Munch and No End

On 12 December 1953, ninety years had passed since the birth of one of Scandinavia’s greatest geniuses, the Norwegian Edvard Munch – and on 23 January this year, ten years had elapsed since his death.
“Munch without end” was how Denmark’s leading newspaper, Politiken, recently commented on the publication of a book about the painter, who died in 1944 shortly after his eightieth birthday – thus substituting his name into the phrase originally coined for Goethe. And indeed, the discussion surrounding Munch seems to intensify steadily with the growing distance from his life’s work.
The book reviewed by the Copenhagen newspaper is the memoir of a Norwegian friend, Christian Gierlöff^[1], entitled Edvard Munch selv (Edvard Munch Himself, the authentic Edvard Munch), published by Gyldendal in Oslo.
Here, from a wealth of more or less essential impressions of friendly companionship with Munch, a richly faceted, personal “portrait” of the “great solitary” crystallises, beautifully complementing the far more “subjective” biography by the Norwegian art collector Stenersen^[2], Image of a Genius, which is of a very different literary value.
Following Munch’s journey to European fame, Gierlöff casts delightful, brief side-glances at the personalities who were of great significance to Munch’s destiny – many of whom were German: the patron Dr Max Linde, the art historian Meier-Gräfe, and the Hamburg higher regional court judge Gustav Schiefler – the cataloguer of Munch’s colossal graphic oeuvre.

He portrays Munch in the years following his return from a restless life on the Continent, which somewhat recalled Peer Gynt – “the great abroad”, as it is called in Norway – as the owner of various houses and cottages in different locations on both sides of the Oslofjord: in Kragerø, on the island of Jeløya, in Åsgårdstrand, and in Hvitsten. Munch had overcome his severe nervous crisis; he was recognised, at least in Germany. His perhaps happiest period of work was spent in the idyllic fishing village of Kragerø. Yet closest to his heart was arguably Åsgårdstrand – at that time not yet the family seaside resort into which the dreamy village, populated by many Kristiania artists during brief, hectic summer weeks, later developed.

Gierlöff, the friend, is so captivated by Munch’s personality and charm that his book becomes a singular song of praise; warm, sympathetic – yet at times almost drowning in too many words. By contrast, the book Idea and Content in Edvard Munch’s Art^[3] by the Swede Gösta Svenæus, likewise published in Oslo this winter, presents a profound analysis of the artist, an investigation into the sources of his art within the European cultural and philosophical “climate” of his era.
Svenæus’ study focuses on Munch’s large decorative oil paintings, which he painted for the University of Oslo, and which Svenæus regards as a turning point in Munch’s art.
When standing before the painting of the rising sun – which must surely be called one of the greatest “events” in the history of painting – when allowing oneself to be “crushed” by the primal force of this white-hot, colour-splintering fireball – one should remember that this “atomic power” was created by a man who suffered from fragile health throughout his life, and who said of himself:
“Illness, insanity, and death – these were the black angels that kept watch over my cradle and since followed me through life – without anxiety and illness I should have been like a ship without a rudder. It was my art that gave meaning to existence, through it I sought the light. It became the staff upon which I could lean – and which I needed.”

The sun was the victory over the anxiety that had accompanied the youth, who had lost his mother early, through childhood and adolescence. The pictures from his restless “Bohemian period”, such as Puberty, Jealousy, Vampire – and above all, perhaps, The Scream – seem painted by a man possessed, whose nerves lie bare and unprotected. How is it possible to “hurl out” such images – and at what a frenzied tempo – and yet (unlike Van Gogh) survive?
“Life sustains,” was Munch’s comforting philosophy. It sustained him and gave him the strength for his monumental Aula paintings. It sustained him just as it sustained the Swedish writer Strindberg, whose temperament was admittedly entirely different from Munch’s – but who, in his “Faustian” attitude to life, his restless lifestyle, and his relentless sincerity, opens up so many parallels to Munch that when experiencing a Strindberg play, one suddenly felt Munchian figures “redeemed” from the “speechlessness” of their mute pictorial destiny.

