University Place

Scandinavian Art and Literature

– Hey everyone, welcome to this lecture on Scandinavian art and literature. I spent a good deal of my professional career thinking about literary history and different periods of literature, and trying to explain them to other people, and styles and things like that. At the same time, I’m also a very visual learner myself, and maybe secretly always wanted to be an art historian. And so I find that when I teach literature, I very often– I’m looking for art paintings that will help me to explain the literature that I’m trying to teach, and so over the years, I’ve run across some really rather interesting connections between both painting and literature, so what I hope to achieve in this particular lecture, is to give you a nice smooth overview of literary periods, literary and art periods, in Scandinavia from the Baroque period onwards. And a little bit of it is going to sound like a soap opera because sometimes it’s quite amazing at closely tied painters and writers were, very closely on some occasions. And so hopefully by the end of the hour though, you will feel empowered to go to an art museum and look at the paintings hanging on the wall and go, “Oh, I get it, I know what’s going on there,” instead of going, “What?” “What’s going on there?” So hopefully want we’re going to achieve today.

So, I’m going to start with this man here. Georg Stiernhielm, who sometimes is called the father of Swedish poetry. He wasn’t the first Swedish poet, but he was certainly the best of the early Swedish poets. He’s portraited here by David Klcker Ehrenstrahl who painted the Royal House of Sweden, the most famous portrait painter of the era. Georg Stiernhielm actually worked for the Swedish Empire. Yes, there was a Swedish Empire during the Baroque period. They actually had a lot of real estate in northern Europe, he worked as an administrator in some of the Baltic provinces, and eventually he was called to the court of Queen Christina who was a very cultured woman, and she enjoyed the arts and one of the things that happens when you have an empire, is you want to start building your own sense of nation and culture and that sort of a thing, and so she found Stiernhielm’s poetic gifts were more desirable to her than his gifts as an administrator. So his most famous is a 500 something line poem called “Hercules.” You know about Hercules, now this is something to think about in terms of the Baroque ’cause it’s foreign to I think modern readers.

We think that writers should be original, right? That they should have their own voice. This is a fairly new-fangled idea. In terms of the Baroque, you didn’t want to be original. In fact, you were recycling themes from classical antiquity, and you were showing how skillfully you could write in already determined meters and things like that. So the Hercules poem that he writes is on a very well-known theme, and it’s Hercules at the Crossroads. A young man trying to decide which path he’s going to take in life. By the way, just a little fun thing. You see, you can see the one hand, and the other one’s kind of in his pocket. Actually he lost his arm in a barroom brawl which is why you can’t see it here. So there he is looking all fancy, but yes, he had another side to him. Okay this is a fairly typical depiction of this theme of “Hercules at the Crossroads.” Hercules there, you can tell it’s him largely because of the club, the attributes of Hercules are a club and very often a lion skin, and that’s how you know who he is. And there he is in between these two women, and the two women are incarnating vice and virtue, and I bet you can see who is who, right? This kind of theme, the Baroque loved binary oppositions. If you remember from cartoons, the little angel and the devil over each shoulder, that is a very baroque kind of thing. Trying to tug between two poles. So they love that, they love allegory. And by allegory, we read into this picture various lessons. So for example, if you look at vice, we know who she is, she’s scantily clad for one thing, and she’s pointing and down here you might be able to see there are all kinds of instruments and games and things like that that waste your time. And the path she is pointing up to, it looks like a garden, the primrose path.

It’s absolutely beautiful, right? The path of vice is attractive, and it will take you and lead you down it. What you might not be able to see so very easily is back here is something that looks a little bit like flames, okay, so hmm, so where will this path ultimately take you, right? Whereas, over here we have this woman who is virtue pointing towards a path that is steep, look it’s not very pretty, it’s a difficult path, but once you get up here, you see the horse of Pegasus who means honor, so if you work hard, you will win honor and esteem. Okay, so that’s allegory. These are also qualities that the Baroque really enjoyed. And moral education, right, telling teaching people how they ought to behave, And that’s what this painting’s all about. Now this is a particularly interesting version of the same story. Remember the Baroque recycled these stories over and over again. They are loads and loads of incidences, paintings of paintings, and plays and poetry and all that sort of stuff. So this painting by Paolo Veronese was actually captured by the Swedish army when they invaded Prague, and so it was part of the spoils of war, and it was brought back to the court of Queen Christina. So interestingly enough, this was hanging on the walls when Georg Stiernhielm wrote his poem Hercules, which I was so thrilled when I discovered this. I happened to be at the Fricke Collection where this painting now hangs, and listening to the little speech, and then it talked about this painting being the court of Queen Christina, and I knew what that meant and I was really excited.

