Munch, briefly again

I just found this reportage/interview that takes a quick stroll through the work of Edvard Munch.

I wanted to embed it on my blog because The Sick Child mentioned in my previous post also features here (although not much discussion has grown around it). The video also caught my attention because it shows images from the Munch Museum in Oslo (where the exhibition Munch 150 was held last year), and because it uses the director of Munchmuseet, Stein Olav Henrichsen, as a valid source of information. A feat of advertisement, no doubt, but one not to be disparaged because of that.

Munch and his obsessive road

It took me a good two hours today to browse through the voluminous Edvard Munch: 1863-1944, the catalogue of the exhibition Munch 150, held at the Nasjionalgalleriet and the Munch-museet in Oslo between June and October last year.

I happened to be in Oslo in early September and I saw the exhibition – both sections of it, organized as they were chronologically (the 19th-century part at the National Gallery, and the 20-th century part at the Munch Museum). I was impressed. The curators had done an incredible job at bringing together exhibits from collections throughout the Scandinavia, England, France, Spain, Britain, and the States.

Then I bought this catalogue last week. 417 pages – a proper Munch overdose. It reminded me straight away of a question that had been gnawing at my brains for a long time: what is that railing that slashes through the panels in some of the paintings in the cycle known as Frieze of Life? I remember when I saw them together in the exhibition I thought those railings were so abrupt, so outstanding – unequivocal solutions to the problem of pictorial perspective, but so much more than that. I thought they looked like knife slashes. So much so, they made perspective painful.
It turns out, as Hans-Martin Frydenberg Lfaatten shows in an article he wrote for the catalogue, the railing featuring in Munch’s paintings (notably in The Scream, Despair, or Anxiety) demarcates a real place in Oslo (or Kristiania, as it was known in the nineteenth century).

Anxiety
Source: www.edvardmunch.org

The Scream
Source: Wikipedia

Despair
Source: Tumblr

      

This is Ljabro Road, “a popular excursion spot with a panoramic view”. It led to the Munch family residence, at Nordstrand, in the southern part of the city, and “was also the traditional vista for cityscapes and postcards depicting Kristiania” in the late nineteenth ce$ntury.

I wish I’d known that when I was in Oslo. I would have gone to the right spot (the Utsikten, in the neighbourhood of Ekeberg), to contemplate the city through the winding perspective of that Ljabro Road. I would have seen the city the way Munch saw it.

Ekeberg in Oslo, the place where Munch stood to paint The Scream
Source: The Telegraph

Like many other things in Munch’s oeuvre, this road, with its divisional railing that features so central in the scenes, is another of his obsessive returns to major themes, his repetitions of shapes and structural elements. Munch is known for the extent to which he altered, reworked, and reshaped his paintings, not in order to correct but in order to adjust to his mental status quo. He was very much influenced by his own moods, or by the place where he resided while working on a particular piece. This is visible, for instance, in the many instantiations of The Sick Child, which he painted in Oslo, in Paris, then in Oslo again. The Paris version is more colourful, more hopeful, one would say, whereas the Norwegian versions scream through the very materiality of the paint. It looks as though the canvas has been scratched by the talons of pain – a scream of terror in itself.

The Sick Child
Source: www.edvardmunch.org

But that, of course, is another Munch topic.

Henri Matisse Cut Outs 2014

What's the big thrill this year in the world of art? Twitter is abuzz and there's good reason for it. Of course, Tate Modern is hosting a Matisse exhibition, starting April 17th.

Henri Matisse Exhibition London http://t.co/Th5EE94HnB At the Henri Matisse exhibition, London art fans can enjoy the most extensive r...

— London Art News (@londonartnews) February 18, 2014

The exhibition, featuring a considerable display of Henri Matisse's cutouts, promises a lot. Reading from Tate Modern's website:

From snowflowers to dancers, circus scenes and a famous snail, the exhibition showcases a dazzling array of 120 works made between 1936 and 1954.

The number of exhibits is not the only outstanding aspect. As the museum points out, not without a dab of pride at being the owner of some of these cutouts, the exhibition of this year makes it possible for a large number of these artworks to stand beside each other for the first time since the date of their creation.

A photograph of Matisse’s studio reveals that these works were initially conceived as a unified whole, and this is the first time they will have been together since they were made.

So the yellow background of the official poster will be a major glow at Tate's, where the Matisse cutouts will be on display until September 7th, after which they leave for New York, where they will be lodged at the Museum of Modern Art for another four months. Plenty of time to pay a visit, or even more than one.

NB: They're even making changes to the usual routine, because (n'est pas?) the Master deserves special treatment.

For the first time at Tate Modern, Sunday evenings will be set aside for a quieter exhibition viewing experience of Matisse: the Cut-Outs, with visitor numbers restricted from 20.00–22.30.0

Wonder how these simple yet greatly evocative paper cutouts were made? Not much technical prowess, but of course, a lot of finesse. Plus, as we know, it's not the maneuver that matters. What's more important is the idea behind the line. See Matisse himself at work, at a late stage in his life, when he had almost completely surrendered to the technique he had made popular:

It's the simplicity of the whole ritual (Matisse, himself a person of many minute rituals): the way the gesture (not the hand!) cuts through the frail material to compose bi-dimensional objects; almost like a child's play.

In the meantime, a smaller exhibition is taking place in Southport, where lithographic copies of Matisse's cutouts are on display for a month (ending on the 16th of March).
And they're not alone. In a few days, an exhibition is opening in Ferrara as well, focused on Matisse's paintings from earlier stages of his career. For those who understand Italian, here's a video I've just fished off YouTube:

Quite a year for Matisse, indeed. 145 years from his birth, 60 years from his death. Richly marked by various events of this kind, the world over.