To Munch and Strindberg in the nineties, Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead^[4] appeared as the painting above all paintings – both were at times fanatical followers of Nietzsche, and Munch read Weininger’s Sex and Character,^[5] using, as Gierlöff relates, a revolver as a bookmark.
Yet Munch saved himself from a Weininger-like fate, turned his back on the “Isles of the Dead” of the Böcklins and Max Klingers – saved himself into a “natural” life, settled down, acquired the large Ekely estate near Oslo, had his own fruit trees in the garden, as well as a horse and dogs… there is something about the ageing Munch that reminds one of the ageing Faust.

He wanted to depict life itself in his paintings, “a single endless picture of life, with my varied play of colours and its countless nuances”. His paintings are continuous commentaries – a completely “perfect” picture Munch perhaps never painted, “perfect” in the sense of a Raphaelesque Madonna or a Mona Lisa … . He left his paintings exposed to the rigours of the weather in his strange, primitive open-air studios (“they must grow and see how they cope with their own life”), he allowed colours to “run” and “drip” across his canvases – without concerning himself about it … .
But as Munch himself said, for him the “presentiment” was the highest attainable achievement – “completion usually disappointment”. It is precisely for this reason, as Svenæus rightly emphasises, that one never truly finishes with his art:
“In his Frieze of Life, one perceives a wealth of possibilities – a complex tension between different points of view.”

This pointing out of possibilities, this “presentiment” (which manifests itself particularly in the yearning contours of his fjord landscapes – the shoreline vanishing into infinity becoming a promising outlet for all our hopes and passions, or indeed a hieroglyph of life passing from nothingness into nothingness) is, however, also the Nordic philosophy of life as a whole, the contribution of the North – it is Peer Gynt’s lifelong searching and longing – it is, within the European cultural sphere, the component to the “perfection” of the South, which from a Northern perspective, however, also signifies “satiety”, fulfilment, and thus the dissolution of the “promise”.
Perhaps that is why Munch will never be understood or recognised in Romance countries – against the background of the classical, sunny Mediterranean landscape, Munch’s Nordic shore will probably always appear not merely melancholy and life-denying, but even “dead” and “inhuman”. For the Northerner, on the other hand, Munch’s sun is the symbol of promise, the redemption from the torpor of the winter night: the giver of life – not the all-scorching and burning destroyer of “her own children” – and Munch’s shoreline, the dream of life, full of possibilities and tensions, not “redeemed” (and thus in their sense “dead”) like the environment of their European antipodes.

Now – at first, it had not been the sun that was intended to form the centrepiece of his Aula paintings. It was to be a Mountain of Mankind, or what Munch, in the typical symbolic language of Art Nouveau, also called “Towards the Light”, and later the Column of Mankind. Svenæus calls his lithography from 1897 – titled by Munch Funeral March – a “fundamental chord in Munch’s art”, and shows the path from this sheet to the Mountain of Mankind, the planned central motif of the Aula paintings, which he calls symptomatic of the demands of that era and characterises as a “macabre dish, prepared in the witches’ kitchen of metaphysics”.
Inspired by contemporary philosophy, by Nietzsche and Darwin, the designs showed the “struggle for power” – the “thronging towards the light” – human body climbing upon human body, trampling one another, upwards, onwards, the strongest leading the way. Nietzsche had declared God dead, and here no religion seemed any longer to offer a possible redemption.

But Munch abandoned this motif entirely in the end. Svenæus shows how a sharp criticism of the designs led to this decision. Perhaps something else also played a part: the Norwegian sculptor Vigeland^[6] was working on very similar plans for his sculpture park.
Munch, jealous of Vigeland’s easy success with the authorities of the Norwegian capital – who supported the “greatest sculptor since Michelangelo” in every possible way and ultimately built him a magnificent studio – claimed throughout his life that Vigeland had stolen “his” idea. However that may have been: the unappreciated Munch (who did not receive the hoped-for commission to decorate the new Oslo City Hall) has become Norway’s “light from the North” – whereas Vigeland’s gigantic world of sculptures fared like the Emperor’s new clothes in H.C. Andersen’s fairy tale: the citizens of Oslo had been prepared years in advance, they had heard that in future centuries their city would be called the “City with the Fountain” (such a fountain was originally the core of the constantly expanding Vigeland plans for a site that was initially to lie between the Parliament building and the National Theatre in the middle of the city, but which soon burst this confined space and later became a reality in the open air, outside the city) so that when the miracle finally began to reveal itself, and ever new groups of photographically naked men, women, and children towered before their eyes, they quite naturally burst into an enthusiastic “Aah” … until one day, and initially probably by the art critic Pola Gauguin^[7], they were told how matters stood with “their Emperor”.