Now you’ll notice that our Hercules figure does not have a club or a lion skin. All right. So what’s that about? He’s dressed like a nobleman. Undoubtedly this painting was produced for some sort of noble family in Italy as a piece of moral education. That’s probably a son in the house playing the role of Hercules, and you see a vice there, and actually her hairdo is described in Stiernhielm’s poem. That might have been one of the details that Stiernhielm would have taken from this particular portrayal, and clearly he’s made his choice this young man. He’s grabbing virtue, like get me away from her. Something again you probably can’t make out is that vice has claws and that one calf that you can see has scratch marks on it, so you know vice has just about gotten the young man into her clutches. Another feature of Stiernhielm’s poem however that is shared with this painting, is this feature of not belaboring the club and the lion skin which is so common, that the Hercules in Stiernhielm’s poem is a young nobleman, and that’s almost all we know about it. And what then is also interesting is that this poem was performed for a young Charles the 11th, the future King of Sweden so that he could read himself into this poem. He becomes the young nobleman who is being morally educated to learn whether to follow the path of vice and virtue. Okay, so there we go, that’s the Baroque.

Next on the docket, we move to the Rococo. Now the Rococo has a lot in common, many things in common with the Baroque except it has developed a sense of humor. That is to say it tends to be also very erotic. It’s not as interested in moral education as the Baroque period was. There are cupids and scantily clad women, that’s all very good. This particular man, Carl Michael Bellman is a Swedish poet and troubadour. Hence, he’s holding his instrument. He would write poems and then set them to music and perform them himself in the bars of Stockholm. He was also Gustav III basically was his sponsor, recognized that he was a talented person who needed royal support. Now what’s kind of interesting to know, there’s some atypical things about Bellman.

Bellman is a very important poet in Swedish literary history. The Baroque era, not the Baroque era, the Rococo. We’re talking about the 18th century. One category of aesthetic appreciation was good taste. In fact, Gustav III is the one who founded the Swedish Academy which is the agency that now gives out the Nobel Prizes, and their motto is Snille och Smak, Genius and taste. And so this taste, whose taste was it? Well it was the taste of the royal court, of noblemen, of people with a good education. And so you needed a certain sense of decorum, following the rules, we all know what is in good taste. Now the thing about Carl Michael Bellman is that his poems were not always, in fact seldom, in good taste, and what do I mean by that?

So here we have a typical sort of Rococo painting and it’s Venus being transported to Pathos’s island accompanied by dolphins and cupids. It’s lovely, it’s happy, it’s light, it’s colorful. This particular painting was also owned by a friend of Carl Michael Bellman’s, and it now hangs in the National Gallery of Stockholm. So this is another case of a poet who sees a painting, and then decides to write a poem about it. Now what’s interesting about the poem that Bellman writes about it, is that we start with this picture basically, Venus on her shell, moving across the waves, with tritons and all kinds of fun stuff like that. Then all of the sudden, one of the tritons has a straw hat. A straw hat? There’s no straw hat here. And if this were happening on film, it would be this sort of fade, and we fade from this picture to a picture of Ulla Winblad who’s a recurring character in his poetry, and a prostitute, being rowed in a rowboat over to Djurgrden which is this area that was outside the toll gates of Stockholm where there was cheap liquor and houses of prostitution. So suddenly, that’s not in good taste. You don’t write about the common people, you don’t write about prostitutes, and as this poem then sort of fades from this into Bellman’s world, it ends actually pretty raunchy. Where we’re in a bordello, and they’re doing what people do in bordellos. It’s really, you got to trust me, it’s really, it’s original, which was kind of bad taste, right, we haven’t developed originality as a positive thing.

But this may be why people still remember Bellman today and I would say every Swede could probably sing at least one Bellman song because they’re really fun and they make extremely good drinking songs. But anyway, so there we go to the Rococo. After this, now we come to the period of Romanticism. Okay, so this is where actually originality does in fact creep into the mix, and particularly in Scandinavia. There is a strong focus on nature and the peasantry, so Tidemand and Gude are Norway’s foremost Romantic painters. This is a very well-known image, and it’s absolutely lovely, Wedding Journey in Hardanger. So you’ve got the peasant culture. You have the beautiful striking landscape of Norway. These elements were very important. There’s also at the time, a certain amount of nation building going on especially for Norway because they had briefly received their independence from Denmark only to be scooped up again by Sweden into a union that did not dissolve until 1905. So that makes the Norwegians especially keen to establish what is especially Norwegian, and it was thought that the present culture, which was closer to nature, closer to the land, that that would tell people what the essence of being Norwegian was.

