So Much Longing in So Little Space

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  – No. And I think I can see that Krohg has been here and made some corrections . . .

  – It’s a painting from Pultosten?

  – It’s a painting from Pultosten. He has painted Andreas Singdahlsen, a colleague of his. And part of the mystery of Munch is that he – more so than Krohg and Thaulow, really – has this ability to find a grand, sculptural form in the heads he paints. And I have wondered, where did it come from? For Thaulow’s naturalism is more even, sort of all over in the details, while with Munch there is something almost old-fashioned, baroquely insistent about the heads he paints. This is one of them. There are better ones that he made at around the same time, but this one is all right.

  – I’ve always thought Munch was such an incredibly talented painter; looking at his early pictures, I’ve thought, bloody hell, he was just eighteen or twenty, but then I read your book and you say no, actually he was technically limited, even compared to other young painters who were his contemporaries.

  – What we need to remember is that the great unlearning in the history of European painting was naturalism. That’s when the entire tradition of studio painting was thrown overboard. You had to remove the shoe polish, as Munch put it. With regard to tradition, open-air painting and naturalism was one huge Delete button. The repertoire of craftsmanlike skill is replaced by the repertoire of observation. In a way, Munch is a part of this enormous renovation of the history of painting. He was a very skilled draughtsman, but there were certainly others at Pultosten who had a greater repertoire than he did.

  – But no one else at Pultosten could have made this? I said, pointing to the picture hanging next to the portrait of Singdahlsen. It depicted the Polish writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski and was radically different in style, much flatter, almost entirely without depth, less painted than drawn.

  – No, that’s true, Grøgaard said. – This is from his time in Berlin, and there Munch learned to appreciate one thing, and that was the technique of casein tempera painting, which produces a matt finish and a mural effect. He hadn’t come across that before. What he had done before that was oil painting. At times you can see how his oils get a chalky colour. This is probably just a sketch he has abandoned, but . . . At times the whites become milky, he can’t quite get the colour to chime, and that is what you see here.

  – Exactly.

  – Often his light and shadow get a little grubby, but tempera allows him to paint more directly, it dries quickly, and this lets him think more decoratively. And what Munch learns around the 1890s is that painting must serve a decorative function, not merely a referential or a documentary function.

  – Singdahlsen’s head is more sculptural, Przybyszewski’s is more flat, but still incredibly better, isn’t it?

  Why on earth did I say that? Intuitively I valued the sculptural and Rembrandtesque classic portrait higher than the sketch-like one, so why was I now saying the opposite? Presumably because I knew this was the ruling consensus, that the figurative Munch was much weaker and less interesting than the later, more direct and simplified Munch, and that there he captured the people, whereas in the earlier portraits, which were also exercises, he built people up. Since Grøgaard was a professor of art theory and an expert on Munch, I wanted to show him that I too knew a thing or two about Munch, that I saw straight through convention to what was really good.

  But Grøgaard disagreed, so I was left looking doubly stupid, as I gazed at the portraits.

  – I quite like it when he manages to combine naturalistic observation with a form of abstract understanding of volume, he said. – I have been very interested in baroque portraiture precisely because it combines observation with an insistence on volume. But these are two extremes.

  – Yes, it was nice to see them next to each other, they reveal such an enormous change in a short time. We can go behind here and see . . . Here is another portrait from about the same time . . .

  – Yes, that must be Aunt Karen, I suppose. That one is rather less successful.

  Oh no! This was one of the few pictures from that period which I had selected for the exhibition. And now he thought it unsuccessful? Maybe it was? Wasn’t there something about the mouth and the area around it that was poor? But the colours were nice, weren’t they? Or not?

  – To me, the first really good portrait he made was of his sister Laura, Grøgaard continued, wholly oblivious of my inner panic, and he pointed to another picture which I had never noticed before. – It was made in 1881, I think, which is the year before Munch joins Pultosten. In a sense he is already on his way, and he has probably seen some art in the high romantic mode here – for this isn’t bad, really, a little high-toned perhaps, but I find it very sensitive and nice.

