Detail: Death Struggle (1915) Oil on canvas (Munch Museum, Oslo)
Not sure where this post will go so fasten your seatbelts and don't relinquish your cocktails! A revelatory show of Edward Munch's paintings at the Met Breuer opening this week. Don't you know? I mean, how many of us have ever seen so many Munch's 'live' and in the flesh unless we are totally into fjords and tall Scandinavian blondes?; )! What is totally amazing is how great great great great a painter was Mr Munch. If Braque and Picasso et al were the initial sparks for form in C20th art then it should be argued that Munch was the fire for abstract color on our cave wall today still flickering without kindling. The subject of every single canvas is manifested not by the subject itself but through the colors of paint and brush/tool techniques. Color and light. That may sound obvious but it is not unless you are up close and personal with these works. Munch could never be deemed a 'happy chappy' yet his paint is always dancing. Always confronting the viewer no matter how 'sad'. So many many disparate contemporary artists have acknowledged Munch as a major influence: Alex Katz to Peter Doig to Tracey Emin to…Charlie Chaplin (well maybe/probably)….
National Gallery of Art, Washington
It is Impressionist/Contemporary/American art WEEK this week in NYC. Munch acknowledged the influence of Van Gogh and Gaughin but made it all all his very very own. A lecture by scholar Avis Berman at The American Art Fair elucidated the overwhelming influence of Whistler's darkness on his American late 1870-80's + contemporaries. Some evolved into something more, some not. It was somewhat of a disappointment viewing the contemporary offerings of an AAA-List auction house yesterday after Mr. Munch. How many of these highly regarded artists truly achieved what Munch achieved with his paint brush and scraping (and even spray painting!). Very few, alas. Their reputations still intact but did any win my heart? A Peter Doig canvas did a gorgeous lyre-bird dance….a huge Cy Twombly not so so so. Loved the floating helium fish (extra fish included in the auction price point but no lifetime supply of helium). Isn't it always the way.
Did anyone spot: ahh- me to know and thou to ponder.
I could be, a helium fish 'rangler'/work up to fresco ceilings and wear top hats!/ I could learn to feed Venetian lions/ I've also gotten along with cats./ I'd wield a whip but never use it/ I'd have them eating out' my tiny hand./ I'd like to be……./
I'd like to be…..
I'd like to be…..
Something…../
Grand
.
'In a very unusual way', /
'something inside me surrenders'/
'to touch my heart': /
Edvard Munch.
Happy/sad beauty/
made me
whole
.
Normally No Longer Empty do just that with vacant buildings in New York. Hold These Truths is on view at the very spacious offices of arts organization The Nathan Cummings Foundation. Art that provokes rather than manipulating thought with curatorial quality to unanimously high standard. Political without being politicized. I would argue there is all the world of difference. Viewing is by appointment.
Detail: The Death of Marat (1907) Oil on canvas (Munch Museum, Oslo)
Scandinavia House hosted the first Munch, Modernism, and Modernity conference ever held outside Oslo this weekend. Sitting spellbound as Mieke Bal delivered the keynote address: (How To Save Munch From His Own Reputation)- I'm not crazy after all, that's 80% of exactly what I saw and thought when I viewed the SFMOMA/Met Breuer show on Monday. Wow! Basically: why don't people look more closely at what Munch the painter painted! Hello! A bit like the Columbo of painting (btw you still have time to bid on Peter Falk's battered raincoat-Lot 1145- you get his shoes without cement as a bonus).;)
No surviving known shoes of Munch. Alas.
Marketing the North was the title of this year's conference. Sounds cynical but there is method in's' madness. There was even a review when the Munch show 'played' at SFMoMA that asked 'where is The Scream'?! Talk about living under a 'rock' called American media. Ooops…The conference title/agenda is ever prescient as the American fundraising model becomes (or how long has it been) ever present in Europe. They are gettin' desperate for the equivalent of 'bums on seats': 'faces in the museum crowd'.
"The biographical Munch still sells" uttered flatly with a large twist of lemon by the last conference speaker. There's a fascinating yet hardly artistic exhibition of Munch's home movies and photos at Scandinavia House. Great cameraman or 'snapper' was Munch not. Curator Patricia Berman pitched the idea (that should have had a lead of 3 years) but this summer and 3 months later here they all are! They are not great anything. BUT: anything by Munch is worth considering and then if you will: embracing, archiving or forever musing.
