Edvard Munch said that the playwright Henrik Ibsen, who was older than him,
had thrown a log into the ant hill
Ibsen's log disrupted the perceptions of contemporary society,
he opened the way for Munch
and Munch took on Ibsen's characters as alter egos
he painted himself as Peer Gynt and as Osvald from ghosts
and the influence was mutual when Ibsen saw Munch's picture
'Woman in three stages' -we can see it in the exhibition here-
it inspired Ibsen to write his last play 'When we dead awaken'
and I see you, Karl Ove, as a continuation, as an extension of both of these Ibsen and Munch.
Your autobiography 'My struggle' as an updated Peer Gynt;
the crazy adventures of a naughty boy from Kristiansand who flings himself headlong into life
and finds himself in the bizarrest of situations
from the hall of the Mountain King to a lunatic asylum in Cairo,
discovering himself along the way.
And I see strong parallels with Munch, Munch painted self-portraits
all through his long life, a huge number of them peeling, the layers of the onion
as he attempts to show both the inner and the outer truth and you do
exactly the same in your extraordinary brave volumes of autobiography.
I'd like to read some words that were written by Munch but I think might just as easily
have been written by you
'My art is self confessional, through it I seek to clarify my relationship to the World.
This could be called egotism however I have always thought and felt that my art
might help others to clarify their own search for truth'
and now I'm going to start by asking you an obvious first question-
Why Munch? And how did it all begin?
That is in fact a difficult question because if you are from, from Norway
It's only five million people and Munch is the artist, Ibsen is the writer and they're everywhere
I guess it's it's like asking someone from Britain 'Where did it all begin with Shakespeare?'
I mean Shakespeare is everywhere you know it's hard to define
but there is a moment anyway because I was never in museums when I grew up
I grew up, you know, in a provincial town
and it wasn't just a part of my life and then we went when I was 17
to a school trip to Oslo, into the National gallery, and I was very much into reading
and I was very curious and I loved you know everything I saw, I loved the nice romantic,
the paintings, the green, the fjords, there are some Monets, there is a lot of stuff
and then it's like you turn a corner and come into a room which completely blow my mind.
It was something completely different, it was Munch, the Munch room
and the Munch room is still there and it is an amazing room.
I don't know how many Munch painting it is but it's like 10 maybe.
It's his best work and it had the same kind of appeal to me then, as Dostoyevsky had in reading
it was like this is about life and death, this is about me, this is about my existence, you know.
And then I have, you know, maybe left that behind and I thought that was again on adolescent experience
and they are a bit naive and are a bit primitive and too simple and you see them you know printed
and well jealousy that's very obvious you understand what it is and so on
but then you see them again and they have an aura
they have they have that still that power, to me at least.
There are something going on in those, in those paintings still when you see them.
Yes I'm a writer and and whenthe Munch museum approached me
they just asked me do you want to do an exhibition on Munch
you have the museum to your disposal, you have all our paintings to disposal
you can do whatever you want and I said yes I would love to and I had no idea,
I mean I had no experience and no idea what would work, would not work
but I knew one thing and that is that Munch, at least in Norway, is a very iconic painter
so when you see a Munch painting, you see Munch
and I think that may be the case here too
- if you see the Scream, you see the Scream. You don't see the anxiety, you don't see the experiment,
you don't see the risks he took, you see some of the canonic, iconic, it's done,
you know it's quality, it's good, but that's what you see and I was taken down
to the basement in in the Munch Museum where they have, I think they have
a thousand paintings and they have also 20,000 paperwork's there
and that's everything that he had in possession when he died that's there
and it's all kind of stuff, it's like a work in progress that's frozen in time
this it's extremely high quality things, extremely bad quality, it's sketches, it's finished,
unfinished, incredibly interesting and you could see so what I wanted tried to do
was make an exhibition with Munch, where it was as if you saw Munch for the first
time so there's many many many paintings never have been exhibited before
that's on that show so for instance the first room is just full of light, this is full of blue sky,
this is very harmonic, it's like idyllic, it's like the opposite of the image of Munch
but he did that too, you know, and then I thought maybe I'll try to make a kind of a narrative
because I am a writer so it starts with the idyllic, garden, people, thing and then you go into a forest
there's more and more empty and in the end it's just snow so it's like it's
more and more empty and then it's in a black room which is the inner self, I thought
completely chaotic, incredibly intense it's like The Scream
but without the Scream and then you go out and you see portraits see all the people he knew
that's the other, that was the kind of concept behind the exhibition
and there was no science, no dates, no reading, anything
because I wanted them to see the paintings as they were
and I find so interesting also because I don't know what quality is.
In art or in literature I have really no idea what it is. It's so difficult to define
and then you see something and you know you relate to it and it's attached
and it's quality but, you know, you can't necessarily say what it is...
That's right it's.... Would you like to read your introduction to the book?
when you write about this... Karl Ove... there's a wonderful picture of a cabbage field
that he put into the exhibition which I think must have surprised a lot of people
but it means a lot...
Yes, it is actually a cabbage field just behind his house.
Where he lived for those 40 years.
'Sometimes it is impossible to say why and how a work of art achieves its effect
I can stand in front of a painting and become filled with emotions and thoughts
evidently transmitted by the painting and yet it is impossible to trace those emotion and thoughts
back to it and say for example that the sorrow came from the colors
or that the longing came from the brushstrokes or that a sudden insight that life will end
lay in the motive. One picture I feel this way about was painted by Edvard Munch in 1915,
it depicts a cabbage field, the cabbages is in the foreground, a roughly executed
almost sketch like dissolving into green and blue brush strokes deeper into
the background next to the cabbage field there is an area of yellow, over that an
area of dark green and over that again a narrow band of darkening sky, that is all
that is the whole painting, but the picture is magical, it is so charged with meaning
looking at it I feel as if something is bursting within me
and yet it is just a field of cabbages. So what is going on with this painting?