  – ‘High-toned’, what does that mean?

  – It isn’t altogether chalky, but the articulation of space in the face is possibly a little dead. It seems a little overexposed, somehow. A little too much light. But it’s a fine picture.

  – Should we move to the next one? This is going to take a long time, there’s so much to talk about!

  The conservator pushed the partition slowly back again, and just as slowly pulled out a new one further down.

  – How did you relate to Munch when you were still painting? I asked as we waited. – As an historical figure, or as someone who had found solutions to problems that were still relevant?

  – Well, I’m from the countryside, from an environment that is in many ways rather old-fashioned, dominated by neo-romanticism, so I actually viewed Munch as a modern painter. I was a hundred years too late! It has struck me that that was one of the reasons I stopped painting. This is modern enough for me.

  A version of Death in the Sickroom glided out in front of us.

  – This is like theatre, almost, I said. – Drama. How did Munch’s pictorial world relate to that?

  – Well, this is the scene from The Sick Child, but here the perspective has been moved outwards. Instead of a close-up of a dying child, the main thing here is the grief of the people standing around. It was made during his time in Berlin, I think, and whereas The Sick Child is thickly and pastosely painted, you can see here that he has learned how to apply paint thinly and to lay down surfaces. This is actually a decorative representation, although it is rather heavy. The green wall, the reddish-yellow floor, and then you have the figures grouped together, so that the format is divided up efficiently.

  – Was this something found in Europe at the same time, I mean the theatricality, that way of conceiving of paintings?

  – Yes, I think you’ll find it in both German and French Symbolism, Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon and a few others who got there before Munch. But this way of dividing the picture up into large surfaces one might say is J. F. Willumsen’s interpretation of Paul Gauguin, which may have influenced Munch. Willumsen understood the significance of Gauguin quite early.

  – Imagine that this was the only picture of Munch that existed, how do you think Munch would have been viewed then?

  – Then he would have been an example of a Symbolist painter, a post-naturalist, a non-naturalist painter, a little behind what is going on in Europe. But it would still have been linked to his biography, I think.

  – You wouldn’t have considered it original or innovative?

  – Well . . . Munch is easy to recognise, of course. He has a strong style. All significant artists have a strong style. So I think I might have said something like what you said a while ago, that we’re dealing with a tough painter here. There’s will here, he takes a risk by working in this way. It has to do with his self-image, I think he felt he was entitled to do these wild things. Many of the other painters at Pultosten came from the countryside, they were – I almost said – millers’ sons, who had the idea of becoming painters so they wouldn’t have to carry fifty-kilo sacks of flour. A humble lad like Skredsvig, for example, who was so happy to be able to paint, right, to s
it there and fiddle with his brushes. You can sense that Munch is from the cultured bourgeoisie and has ambitions on his own and his family’s behalf. His uncle was P. A. Munch, after all, the great historian. Munch visits Rome in 1927 and paints his uncle’s tombstone in the non-Catholic graveyard there. So this is also an expression of family feeling. One has to keep this in mind about Munch, that he felt representative.

  A new partition with pictures came gliding out. And my spirits lifted, for one of them was the portrait of Aase Nørregaard, which was perhaps the best of all the full-length portraits that were going to be in the exhibition. She is painted wearing a blue dress, standing with one closed hand lifted to her waist, the other hand down along her side, against a green and greenish-yellow background, with a beaming face, and something about the figure makes it seem as if it is on its way out of the painting.

  – Aase Nørregaard was the love he never dared, Grøgaard said. – She was a friend of his, and she married Harald Nørregaard, who invested in paintings by Munch early on. She died young, barely forty, and it affected Munch deeply. There is something about the repetition of losses – his mother, his sister, his father, his brother. But also that there was no conflict between them, since they had never been lovers. I think he felt that she was a woman who understood and respected him. Munch is strangely selective in his empathy, by the way. Sometimes he is incredibly considerate, at other times strikingly indifferent towards others.

