Edvard Munch
EDVARD MUNCH.
The Arabian Nights tales are full of descriptions of scenes and objects; interesting in context of Moslem proscription vs portrait painting etc.
The activity of visualization in own´s own mind is part of experiencing paintings etc.
When we see a painting by Velasquez or Edvard Munch, we are casting our own souls into it.
130701 17:39 In Edvard Munch´s paintings I enjoy compositional power, and almost thirty years ago when I wrote about this a curator at Munch Museum agreed emphatically, adding she had been saying the same, but most experts do not get it. The entire question of what is composition in paintings is unclear, and is a test for the capacity to perceive abstraction.
250701 15:42 In 1972 I wrote a paper about Edvard Munch and Velasquez and Hubert Robert and Heinrich Füssli (Henry Fuseli). I emphasized compositional aspects, and especially the reversal of point of view effect very dominant in Velasquez and Robert. Not only in “Las Meninas” but also in “The Spinners”(“Las Hilanderas”)(“The Fable of Arachne”) Velasquez has the view coming toward us as well as from us. This effect is dominant in Robert by his emphasizing light coming from the distance. A recent famous painter who uses similar effects with extreme three dimensional sculptural construction is Frank Stella.
260701 05:34 In this view reversal is intrinsically a special intellectual component; we enjoy the mental thrill.
But alo in other ways is pictorial art philosophy. Especially in the 20th Century we see art (pictorial) moving about among psychology and philosophy.
290801 0652 BBC Prime had terrific show on the great painter Chardin --- wonderful lady talking---I had to rely on memory for the pictures (those i could), as I do not have that channel, and only get the sound, and spotty receptiion. After that they did an excellent show on Jasper Johns.
0655 In terms of intellectual thrill, does Chardin offer composition (as distinct from arrangement)(cf Fussli)(Fuseli)?
071001 1423 Think what Escher would have done with September 11, 2001!!!!!
søndag 14. oktober 2001 15:36 Leaving out Iceland and Finland, among Scandinavian nations it is Norway that by far leads in historic world art achievement. Edvard Munch is the greatest painter since Diego Velasquez (Spanish/Portuguese)(Velasquez is the greatest painter since the ancient Egyptians). Ibsen is the most important playwright since Shakespeare. Among second level artists, Grieg ( Norwegian classical (in the general sense) composer) surpasses Nielsen (Danish), and then we have to match Strindberg (Swedish playwright) vs Holberg (born Norwegian, lived in e g Denmark). In general literature, H C Andersen (Danish) and Snorre (ancient historian of Sagas, of undeterminable nation?). That´s about it. I guess.
onsdag 17. oktober 2001 19:19 Yesterday I met with my grand-daughter and her father (my daughter´s husband) at The Munch Museum Coffee-shop --- delightful, of course, and it is the most important building in Europe and Scandinavia. I hope bin Laden would use a neutron weapon so he only kills people but does not harm the paintings, altho I am aware that the attitude toward culture typical of Taliban would doubtless cause him to manifest the worst of anti-culture. Is there a rule against cultural genocidal behavior, similar to that against genocide v v people? Of course I would have nuked the Taliban when they announced they were about to destroy that Buddhist art --- see, then we would have prevented the events of Sept 11. Toying with evil humans is dumb --- cancer must be removed early. Indeed, removing the Buddhist statues was a rehearsal for removing the World Trade Center towers for the same reasons. Does bin mean something used for disposal?
torsdag 25. oktober 2001 21:20 Today Egil showed me a book of works by a Swedish artist (1868-1930) Axel Petersson, who carved wood , making small statues, so to speak. Terrific --- check him out!!!!! Great ÒnessÓness. l¿rdag 27. oktober 2001 19:35 Andy Warhol gives us planes on planes receding. 19:36 How (neurologically?) does one get an aerial view of a place one has actually only walked? I mean we do, in recollection.
Edvard Munch tirsdag 25. desember 2001 01:50 The famous Pappa Breughel painting of return from the hunt in winter is so very magical. I hear the snow crunching and feel the warm wrap around and hear the people in their various activities. The composition pulls me into the futureground which is the pictures background. The picture has a personality.
