A century ago today, on 16 October 1925, the Norwegian artist Christian Krohg (1852–1925) died. Over the last month I’ve looked in detail at a selection of his paintings and given a brief account of his career and art. This concluding article is an overview to commemorate his death.

Like so many artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Krohg’s paintings were exhibited successfully at the time and were of substantial influence. But they were quickly discarded in the years after the First World War, as European art became overwhelmed by modernism and rejected much of the past. A century later we should now be able to form a better perspective.

As with most Norwegian painters of the day, Krohg trained mainly in Germany, in Karlsruhe and Berlin, ironically in part by the great Norwegian landscape artist Hans Gude. During that, Krohg must have become determined to help build and run a Norwegian state academy so the nation could train its own artists. He also developed an early concern over contemporary society in Norway, in inequality, poverty, the rise of prostitution, and Norway’s independence as a nation. As a writer and journalist, he not only tackled these in paint, but in his novel Albertine (1886) and numerous articles.

Early in his career he travelled to the developing artist’s colony at the northern tip of Jutland in Denmark, in the isolated fishing village of Skagen, the hotbed of Nordic Impressionism. He there started a ten-year project to document the life of one family, the Gaihedes.

Over successive summers, Krohg built a documentary account of their lives in clinical portraits and insights into their everyday routines. In Niels Gaihede Netting (c 1880) he shows them together, with Niels at work on his fishing net, and Ane in the background, staring sternly.

Krohg soon started to teach young artists, first at an art school for women, who were still fighting conservative attitudes persisting in the major academies at the time.

In 1881, with his painting of Sick Girl, he opened a new theme of illness in the family, here a girl who was dying of tuberculosis, then prevalent throughout Norway and much of the rest of Europe. This proved a direct inspiration for a motif taken up early in the paintings of Edvard Munch, who eventually made around twenty variants of the same theme.

At the time, prostitution was illegal in Norway, except in its capital where it was regulated by the police. Krohg was one of many who became concerned at the number of young women who were believed to move from country districts to work as seamstresses in the city, only to find that work too demanding and their income too low, so turned to prostitution.

Krohg’s first novel Albertine was published in 1886 and immediately banned by the police on the grounds of violating the good morals of the people. This tells the story of a young seamstress who ends up a prostitute, an account Krohg turned into several paintings including Albertine in the Police Doctor’s Waiting Room (1885-87). His heroine is the simple and humble country girl at the front of the queue to go into the police doctor for inspection. Behind her is a motley line of women in various stages of decline.

A couple of years later, in his Struggle for Existence (1889) he painted a crowd of poor women and children queueing on Karl Johans Gate, Oslo’s central street, to be handed stale bread to ease their hunger. Three years later this was to be the setting for Edvard Munch’s famous painting of Evening on Karl Johan Street.

He declared his support for Norway’s independence in 17th of May 1893, marking what had been increasingly celebrated as Constitution Day since the signing of the national constitution in 1814. The Norwegian flag shown lacks the ‘herring salad’ badge, so indicating its freedom from union with Sweden, eventually achieved on 7 June 1905.

Throughout his paintings Krohg uses modern close-cropped compositions that may well have been influenced by photography. This is shown well in Reefing the Sails (1900), where two crew are working at a height on a square-rigged sailing ship.

In 1909 he was appointed the first professor and director of the State Academy of Art (Statens kunstakademi), and held the latter post until the year of his death.

Although he explored other themes in his later years, he still returned to the plight of young women toiling long hours at their sewing machines in the garrets of the city. His Seamstress’s Christmas Eve from 1921 offers more optimism that some could be rescued by charity.

Unusually, Krohg even left his own painted obituary in Five to Twelve, one of his last paintings, where he is asleep in a chair underneath a pendulum clock. The face of the clock is completely blank, but the title tells us the time: it is five minutes to midnight.

Krohg retired as the director of the State Academy of Art in 1925, and died in Oslo a few months later, on 16 October.

