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.