As I recall, it was the wonderful S. Laine Faison, one of the professors I had a course of (1955), (how else say that?), who said (in a book) that Edvard Munch would have been greater if he had been French --- and I knew he was wrong; so now I can clarify that had Munch been French he would have been using French models instead of Norwegian, and that would have vastly weakened his greatness: one of the sources of his greatness is precisely his Norwegian-ness, with the subjects themselves, the models. There is an atavism here in Norway, capitalized on also by the playwright Ibsen. Sweden and Denmark (altho i shouldn«t say as i have not lived in those places except very briefly) do not have that, it seems to me (comment from others welcome). Anyway, if you are looking at Scandinavia from, say, Miami, or London, you should be careful to keep in mind that Norway, Sweden and Denmark are three very different countries. There is very solid cultural basis for the fact that it is mostly Norway that has produced the great artists. Amusingly, one of them is contested by Denmark and Norway, i e, Holberg, who was born Norwegian but resided all over Europe and mostly in Denmark and is memorialized in one of the two statues in front of the Danish National Theater. In front of the Norwegian National Theater we have Ibsen and Bjornstrand (sp?) --- but at the side a statue of Holberg with two of his characters. Anyway, only Neilsen (sp?)(Dane) can compete with Grieg, and does not win. And only Strindberg (Swede) can compete with Ibsen, and does not win. But of course Denmark has H C Anderson, who certainly wins over Hamsun (Norwegian). And the great Danish painter is Christen K¿bke (1810-1848)(almost exact contemporary of Poe), whom I personally live in, but of course is simply not in the same league as Edvard Munch. Ah, yes, besides all these there is Snorre the saga master and the other saga tellers, and I guess it would not be reasonable to assign nationality to them. Anyway you see the imbalance in favor of Norway (unless you discard what I have been opining). Besides, Oslo has the best climate in the world, and the locals do not think so!
May I offer comments about Moslems, with regard to their opposition to figurative art ( I mean people«s faces especially)(but I wonder about those marvellous Persian miniatures?) --- they seem to revel in the art of script and the sound of the human voice, as coordinated with their scriptures; and their architecture is fabulous: so, I look forward to some coming together of West and Middle-East in all this, without their losing the concentrated focus resulting from their rule against our sort of pictures. Of course their art history is not a simple monolith: Indeed, in ÒThe Arabian NightsÓ the issue of portraits is alive in many stories centering on a person falling madly in love with someone solely due to a portrait --- as if cautionary tales against the evil of portraiture, except that some of these stories end happily. Anyway, if Islam was trying to protect itself from skills that might have interfered with the Koran, I hope Moslems will reconsider the cost. But my artist friend recently visited Turkey and mosques and said she was relieved at the peace in absence of all those oppressive Christian depictions found in many churches but not in mosques, and I certainly can myself appreciate the absence of depiction sometimes. And we can study the relative presence or absence of pictures in the various sects of Christinity. But is there an illustrated Koran? Or could there be a movie of the life of Mohammed? And what about teaching children by such illustrations --- is that considered bad in Mohammedanism? Well, we could probably do with fewer posters of Sadaam. I am just wondering.
Edvard Munch tirsdag 25. desember 2001 19:28 About Norwegian atavism, I go over now to mention Danish relationshipness: when i first visited the Copenhagen portrait museum named for the tobacco company, I was overwhelmed by the Danish relationshipness palpable in the paintings. Go there. One of the qualifying features of great portrait art is this personal presence of personality as we find especially in Velasquez and Munch and certain ancient Egyptians. Munch, like other geniuses, transcends the national characteristics he was born among; Munch learned perhaps from the Japanese to escape the frame, and anyway had a strong compassionate character from his family probably. But to be in Copenhagen SURROUNDED BY portraits by divers and sundry artists all having the quality of personal compassionate presence of personality of the model, is ...go there. The Hirshsprung Portrait Gallery I think it is called; its been thirty years since. I do not like to recommend travel, but Copenhagen is on the short list. As of course is Paris. Go see the netsuke (netske) --- tiny sculptures from Japan especially. In those days (maybe still) there was a branch of the Louvre that opened in another place only about one Sunday a month, crammed jam packed with netske. It was not well lit, so as i returned several times (being in paris a few months)(I will tell you about that later, in another section) i brought a flashlight. Also, so as to avoid hearing the footsteps and conversations i used ear-protecters, the large kind. And I became friendly with the guard, whose face I remember to this day. Anyway, a few years later I returned from Oslo with my wife and the guard was very pleased remembering me to see me again and joke about the flashlight and the earprotecters.