So from this painting we go to this one, a funeral, and you can kind of see suddenly it’s way darker, right? And what we see here is an instance of what’s been called the pathetic fallacy, that nature cares. So a wedding is bright and sunny and happy, a funeral of course, the sky is gray, nature is crying, and nature weeps with us. So Bjrnstjerne Bjrnson is very well known inside of Norway, a Norwegian poet. I’m not sure if any of you will have heard of him but he was certainly famous in his day. He is the author of the Norwegian national anthem, and he definitely was among the people who thought that Norway needed to establish itself as an independent nation. And he felt that as the same time as Bjrnson and Mo are going out collecting folk tales, in order to find out what the folk talked about and told stories about. Bjrnstjerne Bjrnson thinks Norway needs a literature. It needs a Norwegian literature even if I have to write it myself. And so he started by writing some very romantic tales of peasant life, and Tidemand and Gude were very often used to illustrate these early stories of Bjrnstjerne Bjrnson.

So this romantic mood, okay you can see again peasants, country life, all that sort of stuff, Bjrnstjerne Bjrnson that is kind of an interesting figure in that he has sort of two phases to his writing. So he starts in this romantic mode trying to build up Norwegian national character, and all that sort of stuff, but then this very important moment in Scandinavian literary history comes, and it’s called the Modern Breakthrough. And he jumps on that bandwagon and becomes one of the men of the Modern Breakthrough. So what it that? So essentially, it’s was it called by a Danish critic named Georg Brandes to start treating topics of current interest in literature. He said Romanticism is about our dreams, it’s about our past. Let’s write about what is happening now. Hence the Modern Breakthrough. The breakthrough of the modern world into literature. And this was a particularly dynamic and important period in Scandinavian letters. A moment actually the rest of Europe tended to turn to Scandinavia and follow the lead of a number of writers. So this little sketch is not necessarily great art, but it’s got an interesting story behind it.

So Victoria Benedictsson is also one of the writers of the Modern Breakthrough. Something that happens during this period is that women writers start writing. That one of their concerns, the social issues brought up for debate, happens to be the status of women, and what role they’re going to play in society. And Victoria Benedictsson wrote some important novels and some plays. What she wanted to be was an artist. She wanted to study art but her parents put their foot down, as parents could do, and said no you must not do that, you’re going to do what you’re supposed to do and get married. And so in order to get out of the house at the age of 21, she married Christian Benedictsson who’s 30 years older than she was. Okay she didn’t really know what she was doing. And she was deeply unhappy.

She fell ill, and it was an illness that almost took her– She almost died from it, almost took her life, and when she recovered, she said, that’s it. She didn’t divorce her husband, but she said I’m going to be a writer, and she left home and she became a writer. Unhappily for her, she fell in love with Georg Brandes, who was this critic who basically launched the Modern Breakthrough. He was already married. It didn’t end well. She ended up committing suicide by slitting her own throat, which seems pretty terrible. But then looking at the sketch, let’s bring it back to the art for a second. The costume study, it’s observation, it’s realism. This is how people dressed in Victoria Benedictsson’s day. So when rewrites her novels, she’s writing about plausible, real things, details from her life so that we get a sense of what her characters’ lives are really like, what are the forces, what are the powers that are shaping them. And she’s also writing of course out of her own experience because in order to bring up social issues for debate, you need to convince people that what you’re writing is true and convincing. And so that’s maybe what this sketch hints at.

Modern Breakthrough writers again took up all kinds of different issues. So Christian Krohg here is best known as a Norwegian painter. Here he is, self portrait, he’s got the paints in his hand, that’s what he identified as. But he also wrote an important novel called “Albertine,” and it’s a novel that meant to argue against what was essentially legalized prostitution in Norway. So not only did he write this novel, but he also painted several scenes from the novel. So here we have a picture of Albertine. She’s a seamstress who is poor. She has a sister who for a brief amount of time walked the streets but then found a wealthy man and is taken care of, but she’s a seamstress, you see the sewing machine here. She has to work for a living, she’s tired, there’s no real source of joy. She has to be a good girl, but it’s really hard. And there is this friend, Jossa, who turns up and invites her to go for a walk down the main street in Oslo, Karl Johans, and there’s this act, no, not me, but she’s bored and she’s young and wants to have fun. She feels she doesn’t have good enough clothing to walk down Karl Johans, and so she borrows her sister’s coat. Think about it, literally donning the mantle of her sister. This is sort of the first step out the door towards a career that’s going to lead her towards prostitution. So she and Jossa become friends. Jossa’s already kind of a dicey reputation, and initially Albertine is just going out and people were, men were buying her drinks in cafes, so nothing too bad, but it is something of a slippery slope that she is on. She gets more and more involved and eventually though what pushes her over the edge, and this is why this book was actually confiscated by the police, she is noticed by the chief of police who thinks she’s sort of cute and she is invited, she doesn’t know why, invited to his apartment, and she thinks she’s going to be in trouble. He plies her with alcohol and he rapes her.

