When we think of Edvard Munch, Norway’s best-known artist and the so-called “father of Expressionism” we invariably think of his iconic masterpiece, The Scream. But Munch was an extremely prolific and influential artist who left thousands of other works to the city of Oslo when he died. This book features detailed walking tours of Oslo and Asgardstrand where the artist lived, loved and labored. Readers will discover the sights and stories behind such an iconic work like "The Scream.”
When we think of Edvard Munch, Norway’s best-known artist and the so-called “father of Expressionism” we invariably think of his iconic masterpiece, The Scream. But Munch was an extremely prolific and influential artist who left thousands of other works to the city of Oslo when he died. This book features detailed walking tours of Oslo and Asgardstrand where the artist lived, loved and labored. Readers will discover the sights and stories behind such an iconic work like "The Scream.”
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Overview
When we think of Edvard Munch, Norway’s best-known artist and the so-called “father of Expressionism” we invariably think of his iconic masterpiece, The Scream. But Munch was an extremely prolific and influential artist who left thousands of other works to the city of Oslo when he died. This book features detailed walking tours of Oslo and Asgardstrand where the artist lived, loved and labored. Readers will discover the sights and stories behind such an iconic work like "The Scream.”
About the Author
Museyon Guides are visually oriented travel guides, accessibly written for the greenhorn as well as the aficionado, featuring academic-quality information on artistic and cultural interests and obsessions. They are based in New York City.
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Munch and Oslo
By Lea Feinstein
Museyon, Inc.
Copyright © 2013 Museyon Inc.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-938450-22-8
CHAPTER 1
NORWAY
MUNCH and Oslo
When we think of Edvard Munch, Norway's best-known artist and the so-called "father of Expressionism" we invariably think of his iconic masterpiece, The Scream. But Munch was an extremely prolific and influential artist who left thousands of other works to the city of Oslo when he died. Nature and light were always incredibly important subjects for Munch, and in Oslo he created countless powerful landscapes and cityscapes as well as monumental symbolist murals such as those that he painted for the University of Oslo. When he died in 1944, at age 80, the artist bequeathed his extensive archive to the City of Oslo, a collection that is now housed in Oslo's Munch Museum.
BY LEA FEINSTEIN
Lightning flashes across the Oslofjord as a summer squall whips waves into peaks and blackens the sky. As the storm clears, the bay grows calm, opaque as mercury, and the sky tints red, then mauve. The Rådhuset clock tower near the harbor reads ten thirty, and it is still light ... the end of a long Norwegian summer day. In 1893, Edvard Munch painted The Scream with a sky like this, after a harrowing walk along the nearby Ekeberg Heights. He recorded in his diary that he heard all of nature shriek in anguish. The distress was his own, but his image of the contorted face covering its ears in a tortured landscape remains an icon in our own time.
Oslo was Munch's home. He was born in 1863 and moved here a year later, when the city was still known as Kristiana, the capital of a Swedish territory; his life ended here as well, in the occupied Norway of 1944, when he was 80. Though he traveled through European art capitals during the most active years of his career, he always came back to the Oslofjord region every summer for emotional and spiritual refueling. During the years of his travels, the place he called home was Åsgårdstrand — a fishing village and art colony on the coast, about 60 miles southwest of Oslo — where he owned a little house.
Unlike other artists whose limited output is scattered around the globe in the hands of private collectors and museums, Munch was astonishingly prolific, and a large portion of his life's work is here in Oslo. When he died, he left it all to the city. It is too much to cover in a day or two, so if you're a serious fan, give yourself a week, and don't count on Mondays, when everything is shut tight. A traveler can see the originals of The Scream (1893), Madonna (1893–94), Puberty (1894), and The Sick Child (1885–86), which together catapulted him to fame, but lesser-known and equally startling works are plentiful, including a whole series of stunning self-portraits and hundreds of innovative prints and drawings. Known for his iconic paintings, Munch was perhaps most gifted as a printmaker, and his images are all here — available for casual study or sharp scrutiny.
