perfunctory and here a little clumsy. This is due not only to a groundless materiality and problems in describing volume through nuances of light and shade, but also because Munch cannot make up his mind whether to treat black as colour or tone (atmosphere), that is, an invisibility which functions only as a margin for the penetrating portrait. The grey fields in the lighter areas of the dress, which seem to float in front of the body, reveal his difficulty in completing the figure. Black as tone provides a licence and postpones the articulation, but he fell short once black had to be modulated into volume.’4
Where I see a masterpiece that moves me deeply every time I look at it, and which gives me hope because the dignity she radiates is not merely hers – I mean the biographical Inger Munch’s – but something which exists always as a possibility within the human, Grøgaard sees the laborious efforts and failures of a young painter. One perspective does not exclude the other, and what makes Grøgaard’s analysis so interesting is not his pointing out of the picture’s unsuccessful elements in itself, but what the fact that they are there can tell us. Grøgaard’s thesis is that the painterly strategies which to Krohg and Frits Thaulow’s generation were self-evident and which a talent like Munch’s should have easily mastered, are self-evident no more. ‘What is lacking,’ he writes, ‘are visual formulas for accessing the model.’
All figurative painting is about observation and simplification, for the amount of detail in even a small segment of reality, for instance a human face, is nearly infinite, and the simplification, or the reduction of information, what to include and what not to include and in which way, occurs in accordance with certain systems, what Grøgaard calls visual formulas. What he identifies in Munch’s youthful works is that the visual formulas of tradition are no longer obvious, a divergence has emerged between what Munch sees and what he paints, and a number of technical problems arise in the paintings. At the same time it is never just the motif that he is considering, but also what is happening in the painting, what he simplifies and what he paints in detail, something he must continually connect with what he wants with the painting, what he wants to attain, what makes it ‘good’. This responsiveness to what is happening in the painting, this eye for possibilities that open up along the way, was perhaps one of the things that distinguished him from his contemporaries. Several of them were better trained than Munch, and Grøgaard believes that is an important factor in understanding why he in particular became so radical; painting a model’s face was less straightforward for Munch and consequently occasioned more problems in his work than in that of other painters, problems which had to be solved individually and in each separate case.
Another important factor was his sensitivity, and not just that he was finely tuned to his surroundings – what we call impressionable, that he registered the surrounding mood – but also that the slightest external touch could set off a storm of emotions within him. Painting must have been a way of coping with this, perhaps primarily by making it stop, for when one paints one’s own self disappears, but also by emphasising what was good about his sensitivity, which is apparent in the early paintings’ desire for colour and materiality and unalloyed delight in creation – take Garden with Red House or Morning, the joy found in those pictures. But if one considers Inger Munch in Black, there Munch is closer to something essential, which quite eclipses the technical difficulties. That he is closer to himself and his own life doesn’t make the painting more true than Morning, but more significant, something he himself must have realised or at least sensed. When shortly after he began painting the picture that at first was simply called Study but later became known as The Sick Child, he moved further in towards the personal without shying away from the grief that forms a kind of background to the portrait of Inger. The two levels, the personal memory of his older sister’s death and the sickroom of naturalist genre painting, were impossible to reconcile, and Grøgaard uncovers this conflict practically brushstroke by brushstroke in the painting.
Munch painted The Sick Child using a model
, but he was looking for something other than what he had in front of him, searching for a way which could bring together what he had seen, or rather felt, with what he was seeing, the model in a room. In other words he had available to him a painterly idiom, Krohgian naturalism, which was inadequate to what he wanted to do, so he was forced to search for another one while he painted.
The result is a picture which at one and the same time comes into being and is destroyed, and the destruction, the distortion, enters into the subject matter of the painting, which is tuberculosis, a wasting disease, that is, the destruction of life, and moreover does so intransigently, with no possibility of reconciliation, since reconciliation lies in the space, here almost cancelled out through the close-up of the child and the woman and by the surface character of the painting.
So Much Longing in So Little Space Page 7