And this is definitely a push down this slippery slope, and she continues to consort with the chief of police for a while until she is given I think some gloves, or something to wear to her brother’s funeral. And when she accepts a gift from Winther, she technically becomes a prostitute at that moment. So accepting something for sexual favors. This particular painting is kind of interesting ’cause you can see here’s this woman clearly is like, “What do you think you’re doing Albertine!” You know, reading her the riot act. If you look up here though, the light forms a cross, right above her head and when I’ve given this lecture before one of you bright people in the audience said, “You know, I wonder, that almost reminds me of “Hercules at the Crossroads.” I thought that’s an interesting idea, is that what’s going on here? Is that light there, you could go that way, go towards the light Albertine, and instead you know she’s headed in another direction. I don’t know, I thought it was a good idea.

So this is Christine Krohg’s most famous painting from his career, ’cause what happens to Albertine is that Winther, who’s the chief of police, grows jealous because he sees her paying attention to other men, and so he officially declares her a prostitute. And when you are officially declared a prostitute, you have to be inspected by police doctor for public safety reasons. And this is what this is. Albertine in the Police Doctor’s Waiting Room, and this is Albertine, about ready to go in for a gynecological exam, which destroys whatever modesty she had, whatever inhibitions are absolutely annihilated during this particular visit. I think there you can see Jossa hanging out. And so, all of these are varying degrees of ladies of the evening who are waiting for their moment with the police gynecologist.

Sadly it goes very badly, it ends very badly for Albertine, you know, at the very end of the novel she’s in the red-light district begging men to have sex with her, and she’s really fallen. And that’s part of what Modern Breakthrough writing is. It’s supposed to make you sad and outraged and say, “It shouldn’t be like this. Things should be different. How can we change things?” Just an interesting little detail, this is a study for that famous painting, and for reasons I’m not entirely sure of, Christian Krohg has put himself in the position of the policeman who is standing there next to Albertine. So just something to contemplate, I thought that was interesting, but I have no explanation for it. So, another important figure in the Modern Breakthrough is August Strindberg, Sweden’s most important writer, most influential writer I would say. Certainly best known worldwide as a dramatist and one of the fathers of modern drama. This particular portrait is rather interesting ’cause remember I told you there’s part soap opera and there’s kind of amazing connections between writers and artists. Never more true than during this period of the Modern Breakthrough, because you see there’s Christian Krohg painted this portrait of August Strindberg so he knew him well enough. They were moving in the same circles, could get Strindberg to stand there for a portrait. But what is to me especially amusing about this particular painting, is who bought it. We know who bought it? Well, Henrik Ibsen. bought this picture and it was hanging in Ibsen’s work room. And the legend has it that he used to say, “I can’t write a line without the eyes of that crazy Swede looking at me,” and this is really funny because Henrik Ibsen is Strindberg’s chief rival. He too is one of the fathers of modern drama and they’re writing at the same time, and kind of competing with each other. So it’s particularly interesting that Ibsen should choose to have Strindberg literally staring over his shoulder as he writes some of his masterpieces.

So now back to Norway again and a group called the Christiania Bohemians. You’ll be pleased to know, that the year after “Albertine” was published, legal prostitution was in fact abolished in Norway. So the Modern Breakthrough achieved its purpose. Brought up something for debate, and achieved some actual legislation, managed to change things. Hans Jaeger wrote a book called the Christiania Bohemians. And it was about the bohemian life in Christiania, Oslo and artists and writers and the prostitutes and the models and the racy life that they led.

Here we have “Christiania Bohemians.” You’ll notice by the way, I just have to go back here, Edvard Munch, we’ll get to him eventually, Norway’s most famous painter, but he’s in this mix too. He’s one of the “Christiania Bohemians,” he’s one of the artists who’s hanging around in the cafes. Arne Garborg, who is another famous Norwegian writer of the time, is also part of this group, as it Christian Krohg our good friend that we’ve been talking about so far. So the thing about this novel “Christiania Bohemians,” It too was confiscated by police. They didn’t like it, they considered it pornographic, at some point the novel describes how to use a condom. Much too racy. But whereas Christian Krohg had his book confiscated, and I think had to pay a fine, Hans Jaeger’s was so raunchy, he was sentenced to 80 days in jail for having written this controversial book. Now we know that times were different, because during those 80 days in jail, Hans Jaeger is able to take some personal effects with him into the cell. And one of the things he took was this painting of Svart-Anna and it’s one of these artist’s models, actually the same model who modeled for Josse in Christian Krohg’s paintings. So anyway that’s what Hans Jaeger decided he needed in his cell to comfort him during his incarceration.