TIMELINE
December 12, 1863 Edvard Munch is born in Løten, Norway
1864 Family relocates to Kristiania (now Oslo)
1868 Munch's mother passes away
1877 Sister Sophie dies
1879 Starts classes at Kristiana Technical College
1881 Abandons his architecture studies and enrolls in the Royal School of Design in Kristiania to become a painter
1884 Joins Kristiania's bohemian community
1885 Journeys to Paris
1889 Arranges his first one-man exhibition at the Student Association in Kristiania
Studies with Léon Bonnat in Paris
After the death of his father, Munch falls into a deep depression
1892 Controversial exhibition in Berlin closes within a week
1893 Based in Berlin, Munch creates iconic painting The Scream
1908 Suffers nervous breakdown and delusions; spends eight months in a Copenhagen clinic
1909 Awarded the Royal Order of St. Olav
1916 Relocates to Ekely, where he remains for the rest of his life
1930 A burst blood vessel causes near blindness in his right eye
1933 Receives the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Olav
1937 German officials confiscate over 80 works of "degenerate art" by Munch in German galleries
1940 Bequeaths all works to the city of Oslo
January 23, 1944 Edvard Munch dies of pneumonia in Ekely
Munch painted and reprinted many versions of his most famous works, including The Scream. When he sold a work, he painted another to add to his own collection. "He never copies himself; he just goes deeper into the theme," says Toril Andersen, a guide at the Munch House Museum in Åsgårdstrand. This might have been obsessive, but it was also marketing genius. These combined works were called The Frieze of Life, and they were a pictorial diary of his own life — a linked narrative of innocence, love, betrayal, loss, and death. He added to it throughout his life, exhibiting in European capitals and in Oslo at venues like the rotunda at the Blomqvist Gallery (now home to the chain restaurant T.G.I. Friday's).
Munch said that his family tree was rotten with madness and disease. He lost his mother when he was 5 and his sister Sofie when he was 14, both to tuberculosis, which was rampant in 19th-century Norway. Another sister, Laura, was institutionalized with severe mental illness, and both his physician father and his only brother, Andreas, died before he was 30. Only Edvard and his sister Inger survived into old age. A sickly child, Munch spent days at home drawing and painting. His early pictures portray his family members and the quiet interiors of the half dozen apartments his father moved them to.
His old neighborhood around Olaf Ryes Plass, in the Grünerløkka borough of Oslo, has changed little in a hundred years, although trees have softened what was a raw square of workers' houses. Trendy shops, clubs, and sidewalk restaurants share the streets with modest apartments. Grünerhaven, a lively beer garden in the square, is a popular watering hole and the kitchen is open until 10 on summer nights.
Munch's classes at the Royal School of Design, located on the street known as Apotekergaten, lasted a year. (Now called the Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, it is located on the nearby street St. Olavs Gate.) Then he moved to a studio with friends at the yellow Pultosten building at Stortings Plass. The painter Christian Krohg, who also had a studio in the building, provided moral support and lessons in perspective.
In the evenings, Munch walked from this studio along Karl Johan to the Grand Hotel Café, the gathering place of the Kristiania bohemians, local artists and writers. Per Krohg's 1928 mural on the far wall depicts the scene in the 1890s, and it is virtually unchanged today. The booth that Ibsen claimed every day for lunch and dinner (precisely at one twenty and six o'clock) is still there, too. In the painting, Munch slouches against a window, next to the writer Hans Jaeger, who first encouraged the young artist to make his own life story the subject of his paintings — which in turn charted the course of his career.
Following Jaeger's advice, Munch painted the deaths of his mother and his sister, his own lovers, and their betrayals. Works like The Sick Child, Death in the Sickroom (1893), and The Day After (1894) shocked the critics at the daily Aftenposten, who condemned Munch's work as rough and unfinished and his subjects as immoral. But his fellow artists and the director of the National Gallery bought his pictures from the beginning. They still hang at the National Gallery, an unpretentious brick building a short walk from the Slottet (Royal Palace), around the corner from the university. The iconic paintings, so often reproduced, are fresh and startling in the original. The Scream emits a terrific energy, even on its humble cardboard, and the gouged surface of The Sick Child still shocks. Munch's intensity radiates from his eerie Self-Portrait with Burning Cigarette (1895).