The critical voices multiplied and intensified into the death sentence delivered by the Catholic Evelyn Waugh^[8], the sharp-tongued English writer: “The most shattering thing since Hiroshima destroyed by the atomic bomb”. That, however, was no longer art criticism; it was the judgement of the Catholic Church upon Nietzsche’s godless Übermensch – and in the meantime, Hitler had also materialised this dream figure from the thin air of Sils Maria into a “Golem” of mediocrity and shamelessly unmasked him before the eyes of a mortally terrified Europe.
Now – Vigeland’s “failure” did not necessarily mean that Munch’s idea had been “wrong” – after all, neither of them were philosophers but artists – and if Vigeland as a sculptor (after promising youthful works) failed with his factory-like, gigantic output, that did not mean that Munch could not have succeeded in painting an outstanding picture built upon the same ideas.

In spite of everything, Munch remains primarily a painter, and all the problems he tackles he has always experienced pictorially, in his grand, simplifying lines, in the play of complementary colours. And to his world, today “the world of yesterday”, belongs – besides the gallery of Northern European, bourgeois individualities he shaped and left behind as the “last portraitist of European painting”, comparable to Velázquez’s gallery of Spanish aristocrats – the contemporary idea of the Übermensch … whilst today – “Dieu est mort et l’homme aussi” – man and Übermensch, individual and type, have given way to the cerebral search for the play of forces between microcosm and macrocosm, a play independent of man, indeed no longer visible to him … .

Thus they appear today in a completely different light, the “last great individualities” Munch and Strindberg – in an age that has become so strangely “unsensual”, in which Jealousy, Puberty, Vampire are no longer painted, and human passions, love in all its nuances, are no longer the most urgent dramatic motifs – in which, rather, the cool dissecting knife of the zoologist Dr Kinsey^[9] objectively registers the “all too human” – in which Kafka’s struggle with the hydra of invisible judges of our destiny shows where the centre of gravity has shifted – in which Kandinsky’s non-figurative, “absolute” painting (especially of his final years) seems to say to the viewer: look here at how today’s world “looks”: unsensual, unhuman, “invisible” … .
To the image of the great “unbelievers” belongs perhaps also – even if often hidden – the Bible, with which Strindberg chose to be buried – and Munch’s moral idea of the “Mountain of Mankind”, was it not also fundamentally intended as a warning, and did the cross not stand invisibly behind it after all?
To conclude these reflections, let us now leave the floor to Munch himself – in the conversation reproduced below, we shall moreover rediscover many of the questions touched upon here, in Munch’s surprising, “pictorial” formulation.
This conversation – or more precisely: these conversations – which were recorded by the Norwegian Inger Alver Gløersen^[10], and which she and her father respectively conducted with Munch (and which are published here in the German language for the first time with her permission) convey a particularly clear impression of Munch’s unique personality.

II

Munch in Conversation

“To my estate in Vestfold, situated on the western side of the Oslofiord,” Mrs Gløersen relates, “a small hill leads up. Here, on a Sunday some twenty years ago, my father met Edvard Munch, solitary on a morning walk, squinting into the sun. Munch did not wish to come up with him.”

“I am studying life on the farm at your place,” he said, “dangerous, to be trapped there. I have been here many times before. The dog no longer barks at me; he comes running down here to greet me, jumps up at me and wags his tail. Three generations on a farm, such is life. You are clever, you Höst (the narrator’s father), walking all summer long with your little Nordic grandchild, who consists of nothing but curls and eyes. I must draw the little one sometime. That is how life ought to be lived! It rejuvenates! You become a boy yourself. But I shall play a trick on you: when I am eighty, I shall marry and have such small children, when you have such big grandchildren!”