Back to August Strindberg who I just mentioned. He too had two major points in his writing. He too, I was comparing him to Bjrnstjerne Bjrnson. He starts with the Modern Breakthrough. He begins as a realistic writer taking up issues of current social interest. He was also always very deeply interested in art, and during his realism phase, he becomes interested in photography, and this is a picture that he took of himself and his children because if you think about it photography for a realist is a really great new invention. Right, because we all know cameras don’t lie, of course not. But it was this idea that I can in fact capture a moment. I can capture reality. That’s the first part of his career. And then in the 1890s, he goes a little crazy. There’s something that is referred to as his inferno crisis. “Inferno” is the name of an autobiographical novel that he writes about this crisis, about him wandering around the streets of Paris and in Austria, having consumed perhaps too much absinthe and talking to the spirits. And it transforms his art. He leaves the realism behind and definitely dives feet first into symbolism.

But what is also interesting is that for a while he’s so disillusioned with realism and literature, he gives up writing fiction altogether, and instead he starts painting. Okay so he is a painter. There’s some of his paintings hanging in the National Museum in Stockholm. And there have been some art exhibitions. He used to pay his bar bills by giving paintings to the bartenders. And I had this wild fantasy when I was in Paris last year that I would go to a flea market and discover some undiscovered Strindberg that had been lying in somebody’s basement. It could happen, it could happen.

This is in the Thiel Gallery in Stockholm, so you visit this one. It’s called “The City,” and this is a quote from, this is Strindberg describing his style of painting at this time, right. Each picture has a double meaning, an exoteric meaning that everyone can see, though only with an effort, and an esoteric meaning for the artist and the chosen few. Okay, now suddenly you have to be initiated to understand art, and it isn’t all out there that there are layers and symbolic meanings to be interpreted. Let me tell you what I think is going on here. I’ve spent quite a lot of time with Strindberg and teach a class on him. I don’t know if you can see, but there is this sort of city, it’s called The City, and here it is right here. And maybe you’ve thought of it already, but it took me, I was teaching with this painting for years, and then one of the students said, “That looks like Madison.” Oh, oh my god it does. Coming down John Owen Drive. I have a feeling it’s probably Venice or something else like that. But if I were to guess what this means is that that little thin strip of civilization, of the city, that’s human insignificance. You know we think we’re important, we think our culture matters, but here human civilization is being sandwiched between these greater forces, right, this turbulent sky and the sea, and we are merely just a little little sliver. That’s what I think that painting means.

I’m going to show you a couple of other Strindberg paintings, three more, just so you can see what he was paying his bar bill with, and so you can recognize it if you find it in the flea market. I have less good explanations for these. I think that’s supposed to be a buoy at sea, so something guiding our way? Those I think are mountains, Alps? And incidentally Strindberg along with Emmanuel Swedenberg thought hell was located in the Austrian Alps, sorry, so that could have something to do with it. I don’t know. Could be the sea, I don’t know. But what you see here, it it’s not realism, right? That there are things going on here that require us to start interpreting and he means something by it, but we have to kind of figure out what we see and what he might have meant. Okay, this is a Norwegian painter by the name of Fritz Thaulow who lived in Deippe which is not far outside of Paris. And he was very good painter, we see who painted him, Christian Krohg, a friend of this very small group we’re dealing with. Apparently, he and his wife were also extremely kind, and at their home in Dieppe, they received a number of shall we say shipwrecked souls, among them Herman Bang, who’s a well-known Danish writer, who lived in exile for a good bit.

Another person he accepted was August Strindberg. There was an episode in the novel Inferno where Strindberg goes to a Frits Thaulow’s house and talks about their kindness to him. This is by the way one of Frits Thaulow’s paintings so you can kind of see it. It’s very kind of classic French painting from this time, and why not, painting like the impressionists in some ways. One of the more colorful we’ll call it, guests that Thaulow received was actually Oscar Wilde. And Christian Krohg has an anecdote. He attended dinner with Oscar Wilde at Frits Thaulow’s in Dieppe and wrote a little essay about what that experience was like. Now Oscar Wilde is very well known. The picture of Dorian Gray, is his. He, unfortunately for him, was accused of homosexuality, found guilty, and sentenced to five years of hard labor for it. And when he emerged from prison, he left England and spent the rest of his years kind of a broken man wandering mostly in France. And so this is the Oscar Wilde that the Thaulow’s received, the man who has been in prison, and is out but is still clearly one of the wittiest men that England ever produced. So part of this anecdote Christian Krohg writes gives a little bit of dialogue of what Oscar Wilde is talking about, and I’m quoting now from this essay. “The next thing I will write about is the effect of color upon people. The color blue upon people. Apropos, consider Herr Thaulow, he is totally blue, blue of character and of temperament. Today he is even more blue than usual. Thaulow assumed an expression of suffering. Good god, do you also hold with that nonsense? Dare I ask whether you just as my wife believe Fridays to be yellow? ‘Believe,’ he shouted and then looked around in astonishment. Can there be any doubt at all that Fridays are yellow.”