  – But what would you say of this picture in purely painterly terms?

  – Well, this is the so-called ‘bodyguard format’, two by one metre, which he liked and painted over many years. I think the turpentine-diluted greenery is a little hollow, there is something not entirely convincing about the green background. And the dress could have been given more shape, I think he gets a little lost with all his flecking. He’s a little lazy, he gives up quickly. He makes a start, and then he can’t be bothered any more. So the painting lacks wholeness. But the face is always . . . almost always, interesting. He is a great portraitist, no doubt about it.

  – Shall we look at another one?

  – Sure.

  A new partition came gliding out in front of us, full of late pictures, most of them with garden motifs.

  – I’ve always liked this one a lot, Grøgaard said, pointing to one of the pictures from the Linde Frieze, Girls Watering Flowers, which was going to be in the exhibition. – Because he is caught up in the colours. The greenery holds its own as form everywhere, and the red figure too. It’s a wonderful picture. All the colours suit it – yellow hat, green background, red shirt – and it is so splendidly drawn: bang, and it’s done. In a couple of hours, probably. He painted that potted plant a number of times, with the heavy leaves, but when he does the moist green with a drawing like this, it’s solid. The painting reminds one a little of the French fauvism of the day, perhaps.

  – What about these? I said, nodding towards some pictures of the apple orchard at Ekely, including one with a woman and a man in front of an apple tree, and one of a tree heavily laden with apples in front of his studio. – All of them are going to be in the exhibition.

  – This picture here is too blue and green. He lacks something to temper the image. And this one here, in blue and green, it’s too purple. But here I think he’s accomplished a good balance. And then I ask myself whether this is what he was trying to accomplish, or whether he just didn’t give a damn. Is he trying to create an interesting temperature in the picture, or does he simply not care, is he just thinking of the Adam and Eve motif? It’s hard to tell! He said something interesting once about Ludvig Karsten: ‘Karsten manages something with colour that I can never do. But I have more under my waistcoat!’ On the other hand Munch often has more interesting combinations than Karsten, who is often a little too sweet-toned, often too pleasing in his use of colour. Whereas Munch sometimes succeeds with unpleasant colours, which together produce an interesting effect. You find the same thing in Matisse. Sophisticated, unharmonious things which at times fit very well together.

  – But what do you think he was after? OK, so he’s in his garden, and he’s going to paint an apple tree. But what’s driving him to do this?

  – I think he is a typical painter fascinated by observation, he sees the world around him and it is full of interesting things, an apple tree or a dog or whatever, and then he stands there working at it, and then the main thing is the battle between what he sees and what he paints. That somewhat sweeping, grand quality he has which means that on the one hand he is in control of the painting, on the other hand he is actually documenting his observations. He is a confident painter who needs to test his confidence against new observations. And sometimes the result is like this, sometimes it’s like that. I don’t think he’s walking around with a ruler in hand, thinking, he’s not the kind of painter who stands contemplating the picture afterwards saying, hm, I need to add a little more red here.

  – But do you think he himself thought in terms of what you’ve been saying, OK, there’s something wrong about the colour here, it’s a little flat or dead, and in that case why didn’t he start again and paint it better?

  – Yes, he should have been able to draw out something that could withstand all that blue-green, instead everything is just swept together into a big blue-green heap. I think there’s rather too much greenery in many of his late pictures. And that is a sign he is letting himself be governed by observation to a great extent. But that he could stand out there in the garden and let it be that blue-green, how could he be so unaware? To just let himself be overpowered by an observation in that way! I think I would have tried to resist all that greenery somewhat, anyhow. In this I am a typical bourgeois, for he’s probably thinking, It doesn’t matter! At some point or other it just doesn’t matter!

  – This is very interesting because it has to do with what quality is, doesn’t it?

  While we spoke we had moved away from the garden pictures to the paintings of the elm forest. Munch painted fifteen or twenty of them in the mid-1920s, more than almost any other motif.

