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Lot Essay
‘Far out there – that
Soft line where the air meets
The sea – it is as incomprehensible as
Existence – it is as incomprehensible as
Death – as eternal as longing’
(Munch, quoted in S. Prideaux, Edvard Munch: Behind ‘The Scream’, New Haven & London, 2005, p. 79)
‘I do not paint what I see. But what I saw’
(Munch, quoted in P.E. Tøjner, Munch: In His Own Words, Munich, London & New York, 2003, p. 131)
Saturated with vivid, ethereal colour and rendered with his signature undulating line, Bathing scene from Åsgårdstrand encapsulates Edvard Munch’s pioneering expressionistic mode of landscape painting. Regarded as the progenitor of Expressionism, Munch was among the first to render nature not in an observational way, but in accordance with his own, deeply personal subjective vision of the world around him. He used the landscape as a vehicle for presenting his intensely felt, innermost emotions, channelling human feeling – isolation, loneliness, love or melancholy – into his depiction of nature; as he famously stated, ‘I do not paint what I see, but what I saw’. Painted in 1904 and completed and dated again in 1936, Bathing scene from Åsgårdstrand takes as its subject Munch’s beloved summer refuge, the small Norwegian fishing town of Åsgårdstrand. The undulating shore line, expansive skies and the seemingly endless stretch of water there would become the backdrop for some of Munch’s greatest works, including his iconic series, The Frieze of Life. In the present work, this important setting becomes not simply a background, but a subject in its own right, one of a number of bathing scenes from this time that is rendered in bright, saturated colours, with distinctive liquescent brushwork. Originally in the collection of Munch’s great friend, trusted financial advisor and most important patron, Rolf Stenersen, this painting was subsequently owned by Emil Georg Bürhle, and has been widely exhibited in a number of retrospectives since its completion in 1936.
Munch had first visited Åsgårdstrand in the summer of 1889, renting a small fisherman's cabin overlooking the Oslofjord on the edge of the town. He later purchased a cabin there in 1898. Located to the south west of Oslo, then known as Kristiania, Åsgårdstrand was a fishing village that was popular in the summer months with pleasure seekers and, by the 1890s, with artists and writers. Remaining deeply attached to this picturesque place, the artist would continue to return to this corner of Norway, spending many of his summers there over the following twenty years. The site of some of the most significant, as well as traumatic events of the artist’s life – it was around this area that he embarked on his first great love affair with Millie Thaulow, and later, this was the place that saw his turbulent relationship with Tulla Larsen come to a dramatic end, resulting in the artist shooting himself in the hand – Åsgårdstrand became immortalised in his most haunting paintings. In his painting, the landscape took on a mystic symbolism, a metaphor for his concept of the human experience: the undulating seashore, waves and sea embodying the eternal rhythms of time, and the moon often appearing as a phallic symbol. All of these aspects form a backdrop to many of the paintings that constitute the artist’s most important body of work, which he would later call The Frieze of Life. ‘Have you walked along that shoreline and listened to the sea?’, he wrote. ‘Have you ever noticed how the evening light dissolves into night? I know of no place on earth that has such beautiful lingering twilight…to walk about that village is like walking through my own pictures’ (Munch, quoted in S. Prideaux, Edvard Munch: Behind ‘The Scream’, New Haven & London, 2005, p. 122).
Picturing an array of figures, both clothed and nude, young and old, male and female, Bathing scene from Åsgårdstrand was most likely begun during the summer months of 1904. It was during this time that Munch’s summer residence functioned more than ever as a sanctuary from the pressures of a gruelling exhibition schedule – between 1904 and 1906 he exhibited in twenty-nine shows throughout Europe – as well as a restorative for his increasingly tormented mental health. As he wrote from Åsgårdstrand in 1903, ‘I sail, paint, swim, and am well – here I drink little alcohol’ (Munch, quoted in R. Heller, Munch: His Life and his Work, London, 1984, p. 183). Although the quiet village was being increasingly invaded by fashionable summer holidaymakers, these summers were peaceful times, with Munch engaged in painting, swimming – a pastime he had adopted for its calming therapeutic effects – and sunbathing. ‘The sun beat down for the whole day and we let it scorch us’, Munch’s friend, the writer Christian Gierløff recalled of the summer of 1904, the time that he painted Bathing scene from Åsgårdstrand. ‘Munch did a bit of work on a bathing picture, but we spent most of the day lying down, overwhelmed by the sun, in deep holes in the sand right next to the edge of the fjord, among the big boulders, and let our bodies drink in all the sun we could cope with. No one asked for a bathing costume’ (Gierløff, quoted in I. Müller-Westermann, Munch by Himself, exh. cat., Stockholm, Oslo & London, 2005, p. 108). The present work reflects this sense of blissful content. Under a bright sky, figures and bathers frolic on the sand and in the azure waters under the intense summer sun. There is a sense of vitality and light that contrasts with his earlier angst-filled works, heightened by the intense colours and curving rhythmic lines – a formal characteristic he believed could be used to express the invisible energies and life forces of nature – that Munch has used to depict this idyllic summer landscape.