Okay, now you know that. All right. But we are moving into a period where color is important, aesthetics, the senses are particularly important and so it’s kind of interesting to kind of raise that status of blue and yellow here as though it’s the colors become these very sort of defining characteristics. So now we wind our way back to Edvard Munch who was mentioned previously again, undoubtedly Norway’s most famous painter, and really world famous, you’ll recognize, even if you don’t recognize the name, you’ll recognize some of the images I’m going to show you. He was one of the “Christiana Bohemians.” He was hanging out with Strindberg in Berlin. He was moving around in all of these Scandinavian artist colonies in Europe and very much in the thick of things.

So Strindberg indeed this autobiographical novel, “Inferno,” he changed the names to protect the not so innocent and he describes Edvard Munch who is in Paris at the time as “the Danish painter.” He’s not Danish, he’s Norwegian. So no one would guess who he was talking about. Another member of this group– actually this is Berlin, not Paris– is a Polish writer by the name of Stanislav Przybyszewski, mis-identified as a Russian, right. My friend the Russian had come from Berlin to Paris to kill me, ha ha. Przybyszewski was not a nice man, I’ll just go out and say. There are many things about him I don’t like. I actually have read one of his novels, and it’s allright, very kind of decadent. We’re moving into decadence a little bit, very self-absorbed.

One of the things that Stanislaw Przybysewski shared with Strindberg was an interest in Dagny Juel. Dagny Juel had come with Edvard Munch from Norway. She’s a Norwegian writer, a lovely woman. Was she Munch’s mistress? I’ve maybe, maybe not, certainly Strindberg thought that she was. She briefly had a fling with Strindberg, and then ended up marrying Stanislaw Przybysewski. I told you, soap opera, okay? This is very, we’re definitely right in the thick of this. But Dagny Juel’s face, look at that face, for just a second. So this is “Jealousy” by Edvard Munch. The face belongs to Stanislaw Przybysewski. The lovely woman is Dagny Juel. And the guy admiring her assets is August Strindberg. And you can tell because of that very distinctive hairstyle that he has. So this is the romantic triangle being depicted. So again, think of Dagny’s face. This is one of the famous paintings you probably have seen. It’s a very well-known image, and so Madonna is based on this woman, Dagny Juel. This is a portrait that Munch does of August Strindberg, and you notice kind of the naked woman with the long hair in the border, right. This is Munch’s statement about Strindberg that he was I think far too entangled by women. He’s a notorious woman hater, Strindberg is by the way. Yet he married three times, and so with predictable results I suppose. What’s also somewhat amusing is Munch has misspelled Strindberg’s name, he’s left the R out of it, and “stind” in German means fat, so instead of Strindberg, he’s fat mountain, so, you know, eh. (laughs)

I don’t know it that that was an accident or not. Not that Strindberg was particularly fat, but even so. Munch had some literary ambitions, he wrote things. The one thing of his that I’ve looked at I think it’s something called like “Notes from a Genius,” I mean, huh!? Okay, he thought highly of himself. And what I remember from having to sort of look through that briefly is it’s good he had his painting to fall back on. It wasn’t a particularly good read. So this is a sketch from the 1920s, and it’s Edvard Munch who is letting himself be inspired by Henrik Ibsen’s late play “When We Dead Awaken.” And these are three of the characters from that play. Irene, Maia and the Nun. Okay and if you look at that for a little bit, what’s sort of interesting is that Munch here is quoting himself, another one of his very well-known images from the 1890s, “Women in Three Stages.” I’d say it’s kind of interesting that that reference that Munch is through his painting kind of offering a reading of Ibsen’s play.

So, Sigbjrn Obstfelder, a very important Norwegian poet. A friend of Edvard Munch who has also created this portrait of him. He is important as an early Modernist symbolist poet. And now we’re kind of, we’re moving through, we’re not out of it yet. We’ve gone from the Modern Breakthrough into kind of decadence and aestheticism and very early Modernism, I’d say Munch certainly qualifies as an early Modernist before Modernism itself. It is said that he was the model for Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Malte Laurids Brigge.” He lived not a long time as you can see. Fairly short life, some of which was spent in Milwaukee where he had a brother. Okay, so there you go, a little local connection.