s¿ndag 27. januar 2002 20:31 I recently redd an article from 1985 by some writer named Mark Strand about Edward Hopper. He says the explanation for Hopper«s effect of loneliness (which he takes for granted as a proper evaluation of the effect of Hopper in many pictures, e g ÒNighthawksÓ) is composition based on an unfulfilled triangular pattern which speaks directly to the human soul (I paraphrase broadly). He then points out that some pictures which folks call lonely are actually not lonely, inasmuch as they do not use such a compositional trick. In this latter, he is supposedly distancing himself from standard crap about e g ÒEarly Sunday MorningÓ. He is to be commended for trying to think independently, but he fails, and could not but fail, with his obviously limitted capacity to observe, or think.
I do not feel loneliness in Hopper, and I never thought the paintings of Edvard Munch were depressing, either. I accuse the art world mavins of succumbing to standardized pseudo-responses.
Since around 1970, shall we say, attitudes toward the gruesome and the limitations of social life have become much more mature than previously. We do not now blame Edvard Munch for showing us death and dying, when we have TV coverage of war and accident and disease and the calamities of family life. Instead of being blamed for shoving horrors at us, we see that Edvard Munch offers us nobility in the face of death and loss.
Similarly with regard to Edward Hopper, as we mature away from procrustean repressive obsessions with jollity vs misery, we become more able (regardless of the comments of the artist himself) to see the works of Hopper as indeed not projections of loneliness, but instead of Anti-loneliness, and of personal sovereignty --- it is too bad to fail to do so.
So the argumentation of Mark Strand is wrong to begin with, as its premise assumption is wrong. And his logic is wrong, when he says that since ÒEarly Sunday MorningÓ does not employ a composition factor such as he ascribes to e g ÒNighthawksÓ, its effect is not loneliness. But actually the only way one would truly see loneliness in e g ÒNighthawksÓ is to see loneliness in the picture as a whole. The compositional factor he refers to does not make the picture one of loneliness, whatever else it achieves. Strand uses circular reasoning throughout: he says the picture conveys loneliness and this is how it does so; from that he credits the magical compositional factor with doing what he presumes it is designed to do --- which would in itself be faulty reasoning. Strand merely makes one claim after another and pretends it is logically based, and then proceeds to show the perfection of his logic by excluding e g ÒEarly Sunday MorningÓ from the class of pictures presenting loneliness. Such is quite common in the world of educated fools throughout academia etc --- one (like anyone«s ignorant grandmother) makes an observation which may or may not be valid itself, but then proceeds to pile on quasi-theory to make a tower of crap .
It may even be that the artist believed he/she was trying to create a particular effect; that does not mean the attempt was successful. The viewing is always sovereign. (Not the individual viewer) Even if Hopper used the compositional factor Strand refers to for the purpose of conveying loneliness, that does not mean it actually does so.
If you yourself (vs me) experience the pictures in question, as projecting loneliness, have a good time. But please ask yourself if you really do, or if you are merely going along with standard crap.
Thought in the arena of public communication, is infested with wrong thinking which in areas other than art, e g politics, has effects far-reaching and often disastrous; we should use art considerations to strengthen the intellect, not to practice herd instinct --- indeed, the muses tease people by challenging us to see behind the curtain. Great artists, willy nilly, place there treasures for the brave.
Avoid those jerks at cocktail parties who tell you that a truncated triangular pattern conveys loneliness because that is how Hopper used it to convey the loneliness in his pictures, and that when he did not use it he was not intending to convey loneliness, nor was loneliness conveyed in those pictures.
