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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.”
–Edvard Munch (quoted in S. Prideaux, Edvard Munch: Behind “The Scream”, New Haven, 2005, p. 79)
The present Kystlandskap, a haunting and deeply personal rendering of the beach at Munch’s summer haven of Åsgårdstrand in Norway, is true to the intensely felt vision that the artist set forth in these poetic lines. Throughout his career, Munch used the landscape as a vehicle for conveying his most profound emotions, imbuing the genre with a psychological dimension that overrides traditional descriptive concerns. Here, he rendered the sea and sky as serene, untroubled planes of limpid blue, unmarred by any wave or passing cloud. In contrast, the coastline is a space of turbulence and complexity, with a gravely, lavender shingle giving way to a grassy, boulder-strewn slope, and an unruly, intensely colored mass of shrubs encroaching on the vista at left, straining toward the sea. This is the supposed vantage point of the artist, the land a proxy for his own psychic unrest; the tranquil realm beyond the shore seems a world apart, distant and unreachable, embodying the mystical dimension underlying human experience.
Munch painted Kystlandskap in summer 1904, at a moment of mounting professional success yet tenuous mental health. Two years earlier, his angst-ridden affair with Tulla Larsen had reached a fateful end: she threatened to shoot herself, a struggle ensued, and the gun discharged, severing the top two joints of Munch’s left ring finger. To quell the turmoil raging inside of him, Munch threw himself into work, traveling incessantly for exhibitions and portrait commissions; he signed a contract with the Galerie Commeter in Hamburg for the sale of his paintings and with the publisher Bruno Cassirer for his extensive trade in prints. He increasingly sought refuge in the bottle as well, and he retreated during the summer months to the cabin that he owned at Åsgårdstrand, where he found some measure of relief. “Here I drink little alcohol,” he wrote to Dr. Max Linde, his foremost patron at the time. “I sail, paint, swim, and am well” (quoted in R. Heller, Munch: His Life and Work, London, 1984, p. 183).
Earlier in 1904, for the second year running, Munch had exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, where his work attracted the admiration of the future Fauves. Munch’s lover and guide to the city during these stays in Paris was the English violinist Eva Mudocci, who later posed for Henri Matisse, himself accomplished on the same instrument, and may have introduced the two artists. The present landscape, in the vehemence of its handling and non-naturalistic vigor of its color contrasts, anticipates the artistic liberation that Matisse and André Derain would achieve at Collioure the next summer. While the Fauves, however, worked en plein air to capture their immediate, subjective response to the motif, Munch painted from memory and imagination, transforming his personal experience into psychological talismans. “Munch can go for weeks without actually putting brush to canvas, merely saying ‘I’m painting with my senses’,” recounted Linde, “until suddenly he will give shape to what he has seen, pouring his whole body and soul into his work” (quoted in R. Stang, Edvard Munch: The Man and the Artist, London, 1979, p. 187).
Soft line where the air meets
The sea–it is as incomprehensible as
Existence–it is as incomprehensible as
Death–as eternal as longing.”
–Edvard Munch (quoted in S. Prideaux, Edvard Munch: Behind “The Scream”, New Haven, 2005, p. 79)
The present Kystlandskap, a haunting and deeply personal rendering of the beach at Munch’s summer haven of Åsgårdstrand in Norway, is true to the intensely felt vision that the artist set forth in these poetic lines. Throughout his career, Munch used the landscape as a vehicle for conveying his most profound emotions, imbuing the genre with a psychological dimension that overrides traditional descriptive concerns. Here, he rendered the sea and sky as serene, untroubled planes of limpid blue, unmarred by any wave or passing cloud. In contrast, the coastline is a space of turbulence and complexity, with a gravely, lavender shingle giving way to a grassy, boulder-strewn slope, and an unruly, intensely colored mass of shrubs encroaching on the vista at left, straining toward the sea. This is the supposed vantage point of the artist, the land a proxy for his own psychic unrest; the tranquil realm beyond the shore seems a world apart, distant and unreachable, embodying the mystical dimension underlying human experience.
Munch painted Kystlandskap in summer 1904, at a moment of mounting professional success yet tenuous mental health. Two years earlier, his angst-ridden affair with Tulla Larsen had reached a fateful end: she threatened to shoot herself, a struggle ensued, and the gun discharged, severing the top two joints of Munch’s left ring finger. To quell the turmoil raging inside of him, Munch threw himself into work, traveling incessantly for exhibitions and portrait commissions; he signed a contract with the Galerie Commeter in Hamburg for the sale of his paintings and with the publisher Bruno Cassirer for his extensive trade in prints. He increasingly sought refuge in the bottle as well, and he retreated during the summer months to the cabin that he owned at Åsgårdstrand, where he found some measure of relief. “Here I drink little alcohol,” he wrote to Dr. Max Linde, his foremost patron at the time. “I sail, paint, swim, and am well” (quoted in R. Heller, Munch: His Life and Work, London, 1984, p. 183).
Earlier in 1904, for the second year running, Munch had exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, where his work attracted the admiration of the future Fauves. Munch’s lover and guide to the city during these stays in Paris was the English violinist Eva Mudocci, who later posed for Henri Matisse, himself accomplished on the same instrument, and may have introduced the two artists. The present landscape, in the vehemence of its handling and non-naturalistic vigor of its color contrasts, anticipates the artistic liberation that Matisse and André Derain would achieve at Collioure the next summer. While the Fauves, however, worked en plein air to capture their immediate, subjective response to the motif, Munch painted from memory and imagination, transforming his personal experience into psychological talismans. “Munch can go for weeks without actually putting brush to canvas, merely saying ‘I’m painting with my senses’,” recounted Linde, “until suddenly he will give shape to what he has seen, pouring his whole body and soul into his work” (quoted in R. Stang, Edvard Munch: The Man and the Artist, London, 1979, p. 187).