“He gestured with his hand half a metre above the lawn, those then being his own small children – and then high above his head, those being Höst’s tall grandchildren.”
“An old man and a young woman, that has existed in all ages. It is written in the Bible already – besides, the children turn out so well in such a marriage.”
They had arrived at the shore:
“It was here,” said Edvard Munch. “We were coming from a party. I had just had rheumatic fever, ought to have been lying in my bed instead of roaming through the cool night air. Then she waded out, the beautiful young daughter of the admiral. Out to the largest stone, far out there. She swung herself onto the stone, loosened her long hair and sang. Mermaid. It was midnight, moonlight, a September night. I waded after her. Your mother-in-law belonged to our party. She tried to hold me back, called out to the girl to come ashore. But the girl – she smiled and sang. I waded and splashed, finally reached the stone and sat down by her side. ‘You are a troll!’ your mother-in-law shouted to the girl. But when I lay alone the next day, sick with fever in Åsgårdstrand, your mother-in-law came and nursed me. I was twenty then. So it is: a good woman can call herself hoarse to protect us. But it is the troll we pursue.”

Later that same day, my father suggested that they should have something to eat.
“I suppose you eat at the hotel?” he asked Munch.
“Are you mad? Nothing is so dangerous as eating in a hotel! Strindberg was right. It is quite impossible to know what the woman in the kitchen takes a fancy to putting into the food. If only people would be a little more careful about what they put into their mouths, our doctor friends would soon be out of work. No, berries, those you should eat, there is nothing unclean about them. Come along, we shall go into the fairy-tale forest, I know where we can find large, splendid blueberries there.”

And whilst they ate blueberries, Munch complained that he could not be left in peace. When he arrived one evening from the capital to Åsgårdstrand, he could not sleep in his cottage because the windows had remained closed during his absence and the whole house smelt terrible: he had forgotten “some leftovers of food” upon his departure. Thereupon he had unceremoniously gone into the garden and laid down in the long grass (which had not been cut for thirty years!). Early the next morning, Munch was awakened by an elderly lady, twice as stout as was good for her, stepping on his stomach. It had been dreadful. But of course, Munch was to blame, and the lady was the aggrieved party.

“It was my garden,” Munch told my father, chewing blueberries, “it was my grass, and my stomach she stepped on. But it was she who cried out, squealing like a pig on the slaughter bench – it was she who complained when the neighbours came rushing over. It turned out that for many years she had waded through the grass of my garden every morning, fresh from her bed, on her way to her morning bath in the fjord. And there I had dared to lie in her path! Yes, so it is: when man sets his foot upon a toad, crushing it with an iron-shod heel where the toad has its home, yes, where God has assigned its place in creation – then man cries out, complains. Your daughter told a story of a hunting party, shouldered the gun and shot off both his legs because he sprang about so remarkably nimbly in his own primeval forest. That is exactly the same, it is always the same. They murder and then cry out: The swine is bleeding – he dares to soil us! Strange, strange … .”

And there in the forest, whilst they ate blueberries, Munch and Sigurd Höst, Munch repeated – in the year 1930 – quietly, reflectively, but in great wonderment at the strange ways of men, everything he had “written down” and recorded in 1908 in his most passionate despair:
“Friends are enemies in disguise – they sneak into your house, eat your food, drink your wine and plunge the dagger into your back … .”
“This lady, yes, I shall have to flee, makes a great clamour because I dare to sleep in my own garden. What indeed is this freedom people talk so much about? She was naked and large and fat, this lady, she stepped with her full weight onto my stomach – but it was I who had to be accused. This painter! To renounce the world and its ways, to serve art, to follow his calling: no, he is a dangerous fellow. Lock him up!”

Once I met Munch up in a side street off Pilestredet in Kristiania. He walked with half-closed eyes, and I passed by without greeting him. It belonged to the lessons of my childhood: you must never greet Munch. He must be allowed to walk in peace. For a little girl to curtsy before him could destroy his mood.
Hardly had he passed when he turned around and accompanied me for a part of the way.
“Have you also discovered this clever street?” Munch asked me. To me, it was an old acquaintance. My dressmaker lived here.
“I am a fugitive,” Munch said. “The enemy is preparing to pursue me, but here I seem secure.”
At that time, an exhibition of his paintings had just opened. He had visited it early in the morning, so early that he could count on encountering no visitors.
“But a lady (a very well-known and respected lady in the Kristiania of that day) was already there, and she gave me a lecture. She explained my own paintings to me! (Munch shuddered.) But I am certain she never enters this street. Here I wish to walk.”
And he walked on, with an expression that seemed to say: if I meet this lady once more, it is all over with me.