There was a lot of talk at the conference about how/whether Munch marketed/networked himself as an artist, and the broader context of that. His photo 'selfies' can easily be misconstrued as self obsessed. Not a far leap from how Munch was/gets marketed. THE SCREAM! By all accounts Munch was amazingly charismatic (Gallen-Kallela, Rolf Stenersen). It's a bit like the classic acting exercise: no one is interested if you cry your heart out on stage or screen. What we all do, though, is fight back the sorrow. That's what becomes heart-breaking for both player and observer.
Munch may have got drunk (and it is said he totally screwed up his long great friendship with playwright Henrik Ibsen when he went too far at a cafe). Hard to imagine Munch indulging in self pity in public, though. The proof is in his art now public.
A curator at SFMoMA recounted a 1950's exhibition of Munch works and how some Bay Area artists totally responded. With no criticism intended (and I have not seen the original works as I had not seen but 2 of Munch's until last Monday), these artists don't seem to re-inhabit the visceral of Munch's paint. They remain voyeurs.
The conference raised so many issues that it should be worth a 1,000 at least words. Hey- I wanna go to bed: I've been up since 6.30 this morning. [I heard about a writing 'cyber' competition in Britain where some folk were writing 5,000 words before bed and 10,000 the next morn.] Guess I need implants for my inner dinosaur. The ginseng just ain't kickin' in.
Hopefully the conference will be online in a month or so. Will link when/if it is. Many many other Nordic artists were mentioned this weekend (and I couldn't help but think of C20 American art and thence Clement Greenberg parallels) having seen a lot of American Art Week this week. The question is WHO were the bravest! Who 'blinds us by reputation' when we are forever "bound on a wheel of fire"? No, not even that. You don't/never create art 'to be' anything. Downfall if you do. (well, alas not always true….hey ho)
WHO cried from the heart and yet made it the observer's tears not the artist's? WE know some of those American/Mexican/Canadian etc artists who were and are. More to be discovered for sure. Of course the last thing you want is to market tears of soft rain. Munch is so like Brecht: the poet of paint- the poet of words. "We don't cry out loud/we keep it inside, we learn how to hide our feelings/Fly high and proud/..."
The strange true lynchpin for all this.
I could have hung out with a colleague tonight for a bit longer but so tired and hungry just wanted to get home. This is what NY allows one to see: Munch on the subway. Happenstance. How could/would/should I paint this family unravelling in't my eyes? The mother in a state of troubled or maybe just fatigued 'something'. The totally supportive father of a totally independent very young girl. Her beautiful eyes seeing all. The father of a totally strong, willful slightly older son who simply needs to grow. Rebel. Learn by mistake. The young daughter very knowing, very quietly supportive glancing at her older brother having learnt a tactile, crafts skill to pass the time and quicken her mind. Quietly her head then resting momentarily upon her father's knee in sympathy.
Munch somehow got something equivalent. A cinematic image. How do you combine all those still frames into one image still 'real', fluid, energised?
Not singular. Not sad.
The circus of life…..perhaps Munch never overcame his 'demons' but he was a survivor living a ripe old age perhaps thankfully dying before WWII scorched its inevitable way. What did Munch make of that? Maybe he'd seen it all with WWI- a subject absolutely no-one raised at the conference. Nor was his time in Oslo under the Nazi occupation spoken of. NOt a good topic for 'Markrting the North'. His paintings weren't confiscated from his Oslo studio by the Nazis as he feared instead they paid for his funeral. There is no proof he was ever a sympathiser. His self-portrait (1940-1943) and title for the Met Breuer shows no signs of the outside world. Was he ignorant (as were many Germans) that the Jewish camps were what they were? Did he believe that humans were always at war in some fashion with each other? Like all biography we are inevitably curious yet most of the questions will never have definitive answers. When one leaves art to the world that great, that soul searching, does anything else ever really matter?
Poets don't have biographies. Octavio Paz
There never was a good biography of a good novelist. F. Scott Fitzgerald
If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine. Fernando Pessoa
Alas: there may will be a marquee coming to a location near you:
SOFT RAIN: AMERICAN ART- THE KNOWING SELF.
Siodmak also discusses the rocky relationship with his brother, director Robert Siodmak, and reminisces about some Hollywood notables: “I saw John Huston frequently at my home. We played chess but I could hardly afford that relation since he went through a bottle of my Scottish whiskey in one sitting. So did the actor Humphrey Bogart, his close friend, who also was a chess aficionado. Bogart was even speedier in drinking my scotch than John.” A friend once said to Siodmak of his writing, “You are writing about people who want to climb to the top of the mountain, but never get there--that is the theme of all your books,” to which Siodmak responded, “But it also is the outcome of everybody’s struggle in life.” [Lot 1215-Bonhams]