Bathing scene from Åsgårdstrand exemplifies Munch’s unique and enormously influential mode of landscape painting. Throughout the late 1800s, Munch had visited Paris on numerous occasions, as well as the south of France, becoming very familiar with Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, as well as the work of Henri Matisse and Vincent van Gogh, whose paintings, like Munch’s, would become an important precursor of Expressionism. By contrast to his European counterparts however, Munch’s aesthetic was wholly unique. The antithesis of a naturalistic, documentary or objective rendering of nature, Munch’s landscapes are highly subjective in both their formal execution and their symbolic meaning; the product of imagination rather than of a perceived reality. The artist explained his approach to landscape painting: ‘It was the era of realism and impressionism… It so happened that I would find myself in either a morbidly agitated state of mind or a cheerful mood when I discovered a landscape I wanted to paint… I got out my easel, stood it up, and painted the picture from nature… It would turn out to be a good painting – but not what I had wanted to paint. I couldn’t paint it the way I saw it in my disturbed or joyful mood… That happened often… So in one such case I began to scratch away what I had painted – I searched my memory for the first image – the first impression – and tried to recover it’ (Munch, quoted in K. A. Schröder & A. Hoerschelmann, eds., Edvard Munch: Theme and Variation, exh. cat., Vienna, 2001, p. 271). Unable to paint without expressing his often-tormented innermost emotions, Munch used imagined, heightened colours and simplified line and form to render his experience and perception of the world around him. Like Matisse’s Luxe, calme et volupté (1904, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), Munch has conveyed the landscape with a series of undulating, arabesque lines and bold, unnatural colour. Yet while this liberation from a descriptive mode of rendering nature was also being explored concurrently with Matisse and the Fauves in Paris, it was Munch’s psychological approach to painting the landscape that would exert a great influence on subsequent generations of artists, most notably the German Expressionists.
Soft line where the air meets
The sea – it is as incomprehensible as
Existence – it is as incomprehensible as
Death – as eternal as longing’
(Munch, quoted in S. Prideaux, Edvard Munch: Behind ‘The Scream’, New Haven & London, 2005, p. 79)
‘I do not paint what I see. But what I saw’
(Munch, quoted in P.E. Tøjner, Munch: In His Own Words, Munich, London & New York, 2003, p. 131)
Saturated with vivid, ethereal colour and rendered with his signature undulating line, Bathing scene from Åsgårdstrand encapsulates Edvard Munch’s pioneering expressionistic mode of landscape painting. Regarded as the progenitor of Expressionism, Munch was among the first to render nature not in an observational way, but in accordance with his own, deeply personal subjective vision of the world around him. He used the landscape as a vehicle for presenting his intensely felt, innermost emotions, channelling human feeling – isolation, loneliness, love or melancholy – into his depiction of nature; as he famously stated, ‘I do not paint what I see, but what I saw’. Painted in 1904 and completed and dated again in 1936, Bathing scene from Åsgårdstrand takes as its subject Munch’s beloved summer refuge, the small Norwegian fishing town of Åsgårdstrand. The undulating shore line, expansive skies and the seemingly endless stretch of water there would become the backdrop for some of Munch’s greatest works, including his iconic series, The Frieze of Life. In the present work, this important setting becomes not simply a background, but a subject in its own right, one of a number of bathing scenes from this time that is rendered in bright, saturated colours, with distinctive liquescent brushwork. Originally in the collection of Munch’s great friend, trusted financial advisor and most important patron, Rolf Stenersen, this painting was subsequently owned by Emil Georg Bürhle, and has been widely exhibited in a number of retrospectives since its completion in 1936.