With Munch, there never existed reservations like “granted the case – if possible – on the condition that …”. He always appeared suddenly – and when one least expected it, he stood before you. Just as suddenly, he disappeared again. Like a falling star. But he always left behind something that moved one for a long time afterwards.
“Power is like a sphere. If one does not constantly cling to it, it rolls away and another with strong suction arms sucks it to themselves.”
A problem that occupied him greatly was that Charon’s^[11] bark is usually depicted as so strangely small and light.
“It is supposed to ferry the souls across, is it not? Across the Styx^[12], is it not? And then so small? Then the souls must be small and light – a soul as light as a feather, no, like eiderdown. The soul that is heavier than eiderdown must remain behind. And what then?”

I quoted Hubbard^[13], who holds the view that at the sight of the Styx we should have to burst into laughter, remembering that as small pink creatures we came into the world and leave it fat and bald-headed – and that we have taken it so deadly seriously all this time … .
“Quite,” Munch replied, “Does he say that? I still have too much of my nursemaid’s tales within me to think of laughter in connection with the River Styx. I see them before me, those who were left behind, those who were too heavy – and I ask myself, what is to become of them?”

I drew Munch’s attention to the fact that the painter Astrup^[14] had also spoken of this.
“There we have it: Astrup lived in primeval times – up there in Jølster they still remember the most important of all teachings, the science above all sciences: how we are to cross the Styx in Charon’s bark. The nursemaid of today has forgotten this, for her head is full of tables and charts. We contracted bacilli and tuberculosis and died – but die we all must! And we were given to know how we are to cross the River Styx! Do they remain on this side of the shore, all those who are too heavy? Will there be room for them? One tramples the other, just as on earth. Where are the poets? Why does no one write about those who do not get across? One ought to paint them!”
He closed his eyes.
“The shore is narrow – they stand upon one another, crawl over one another, some lie at the bottom, others swing themselves high up, pressing the others down. Delacroix! Did he not paint that? And Charon, does it pain the ferryman that so many had to be left behind – or was he relieved that his bark could hold no more? Why was he condemned to freight souls, for all eternity?”

“Nothing is like the presentiment – that which one anticipates, that which one believes one shall get to see – the expectation of what confronts one on the other shore. One can stand on the beach and see how the evening sun gilds the opposite shore, so that it glows with a magical allure like a fairy tale come true. One can take a boat and row so vigorously that it foam around the bow, intent on reaching the other side, the land of promise. – And when one has arrived, the stones there are just as grey as on the shore from which one set out. It would have been better to remain where one was – with one’s anticipatory expectations unimpaired. Completion often brings disappointment – in fact, always.”

“How often have I not had to experience it? I met a beautiful woman and I divined that the soul behind the splendid appearance must be great and beautiful! But it was like in the fairy tale: as soon as she opened her mouth, toads, serpents, and venomous creatures came tumbling forth from between her adorable lips. Noblesse oblige, they say. Does beauty not oblige then?”

“What indeed was it you were telling yesterday? Tell me once more about the Indian boy. He haunts me, that boy. Tonight I woke up and had to think of him. That must be the highest wisdom. The art of living. When did people in this country forget to develop the art of living? Now I remember what you said yesterday: you said that to you, the Indians seemed to live life in order to fit themselves into eternity, whereas the Europeans lived for the temporal. And that the Indians accuse us of worshiping the art of self-deception. Well, and then your little laundry girl! The one who told you she had to settle things with the Good Lord. The one who told you that for Director Hansen and Consul-General Olsen she had to exert herself. I could paint her, your little laundress. Actually, I ought to paint her before all others. She was small, was she not? Small and lively. I see her before me, she who thought, ‘il faut s’arranger un peu avec le bon Dieu …’.”
“To press oneself into eternity, that is what matters. The one thing necessary. A woman in a mountain village walks like that two hundred years ago and has a thought – it comes to me, from woman to woman – and finds its resurrection in one of my paintings. And I must feel my way back, if possible to the very first morning of this world, to the primal instinct, to primeval times, to the untouched. Gauguin sought it in Tahiti, Astrup possessed it in Jølster. He had grown up with it. It had become a part of his being. In the paintings where he is true to Jølster, he is great. His children must take up the inheritance after him. The inheritance together with the cross. Then one can bear it. Every man, every woman, who takes up the inheritance and the cross, they pave the way for the great thing. It may come today or in a hundred years, but it comes. And all those who preserve and protect the only thing that matters are the co-creators of creation!”

Carl H. Hudtwalcker, Oslo, 1964