Oppressed by the long, dark northern winters, and eager to see advanced painting, Munch fled Oslo for Paris when he won a grant in 1889. Upon his return to the city, which he had visited in 1885, he saw the works of Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat, Gauguin, and Van Gogh, as well as Japanese woodcuts. He learned etching, lithography, and woodcut techniques, and he translated the simplified forms of his paintings into prints. From 1893 to 1908, he spent the cold months of the year in Berlin, Paris, Copenhagen, and other cosmopolitan cities, arranging exhibitions, painting portrait commissions, and establishing an international reputation.
Every summer he returned to Åsgårdstrand. Munch would take a steamboat and make the trip from Oslo in five hours. There is no longer a boat (and the train-bus-taxi combo is arduous), so renting a car is the best way to get there. Still popular with artists today, it was a favorite summer destination for Oslo artists in Munch's time. The little fishing village was quiet in the winter, but when the population doubled in summer, life became very lively.
Munch summered there with his family, and in 1897, he purchased his little house for 900 kroner — a big sum for that time. "He almost lost the house several times because of financial difficulties, but he kept coming here until 1933, when he was too old to make the trip," Andersen says. "The house is still exactly the way it was in Munch's time." She opens a closet where the artist's coat still hangs; his photos and sketches are still pinned to the walls, and his presence is palpable.
Far from the Oslo gossips, it was an ideal place for trysts, and Munch — known as "the handsomest man in Norway" — had his share of tumultuous love affairs. His first love was Millie Thaulow, a married woman. Their affair, with its innocent beginnings and her eventual betrayal, is portrayed in The Dance of Life (1899) and Ashes (1894). His affair with Tulla Larsen, the headstrong daughter of a rich Oslo wine merchant, ended in disaster. Engaged to be married to Tulla, Munch kept losing the official papers he was required to file. He was reluctant to commit himself to anything but his art and broke off their relationship. A last desperate rendezvous in Åsgårdstrand was marred by a shooting accident, when Munch lost part of his left middle finger. He transformed the scene into paint and gave it a historical context as The Death of Marat I and The Death of Marat II (both 1907).
When Munch was drinking, he often picked fights with strangers and shot at his friends. And when he shared a woman with another man, such as the Oslo sculptor Gustav Vigeland (his roommate in Germany), reports of his bad behavior made it back to the local press. In Self-Portrait with Bottle of Wine (1906), Munch portrays himself as a dissolute man at the end of his wits, and in 1908, he suffered a nervous breakdown. After an eight-month stay in a Copenhagen clinic, he returned to the Oslofjord. He tried life in Kragerø and in Hvitsten, down the coast from Oslo. With the money from a commission for a mural cycle to decorate the university's Great Hall or Aula, Munch finally returned to his hometown. He purchased Ekely, a two-story house in the western suburbs with enough land for his mural studio. The house was bulldozed in 1960, but space in his former studio building is available for rent to artists. It is closed to the public. (The Munch Museum website features a humorous short film about an artist's move to the utopian studios.) At Ekely, Munch worked on 11-foot sketches (1909–16) for the murals, which he completed in 1916. The Sun is the focal point; The Researchers/ Alma Mater (often called Mother Earth) and History (in which an old man instructs a young boy) round out the series. Closed for restoration, the hall is due to reopen in 2011, but full-scale preparatory sketches are on display at the Munch Museum.
THE SCREAM
Since Edvard Munch painted The Scream in 1893, it has become one of the most iconic images in art history, a symbol of the alienation and anxiety of modern life.
Munch painted the image in the middle of one of the most creatively fertile moments in his life, around the time that the young artist embarked on The Frieze of Life, his monumental study of life, love, and death. Lasting for most of his career, the series explores the same feelings of anxiety and depression that plagued the artist, feelings he himself credited as the inspiration of his art.
In The Scream, the viewer is confronted by a horrific figure with a masklike expression frozen in pain. A road disappears in dizzying perspective while a couple walks in the distance, seemingly unfazed by what is happening. The Oslofjord swirls in blue and black, while an angry sky is red and orange. In his writing Munch describes walking in Ekeberg when suddenly, the sky turned "red as blood" and he felt totally isolated from his companions, alone with the all-consuming cry of nature. Whether this vision was real or imagined remains unknown — contemporary scientists note Munch may have actually described the 1883 volcanic eruption of Krakatowa, an event which caused atmospheric changes around the world.