  – Yes, Grøgaard said, looking up at the enormous twisted tree trunks in front of us. – And the big question about the older Munch, from 1917 onwards, is what does he want? What is he up to? What are his ambitions for painting?

  – This is something he very often succeeds with, Grøgaard said and let his finger trace one of the twisted trees in the air. – The trunks. And the way he divides it up. Sometimes what he does feels grand and majestic, it has what the English call scale. A dimension. We feel a certain solemnity even in a small format owing to the way he has divided it up. At other times it just doesn’t work, nothing comes of it, it just fizzles out. And then you think, Doesn’t it mean anything to him? But at the same time I wonder if I’m applying the wrong scale. To measure this against? His late work?

  – Could one imagine something we might call ‘pure painting’? That he simply paints, and that’s all there is to it? And if so, what is the result? The quality declines, the individual pictures lose their force, the iconography vanishes, and then the value is lost too. Or is it the other way round, that something else comes into being?

  – I think perhaps that should be our starting point, that something else comes into being. That one doesn’t depict Munch as someone who has lost interest, in a way, someone who paints simply because he doesn’t know how to do anything else. Let’s say that is what he’s after here. It must be that. How are we to understand it? In a way it is a lame comparison, but you have Søren Kierkegaard’s three stages, which you could also divide Munch’s oeuvre into. You have the aesthetic stage, that’s the naturalist who made The Sick Child. You have the ethical stage, that’s the symbolist who painted The Scream and Melancholy. The religious stage would then be the artist who after the turn of the century develops a new observation-based painting using trivial motifs. But what is religious about it? Apparently nothing. But let’s think
. . . Could it be painting as a kind of cosmological practice? Tending to the world? You’re out there looking, you have the talent for it, you have the required sensitivity, and you deal only with your own perception in a simple, de-ideologised, almost postmodern or post-religious way. I don’t really know, it’s easy to invest too much in these concepts, but perhaps they do after all have something to say about this. A form of cosmology or caretaking. He tends to his immediate world. And he practises painting as only he knows how.

  * * *

  *

  Although one gets closer to Munch’s artistic practice in the Munch Museum’s storage rooms than perhaps anywhere else, since the paintings there have not been selected or curated but comprise all the pictures Munch had around him at the time of his death, and in that way represent some of the force and the chaos he worked within, and some of the arbitrariness and processuality, nevertheless more than seventy years have passed since they were in circulation, so more than anything else they are elements of a sort of painterly mausoleum, from when time stopped and work on them ceased. Since then many new generations of artists have been active in a world which has changed rather drastically, not least in relation to the visual.

  How do artists working now view Munch’s practice? How relevant are his pictures to them?

  There are probably as many answers to that question as there are artists. One artist I have been most curious about in this respect is Vanessa Baird. Her pictures have both a wildness and a will to break free of visual expectations which make me think there is a kinship with Munch, if not directly and specifically then at least indirectly, through a fundamental attitude to what it is to paint, what painting should do.

  There is something deeply unpredictable about Vanessa Baird’s art, her pictures are powerfully emotive, they are often disturbing and discomfiting, sometimes beautiful but always intense, and it is as if many of them manage to reach a place or a point from which significance spreads outwards in waves, becoming greater than themselves in the way a myth can be, or an allegory. But allegory sounds harmless, allegory sounds like a non-committal story about something which is also something else, and Baird’s pictures are neither non-committal nor harmless. One such point of expansive signification is all the papers or documents falling through the various motifs in her work Light disappears as soon as we close our eyes, we immediately understand what they are, for we have seen public buildings collapse following terror attacks, and yet we have never seen it like this, taken out of context and inserted into other situations and landscapes, where it has retained its striking visual force from the catastrophe but is also seen afresh, open to new interpretations, where the fact that it is a shared visual experience, a part of the collective unconscious, something that floods through us all, becomes visible, so that it is detached from its original context and becomes a sign.