This is also a Munch painting I imagine you have seen reproduced somewhere or another. And it has been suggested, and I’m not sure I buy it, but I’m going to let you decide, that there’s a poem by Obstfelder that inspired this painting. I’m going to read it to you, it’s very short. It’s called “I See,” and you make your own decision. “I see the white sky, I see the gray-blue clouds, I see the blood-red sun. So this is the world. So this is the home of the planets. I see the tall buildings, I see the thousands of windows, I see the distant steeple. So this is the earth. So this is the home of mankind. The gray-blue clouds gather. The sun has vanished. I see the dapper gentlemen, I see the smiling ladies, I see the sagging horses. How heavy, heavy grow the gray-blue clouds. I see, I see… I seem to have come to the wrong planet! It is so strange here…”

Okay, maybe? Personally, I can see the color is important, but there’s something about this Munch piece that actually says that poem even more, sort of the stream of stares, maybe not steeples, but the cities and the windows that here’s a crowd of people but yet somehow are strange and alienated from each other. But still we can kind of sort of see this sort of growing Modernism. And in Modernism again, a total rejection of realism, and it’s a fairly dark view of the world as sort of having lost its sense of orientation, that all of the cities have grown and we live in these urban areas. We don’t know each other any more. We feel alienated from each other. We perhaps– That steeple, we no longer necessarily believe in a god who can help us on our way, and this tends to promote these sort of feelings of anxiety among a number of the Modernists.

This is Verner von Heidenstam and he was a member of the Swedish Academy. In fact, won a Nobel Prize, though I’d be surprised if you’d heard of him. In a way, the Swedish Academy gives the Nobel Prize and he was a member of the Swedish Academy, and so sometimes you kind of think, hmm, I wonder. Nepotism, might have been that in his case, and I hope I’m not making anybody angry. Other people have really deserved it. And this portrait of him is rather interesting ’cause he’s undoubtedly looking at the setting sun. He’s a fairly decadent writer, especially in his early work. He kind of moves into a nationalistic phase. But his early work is very much about decadence and about civilizations falling and collapsing, so it would be suitable to have him looking at the setting sun, civilization is coming to an end.

This is something he painted himself which I think is kind of hilarious in some ways. “Self-portrait with Death,” okay. So you see the dandy, this is all part of that turn of the century decadent thing. The hat, he’s extremely well-dressed, and there are these skeletons and it just kind of hanging over his shoulder. And indeed, this sort of decadent mode, there’s an obsession with death, decay, dying that our civilization is somehow about to come to an end. This is a painting by the French painter Eugne Delacroix, “The Death of Sardanapalus.” And the reason I show it to you is that here we go again, cross-pollination between painting and literature. One of Heidenstam’s early novels “Hans Alienus,” has a scene, has this scene in it actually.

Our main character, Hans Alienus ends up going to the underworld– it’s not a realistic novel– where he meets Sardanapalus, and Sardanapalus was this great wealthy man who rather than have the Barbarians invade and destroy everything, he thought he’d do it first and enjoy the destruction. So it’s this tale of a voluptuous, glorious destruction and death, ’cause there he is having his harem killed, murdered before him. Kind of grizzly, right? But that was also part of the taste of the decadent era, and so Hans Alienus, Verner von Heidenstam’s character, is present during this particular episode as the Barbarians are about to invade, but Hans Alienus survives and wanders on. He’s something of a pilgrim.

This is also another– This is a writer who is producing a self-portrait. Hjalmar Sderberg is an important Swedish writer from the turn of the century. His novel “Doctor Glas,” I teach every year, and sometimes more than once. It’s a story of a physician living in Stockholm who tries to make a moral decision. Do I poison the minister or don’t I? You’ll have to read it to find out whether he does. But I think it’s sort of interesting, dandyism again, in terms of decadence. He’s so well-dressed with the collar and the tie, and the fact that Sderberg had himself this kind of artistic flair that he wanted to create his own self-portrait.

So Pr Lagerkvist, when we move to Pr Lagerkvist, we are moving into High Modernism. And the dates of High Modernism in all of Europe tend to coincide and be triggered by World War I, which was seen as a, sort of a major cultural crisis, that if there had been optimism in science and human progress and our ability to create a better world, the war and the wholesale destruction that happened during World War I kind of was a setback to that. People thought no, no, clearly human beings are, there are no good, we’re only capable of destroying things.

So Pr Lagerkvist won the Nobel Prize in 1951. He deserved it, he’s one of my favorite writers, and I may well write a book on him someday because I admire him greatly. When he was a young man, he went on a study trip to Paris in 1913, and so this is just before World War I breaks out. And he goes to Paris and he looks at the modern art on the walls, and in this essay, “Verbal Art and Pictoral Art,” it’s a modernist manifesto. He basically says this is the Modernist art I have seen, and this is how we can apply what the painters are doing to what the poets are doing, to what writers can do. He was impressed by both cubism and expressionism, I’ve got these examples here. Cubism, you’re using geometric figures and you can still see a face there, right? It’s not really representational. Expressionism is more about expressing inner feelings outward, to express them. And so that the colors are setting a mood here. And again, it’s not a photograph, it’s not a realistic image. And to begin with, Pr Lagerkvist was fond of cubism, he liked the order, it seemed clean and tidy to him. But when World War I broke out, that flipped him over more towards this expressionist. It was so emotional, there were so many passions involved in that conflict. I’ll give you a taste of his poetry. “My anguish is a dreadful forest where bloody birds scream. A prouder desolation you may yet find; but I don’t care. I sit and stare under dry trees and listen to the hoarse screams. Soon I will lie still under the empty trees and rot among the bird corpses.”