Munch revisited the theme of The Scream several times, in pastel, lithograph, and once again in tempera on cardboard (1910), now at the Munch Museum. Over the years, The Scream's iconic status has attracted some unwanted attention — versions have been stolen from both the National Gallery (in 1994) and the Munch Museum (in 2004). Both paintings have since been returned.
As he aged, Munch avoided people, especially the "interfering meddlers" from "the enemies' city" — Oslo (as he referred to it). Fearful of thieves, he erected a barbed wire fence and kept vicious guard dogs that he couldn't handle. Collectors and dignitaries were kept at arm's length; save a few old friends, no one could visit, not even his sister Inger, who Munch once said "made him tense." Rolf Stenersen was an exception. A local financier and art collector, he acted as agent, financial adviser, and errand boy for the old man, and penned a lively anecdotal biography. In Munch's last self-portrait, Between the Clock and the Bed (1940–42), he sees himself as a shrunken old man racing time and awaiting the end. When a cargo of German ammunition exploded in Oslo harbor in December 1943, buildings and windows throughout the city were shattered. Huddled near his basement shelter in the winter cold, Munch contracted bronchitis. He died the following month, in January 1944.
After his death, the "huge mess" at Ekely (as Stenersen describes it) was placed in temporary storage. In 1963, on the centennial of his birth, the Munch Museum was dedicated in Tøyen, in the eastern part of town. His gift to the city included roughly 1,100 paintings, 4,500 drawings and watercolors, 92 sketchbooks, 18,000 graphic works, and 6 sculptures. The well-publicized thefts of The Scream and Madonna (both recovered) highlighted the need for tighter security. A new, state-of-the-art Munch/Stenersen Museum is under construction next to the new Oslo Opera House. When it opens in 2013–14, Munch will be back where he belongs, with a fine view of his beloved Oslofjord.
ART IMITATING ART: THE ARTIST'S IMPRINT ON POPULAR CULTURE
MOVIES
ON LOCATION
Edvard Munch (1974)
Director: Peter Watkins
Peter Watkins's three-hour, made-for-TV movie chronicles 10 formative years in the artist's life, from 1884 to 1894. Known for his docudrama style, Watkins stayed very true to Munch's biography — filming on-location in Oslo and Åsgårdstrand and using Munch's own diaries for narration. The film also introduces the key figures that influenced the young artist, from his mentors Hans Jaeger in Kristiania and August Strindberg in Berlin, to his first love, the married Millie Thaulow, referred to as "Mrs. Heiberg" in Munch's diaries and in the film's narration. The movie stirred a bit of controversy when it was released for Watkins's casting of non-professional Norwegian actors in all the roles. In fact, the director went so far as to intentionally hire actors who disliked Munch's work to portray the unfavorable reception the paintings initially received.
Ansigter (Faces) (1971)
Director: Anja Breien
This Norwegian film is a short documentary about the faces within the art of Edvard Munch. Within it, several portraits are showcased and accompanied by a poem from Poul Borum.
Post Mortem (1989)
Director: Skule Eriksen
Throughout most of Munch's life he was an enthusiastic photographer. This short film uses many of the artist's photographs, several of which were self-portraits, to uncover their inner meaning. It was made in cooperation with the composer Randall Meyers.
Scream (1996)
Director: Wes Craven
In this trilogy of popular horror films, a psychopathic serial killer called Ghostface stalks a group of teenagers while wearing a mask of the face pictured in The Scream.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Munch and Oslo by Lea Feinstein. Copyright © 2013 Museyon Inc.. Excerpted by permission of Museyon, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
MUNCH AND OSLO NORWAY BY LEA FEINSTEIN,Introduction,
Biography,
Timeline,
The Scream,
Art Imitating Art,
For Your Information / Access,
Calendar ... Yearly Events,
Before You Go, Get in the Know,
Walking Tour,
Munch Lived Here,
Souvenirs,
The Madonna,
The National Gallery,
Where to See ... The Walking Tour,
Where to See ... Scene Stealers,
Where to ... Eat and Sleep,
Map of Venues and City Landmarks,
Extended Travel: Åsgårdstrand,
Åsgårdstrand in Artwork,
Anatomy of a Masterpiece,