Munch had first visited Åsgårdstrand in the summer of 1889, renting a small fisherman's cabin overlooking the Oslofjord on the edge of the town. He later purchased a cabin there in 1898. Located to the south west of Oslo, then known as Kristiania, Åsgårdstrand was a fishing village that was popular in the summer months with pleasure seekers and, by the 1890s, with artists and writers. Remaining deeply attached to this picturesque place, the artist would continue to return to this corner of Norway, spending many of his summers there over the following twenty years. The site of some of the most significant, as well as traumatic events of the artist’s life – it was around this area that he embarked on his first great love affair with Millie Thaulow, and later, this was the place that saw his turbulent relationship with Tulla Larsen come to a dramatic end, resulting in the artist shooting himself in the hand – Åsgårdstrand became immortalised in his most haunting paintings. In his painting, the landscape took on a mystic symbolism, a metaphor for his concept of the human experience: the undulating seashore, waves and sea embodying the eternal rhythms of time, and the moon often appearing as a phallic symbol. All of these aspects form a backdrop to many of the paintings that constitute the artist’s most important body of work, which he would later call The Frieze of Life. ‘Have you walked along that shoreline and listened to the sea?’, he wrote. ‘Have you ever noticed how the evening light dissolves into night? I know of no place on earth that has such beautiful lingering twilight…to walk about that village is like walking through my own pictures’ (Munch, quoted in S. Prideaux, Edvard Munch: Behind ‘The Scream’, New Haven & London, 2005, p. 122).
Picturing an array of figures, both clothed and nude, young and old, male and female, Bathing scene from Åsgårdstrand was most likely begun during the summer months of 1904. It was during this time that Munch’s summer residence functioned more than ever as a sanctuary from the pressures of a gruelling exhibition schedule – between 1904 and 1906 he exhibited in twenty-nine shows throughout Europe – as well as a restorative for his increasingly tormented mental health. As he wrote from Åsgårdstrand in 1903, ‘I sail, paint, swim, and am well – here I drink little alcohol’ (Munch, quoted in R. Heller, Munch: His Life and his Work, London, 1984, p. 183). Although the quiet village was being increasingly invaded by fashionable summer holidaymakers, these summers were peaceful times, with Munch engaged in painting, swimming – a pastime he had adopted for its calming therapeutic effects – and sunbathing. ‘The sun beat down for the whole day and we let it scorch us’, Munch’s friend, the writer Christian Gierløff recalled of the summer of 1904, the time that he painted Bathing scene from Åsgårdstrand. ‘Munch did a bit of work on a bathing picture, but we spent most of the day lying down, overwhelmed by the sun, in deep holes in the sand right next to the edge of the fjord, among the big boulders, and let our bodies drink in all the sun we could cope with. No one asked for a bathing costume’ (Gierløff, quoted in I. Müller-Westermann, Munch by Himself, exh. cat., Stockholm, Oslo & London, 2005, p. 108). The present work reflects this sense of blissful content. Under a bright sky, figures and bathers frolic on the sand and in the azure waters under the intense summer sun. There is a sense of vitality and light that contrasts with his earlier angst-filled works, heightened by the intense colours and curving rhythmic lines – a formal characteristic he believed could be used to express the invisible energies and life forces of nature – that Munch has used to depict this idyllic summer landscape.
Bathing scene from Åsgårdstrand exemplifies Munch’s unique and enormously influential mode of landscape painting. Throughout the late 1800s, Munch had visited Paris on numerous occasions, as well as the south of France, becoming very familiar with Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, as well as the work of Henri Matisse and Vincent van Gogh, whose paintings, like Munch’s, would become an important precursor of Expressionism. By contrast to his European counterparts however, Munch’s aesthetic was wholly unique. The antithesis of a naturalistic, documentary or objective rendering of nature, Munch’s landscapes are highly subjective in both their formal execution and their symbolic meaning; the product of imagination rather than of a perceived reality. The artist explained his approach to landscape painting: ‘It was the era of realism and impressionism… It so happened that I would find myself in either a morbidly agitated state of mind or a cheerful mood when I discovered a landscape I wanted to paint… I got out my easel, stood it up, and painted the picture from nature… It would turn out to be a good painting – but not what I had wanted to paint. I couldn’t paint it the way I saw it in my disturbed or joyful mood… That happened often… So in one such case I began to scratch away what I had painted – I searched my memory for the first image – the first impression – and tried to recover it’ (Munch, quoted in K. A. Schröder & A. Hoerschelmann, eds., Edvard Munch: Theme and Variation, exh. cat., Vienna, 2001, p. 271). Unable to paint without expressing his often-tormented innermost emotions, Munch used imagined, heightened colours and simplified line and form to render his experience and perception of the world around him. Like Matisse’s Luxe, calme et volupté (1904, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), Munch has conveyed the landscape with a series of undulating, arabesque lines and bold, unnatural colour. Yet while this liberation from a descriptive mode of rendering nature was also being explored concurrently with Matisse and the Fauves in Paris, it was Munch’s psychological approach to painting the landscape that would exert a great influence on subsequent generations of artists, most notably the German Expressionists.