Indeed, ask the jerks to tell you what they mean by ÒlonelinessÓ.
Of course the career of Edward Hopper (1882-1967) was not dedicated to portraying the emotional life of James Dean.
We can gain some insight into phases of development of society by noting that when Hopper was working, what he portrayed was called by many, ÒlonelinessÓ. In that sense he makes a comment on people at that time, who were unable to perceive that being alone was not the same as loneliness. Indeed, there was a war on when ÒNighthawksÓ was painted (1942), and multitudes in USA were alone not freely. A psychiatrist told me (1959) that he as a psychiatrist was painfully aware of the devastation to personal relationships caused in USA by WW2. But Òvita brevis, ars longaÓ (life is short, art is longlasting). Compare honestly the works of Hopper v v works by German Expressionists, as to mood: In Hopper I myself do not see hopelessness. I do not see sad, bleak or desolate. Indeed, if you believe that a house standing in a relatively empty area should convey desolation, or sadness or bleakness, then I suggest you would be disappointed or even offended by Hopper due to his nobility of characterisation --- precisely what makes Hopper especially valuable is this characteristic nobility, conveyed partly by a royal elegance (shibui), and which he has in common with Edvard Munch (and Diego Velasquez). If you expect that whatever does not convey communal strength and power must be sad, you are shocked by the notion that being alone is not sad, and accordingly also MUST call some Hopper sadly lonely, lest you be called UnAmerican. You see the sinister implications: individualism is permitted as long as it is sacrificed on the altar of conformity, or forgiven if accepted as full of disorder. The extent of communal arrogance of The American People during the career of Hopper is hard to imagine. It is easy to castigate the abuse of psychiatry by USSR, but in USA the attitudes then were very like a psychological police state. Many important intellectuals fought against it, including important artists, including ÒHollywoodÓ. Enuf for today.
22:58 It occurs to me that some may insist that altho they agree with me about the nobility matter, they still require the initial loneliness , on top of which they would allow the nobility in the presence of that loneliness. But I would counter-insist that the actual emotion conveyed, and consistently conveyed in many works over the entire career of Hopper, is not loneliness at all. It is pride in one«s personal sovereignty: the fact of isolation is presented as a vehicle of nobility, not of sadness. Of course one reason this sort of viewpoint is more available now, is our vastly improved awareness of Eastern philosophy. But of course not all are aboard. But the muse is. The canvas confronts absolute totality. The mere mentality of the artist«s milieu may hide, but does not erase, the basic truth of artistic subconscious awareness in the great artist (e g Hopper); or indeed, the occult protected by smoke and mirrors. Hopper is not great because of portraying loneliness --- if Hopper portrayed loneliness he would not be great. Loneliness is paltry. Loneliness is for illustration, not art. Consider that the models for the great statues of Ancient Greece were slaves. Were they conscious of their own immortality? Were they sad? Do Hopper«s characters know they are seen by a great artist? Do the viewers of the works know they themselves are seen abstractly by the great artist? Are we not ennobled by awareness that putatively we indeed may be seen when alone as the great artist sees these characters? Do we not become the circus performer we are enraptured by? When I sit alone I am not lonely. Indeed, Hopper is not Edvard Munch, of course, and nowhere in Hopper do we get a ÒScreamÓ or a ÒPubertyÓ. Munch indeed did not involve himself in loneliness --- he went for ÒJealousyÓ and envy and positive aggression; whereas loneliness is a negative state. It may be that loneliness is impossible to paint in a painting. Goodnite.
tirsdag 29. januar 2002 14:38 The above commentary is about an article by Mark Strand I found in a book: ÒWriters on ArtistsÓ edited by Daniel Halpern, publ: North Point Press, San Fransisco,1988, entitled ÒHopper: The Loneliness FactorÓ, originally in ÒAntaeus 54Ó Spring 1985. ----------------------------
for section edvard munch (#22): Thursday, October 24, 2002 8:29 am one of my favorite painters is hubert robert,and see his works on the site "hermitage" (the museum in st petersgurg russia)--- i will use their items for my comments about his works. ------------------ --------------------