When I look at its colors and shapes, which are so radically simplified that they
suggest a landscape more than they represent it, I see death.
As if the painting intended a reconciliation with death
but a trace of something terrible remains
and what is terrible is the unknown
that we don't know what awaits us, but Munch's painting doesn't really say anything,
doesn't conform to anything other than cabbages, grain, trees and sky
and yet death and yet reconciliation and yet peace and yet a trace of something terrible
is it simply that the line of the fields leads inwards towards darkness
and that dusk is descending in the sky above?
Perhaps... but many have painted fields, many have painted dusk
without attaining what this painting so calmly radiates.
Munch was around fifty years old when he painted cabbage field
he was known as a painter of the inner life, of dream, death or sexuality
he had gone through a life crisis after that he withdrew from social life
and he no longer sought out pain, pain where he painted he turned outwards he painted the Sun
but that isn't hard to understand everything begins anew when the Sun rises,
darkness yields, the day opens up the world once again becomes visible over
the next thirty years he painted what he saw there in the visible world
but the visible world is not objective reality it appears to each individual as seen by them
Munch's great gift lay in his ability to paint not only what his gaze took in but also
what the gaze was charged with there is a longing in this painting of the cabbage field
a longing to disappear and become one with the world
and that longing to disappear and become one with the world
fulfilled the painting for him, fulfilled for him the act of painting
that is why this painting is so good
what disappears re-emerges in what comes into being
and if the disappearance ceased for the painter as soon as he finished the painting
it is still represented in the picture which fills us again and again with its emptiness.
Cabbages, grain and forest. Yellow and green, blue and orange.
I wanted to ask you about repetition of motifs
because I know that people feel cheated, insulted almost
that Munch made different versions of the Scream- four coloured versions
and the lithograph that you can see here in the exhibition
and people somehow feel that this devalues its authenticity
and Munch was asked this and I'd like to read his answer which I think is wonderful
'I've never made copies of any work in instances where I have made use
of the same subject I wish to make myself more deeply involved
people complain loudly that I have painted it on several occasions
but a picture that I have struggled with for a whole year
cannot be dismissed in a single picture
why should I not be allowed to paint such an important subject five times
when other people produce an endless succession of palm trees, apple's,
church spires and haystacks?' [and we know who he's talking about]
And like Munch you go back to the same motifs in your work,
you revisit specific important events in your books
such as the death of your father just as Munch revisited the death of his sister Sophie
and his Scream experience both in painting and in writing
and you say in your book, I quote
'The World is not something in itself ready to be observed, the world materializes in our gaze,
it is not, it becomes but that engendering is impossible to live in, impossible to grasp
and so we invent common formulae and baptize them truths,
all the knowing we have about the world we hold up
in order not to be powered by the shifting incomprehensibility of it.'
My beloved Nietzsche says it in a different way;
Nietzsche says 'There are no truths only perspectives and our recollection of a memory today
will be different from our recollection of the same memory tomorrow or next week'
and I wondered how have you understood your experiences differently
over time by revisiting them in your work?
various thing by revisiting them
how have you understood, you know, when you come and say the death
of your father and you visit it and you revisit it how do you understand
your need for repetition, your need for revisiting...
Yeah it's on two levels so it's one personal level between me and my father
the one is the writing, which has to do about writing about memories
and write about a life where the essential thing in a life
is that all the relations changes through the life
I mean my father was one thing for me when I was ten
and one thing when I was twenty, one thing I was thirty
and that's what I tried to kind of capture in the book
-the multiple perspectives?
Yes exactly, of the same events, the change and that's the scary thing is
to discover that a past, you think the past that's over
it's fixated it's back it's changed because you have changed
and also our collective look of history changed you know it's it's moving it's changing
and my book is very much about that
it's about trying not to fixate things I try not to you know
yeah I tried to do the opposite, try to make them move and make them change
and make them be in perspective to each other, you know,
because there is no such thing as one point
and from that's that's truth you know well you move and that there's another truth
but the same is the same point you're looking at that's so
complicated no we can't have that in our lives normally
we have to have that's that's for art, you know, that's for literature
but you can't really do it in your own life so we feel we are the same
now than when we are twenty, we look the same, but we don't,
we just don't remember how the world looked when we were twenty
I think that's that's very much the writings in relation to memories.
Why do you think Munch is striking such a big chord today?
I don't know I mean that's that's very that's very hard...
I thought okay I'll give you some time
because I thought I'll ask this mean question to Karl Ove and then I thought
well god what if he asks it back to me
and so I thought well actually I think it's we live in a time of great anxiety
don't we at the moment and I think it starts with Nietzsche,
of course Munch was reading Nietzsche in 1892
the winter before he came back to Oslo and painted
the Scream and he was reading and Zarathustra- God is dead-
you know that absolute hammer blow to the generation
and, you know, what is the meaning of life?
and particularly you know if we murdered our God, what we do for moral codes?
What is right and wrong? forever and ever amen
and oh you know that was just one thread that went into the painting
of the Scream obviously, but I think that you know this is horribly relevant for our time really
you know we say God is dead we haven't put anything good up in his stead,
we don't know how to behave, we're looking for meaning
and I think I think that is one of the reasons why Munch is so very relevant to today
Yes very interesting that you that you read them that two of them so close
and you have also Dostoyevsky in the mix there
and all three of them you could you could read now and relate to now
but it's it's like all of them are laying something bare, that's that's what they're doing
that's yes the project and we have haven't still we haven't fixated it again
I don't know, I have no idea [me neither]
I think we've come to the end of our time...