Okay, that’s not a cheerful tune, right? But imagine it’s the background of World War I. And if you remember once upon a time, during the Romantic era, for example, poetry was supposed to be beautiful, right? The good the beautiful and the true. That’s not beautiful, it might be true, good not so sure. So this is part of what Modernism is breaking with, that there need to be new forms of expression. Originality becomes extremely important. We need to be modern, we need to invent poetry anew, which Lagerkvist does.

This sketch is by another Swedish Modernist poet Karin Boye, and again it’s sort of interesting. It reminds me a little bit of the Benedictson sketch that we saw, you know the woman writer from the Modern Breakthrough. And what’s kind of creepy or what’s so touching about this that here this is much more symbolic life and death, but what’s touching is that Karin Boye also committed suicide. And so you sort of look at this as coming from someone who I think struggled with that urge through most of her life, you know the happy woman who can’t quite break the chains of death.

Harry Martinson, another Swedish poet who won the Nobel Prize, ah maybe he deserved it. Actually his poetry is pretty good. But here is a painting that he has done called, “The Huldre in the Industrial Forest.” Okay, so what is that? That’s sort of interesting. So here’s the huldre, traditionally huldre, these are the fairy folk. The ones who live in the mountain. They’re creatures of romantic folklore, really, of nature. But what is this huldre looking at? This smoke-belching factory and these people streaming out of the factory, the workers, the proletariat. And there she sits next to the smokestacks looking at basically what the modern industrial world has come to. We can only imagine what might be going through her head. But again, this is a Modernist concern. What is technology, where is it bringing us? What in fact is it perhaps destroying?

Karen Blixen, Isak Dinesen, as she’s known in the United States. Another one of my favorite writers about whom I actually have written a book. One of her well-known books is called “Out of Africa.” There was a movie starring Meryl Streep with the same name. So she spent I think 17 years in British East Africa which is now Kenya, on a coffee farm, and she was trained at an art academy before she left. That’s the only formal schooling Isak Dinesen, who became the Baroness Karen Blixen, ever received, but this is a painting of one of the women that lived on her farm in Kenya and I think it’s quite lovely. I wish she had painted more. There are only a handful of paintings that she actually executed. And so this, now we come to Postmodernism, all right? Modernism amongst new forms. Post Modernism is kind of about questioning our ability to represent reality in some sense, which is problematic if you’re a painter or a writer. You might want to represent reality, so what are you going to do? So this particular painting, the one down here, is by Swedish painter named John-Erik Franzn.

What he is referring, and Postmodern writers often do, refer to older works of art and change them in some ways. So we look here, and this is Monet’s “The Picnic.” We have two men and two women having a picnic in the woods. Why the women have to be naked, I cannot tell you. But there they are enjoying it, so the nice classic late 19th century painting. This is Pablo Picasso’s version of the very same painting, and in typical Modernist Picasso style. No, it’s not a photograph. No, you’re not going to mistake it for anything real.

He draws attention to the fact that it is a made thing, that the art– He has chosen this, the dimensions. It’s two dimensional so you got both eyes on one side. And so he’s doing his typical Modernist Picasso thing with it. So now we come down here and we see a picnic. This is actually the, a Swedish dream, right? This is how you spend your weekends, right? Out in nature, having a picnic. She at least has a bikini on, there’s a child present. Adding to that, there’s even a Volvo, alright? So this is happy days, this is beautiful. And as you’re looking at this painting, you’re seeing well okay but there’s more painting, it goes outside the frame.

What’s going on there? So it’s interesting that the artist has deliberately shown you that okay, any time you look at a painting, the painter is directing your attention to what’s inside the frame. And so he’s let the frame, the painting go on outside that frame, and as you’re looking at this and you’re trying to figure out what’s going on over there? And then I will say those are dead Cambodians. And you go, “Wha, ha? Excuse me?” That’s shocking, is it not? Yes, ’cause that’s not actually realism, right? There were not piles of dead Cambodians in the Swedish countryside, but this is a comment that just as we think we are living our privileged happy lives in Sweden, there’s another world out there, that there’s that frame, it’s a piece of reality that we know and that there are other people outside the frame experiencing tragedies and other things. And so it’s always important to realize that art is showing you something that it wants you to see and wants you to focus your attention on. That is the last slide that I have to show you. So thank you very much for your attention.
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