In the face of a book of this kind, it is easy to come up with expectations that are turned up too high. There are no limits to what you can wish for. First and foremost, the biographer must come up with illuminating interpretations of the artist’s work. It also doesn’t hurt if the author approaches his object with unparalleled artistic sensibility, as Karl Ove Knausgård did to his advantage in the book “So little longing on so little flate” – where he read his and others’ imminent death into Munch’s painting of a cabbage field. Why stop there? Ideally, the author of a Munch biography should also have known his subject of study personally, as the art collector Rolf Stenersen did, and later recounted in the memoir classic “Close-up of a Genius”. Solid contemporary sources But instead of flaunting on the book all the expectations that have thus been fulfilled elsewhere, it is more interesting to look at what de Figueiredo has to add. And it’s not that little. The most important thing is historical weight. It is when de Figueiredo conducts the chorus of contemporary sources that he is truly at home. There is nothing that beats testimonials handed down from those who were present. This is something all historians know. Through the contemporary sources, we see Munch through the eyes of those who were close enough to him. THE FIRST PICTURE: Edvard Munch was born on 12 December 1863 in Ådalsbruk near Løten in Hedmark. Here on the lap of his mother Laura Cathrine Munch. Photo: H. Lunde, Hamar. The Munch Museum’s archive. / Aschehoug Bakhode as a coconut One of them was the German writer and painter Max Dauthendey. He was present at Munch’s first exhibition in Berlin, and noted that the 28-year-old artist was “a medium-height, thin young man. Blond, true Nordic, narrow forehead, narrow head, but with a back of the head like a coconut”. Through the letters and diaries, which the Munch Museum has put a lot of effort into digitizing, we also see the world through Munch’s eyes. The letters he sent home to aunt Karen on Nordstrand from Berlin and Paris are directly touching. Overall, this two-way communication provides a clear portrait of the artist as a young man. The conclusion is clear: He was lonely! One of those who perceived this loneliness was the German writer Theodor Wolff, who observes Munch at a party in Berlin in 1893: Little news about “Scream” De Figereido does not shy away from saying something about the pictures either. Sometimes this is quite successful. About Munch’s painting “The Sick Child” he writes: “When we look at the painting, we do not see Munch’s grief over his sister. We see a tale of grief through a veil of tears created by flowing layers of paint, falling movements in the layers and an atmosphere reminiscent of the semi-translucent film that lies over old silent films and gives the past reality a sheen of memory and dream. MUNCH’S BREAKTHROUGH: “The Sick Child” is from 1885–1886 and is often considered his breakthrough picture. Photo: The Munch Museum When he writes about “Scream”, one notices how difficult it is to come up with something new about an image that is almost understood to death: “Scream is the holism of symbolism in an infernal form, a diabolical symphony, where the wave lines which surrounds the figure, does not isolate it from the world, but channels between the inner and the outer and allows the individual to be absorbed by a boundless and omnipresent anxiety. Scarce personal descriptions Managing to tell about the first half of Munch’s life in less than 300 pages is a feat in itself. What de Figueiredo does not have room for in the running text, he places in the endnotes. What belongs in the main text, and what should be added in the comments at the back of the book, is not always obvious. Sometimes the character descriptions are scarce. I look in vain both in the text and in the endnotes for an explanation of who the aforementioned Max Dauthendey is. ARTISTS IN EXILE: Edvard Munch, August Strindberg and writer Dagny Juel spent a lot of time at the bar G. Türke’s Weinhandlung und Probierstube in Berlin, renamed “the black pig” by Strindberg, who thought the wine sack outside the door resembled a pig. Photo: Edvard Munch Artists from the De Figueiredo colony, whose mother is from Norway and father from Zanzibar, take the time to put forward a bold claim: Norway in Munch’s time was a sort of colony. We were remote-controlled first from Copenhagen, and then from Stockholm. Ibsen and Munch broke through precisely because they were provincial artists from a nation with “low educational pressure”. That perspective is interesting – have we simply stuck with the wrong self-image? Do we, by virtue of being subject to foreign powers for over five hundred years, really have more in common with Tahiti than Germany? Did Munch and Ibsen become world artists, precisely thanks to their anchoring in the periphery? This discussion is interesting, not least considering that this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Jon Fosse. Is it precisely the provincial aspect of him, in the best sense of the word, that the world has learned to value? AT THE CASINO: “At the Roulette in Monte Carlo” (1882, oil on canvas). The man on the left is probably Munch himself leaning over the table with a notepad in his hands, writes Ivo de Figueiredo in “Stormen”. Photo: Edvard Munch Shot in the left hand When Ivo de Figueiredo finishes the first volume, Munch wanders around Kristiania after having his left hand partially shot to pieces while drunk at the summer house in Åsgårdsstrand. The historian’s task here is to tell that there are situations in the artist’s life that the sources are silent about. We simply do not know what happened. What we do know is that at this time he had begun to experiment with graphics and woodcuts. It would still be a few years before Munch painted the cabbage field so loved by Knausgård, and began to photograph. “The Storm” gives a sense of an overview of the first half of an artist’s life, which I think many of us know piecemeal and divided. You can only look forward to the continuation. Hello! I read and review literature in news. Please also read my review of “Kairos” by Jenny Erpenbeck, “Details” by Ia Genberg, or Franz Kafka’s “The Process” translated by Jon Fosse. news reviews Photo: Aschehoug Title: “Stormen – Volume 1, a biography of Edvard Munch” Author: Ivo de Figueiredo Publisher: Aschehoug Number of pages: 297 Date: 12 October 2023
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“The Storm – Volume 1, a biography of Edvard Munch” by Ivo de Figueiredo – Reviews and recommendations