References

This blog:
Christian Krohg painting social reality 1: to 1883
Christian Krohg painting social reality 2: 1883-88
Christian Krohg painting social reality 3: 1888-95
Christian Krohg painting social reality 4: 1898-1924

Skagens Museum, Denmark
Øystein Sjåstad (2017) Christian Krohg’s Naturalism, U Washington Press. ISBN 978 0 295 74206 9.

In yesterday’s article I showed excerpts from two cycles of paintings of the journey of life, by Nicolas Poussin and Thomas Cole, and started the epic series of 34 images by Louis Janmot that constitute his Le Poème de l’âme (Poem of the Soul). The last painting of his depicted the child growing up in an idyllic country landscape in Spring.

The child’s family are at home during a thunderstorm, shown by flashes of lightning at the window. Grandmother reads a psalm to calm the spirit, while the mother and another young woman sit and sew. Father (a self-portrait at the age of thirty) looks on with concern. An even older woman, perhaps the great-grandmother, sits in the shadows near the window.

The couple have grown now, and find themselves walking along a path by the university. In the niches alongside the path are its professors, each offering false learning that might replace their faith. That learning is represented by the combination of papers and a lighted candle. In the niche closest to the viewer is the figure of death itself, its niche decorated with skeletons. The land is rocky and barren, with a wizened tree, where an owl is perched.

Still dressed in their gowns from their First Communion at church, the two sit together by a pond, with high mountain peaks in the distance. The boy is stroking a dove, a symbol of peace, while the girl strokes a panther, indicating tamed passions. They both hold a lily, for purity, which separates and unifies them.

In a revisit of Jacob’s Ladder, the pair fall asleep in the woods, and dream of a perpetual cycle of nine angels ascending and descending a staircase leading towards God in heaven. The angels each carry a symbol of the arts, such as a musical instrument.

The couple now face life’s challenges, symbolised by the ascent of a mountain, a task they accomplish together. So they achieve the ideals of life, both earthly and spiritual. This also indicates their exploration of space, and the world in which they live.

Later, when they have reached adulthood, she bids him farewell when she is called to ascend to heaven.

Now a man, returned to earth alone, his spirit back in heaven, he kneels before a wooden cross decorated with a garland of flowers that she left him. (It’s said this refers back to flowers she wore at their First Communion, but no such flowers appear in the paintings.) He pines for her memory, as breaks in the cloud cast bright sunlight down on patches of the earth.

Janmot’s story concludes in his series of charcoal drawings, where the man falls in love, but is abandoned. He then experiences doubt and falls into evil ways in an orgy. He suffers, and ages as a result of his sins, but his plight is taken by his mother to Jesus and the Virgin Mary in heaven for their intercession.

The intercession was successful, and a team led by an angel arrives to address the man’s plight. The woman’s corpse is despatched into the waves, perhaps in a form of burial at sea. The angel’s team consists of two other women, who sit and read from books held open by putti. At their feet are symbolic animals: a lion (strength), fox (cunning), and sheep (the sacrifice of Jesus Christ). Above them are three more putti, bearing symbolic objects including a large fish-hook, whose meaning is obscure.

The man is welcomed back at a heavenly Eucharist – the title is from the early words of the service, in Latin. Angels swing censors, there are rows of pious kings and clergy, and in the distance, descending a flight of steps, is the figure of Christ himself, bearing a lamb on his shoulders. The group at the right foreground contains the man’s soul, who looks directly at the viewer. With this, Janmot’s epic is concluded.

Just over a decade after Janmot completed that series of 34 images, Walter Crane condensed his account of the journey of life into a single painting.

Crane’s allegorical narrative of life as a bridge appears unique to him. It shows a newborn baby arriving in the hand of a winged angel in a white punt/gondola, left of centre. The baby is handed over to a mother or nurse, fed at the breast at the bottom left corner, walking up the steps, and learning at the top. Children play, then grow into young adults, and marry as they reach the top of the bridge. Throughout this runs the thread of life.

The mature adult in the middle of the bridge (by its keystone) then ages steadily, bearing the whole globe during the descent. He then gains a long white beard and walking stick during the descent into old age, finally dying, his body being placed in the black punt/gondola, where it is attended by the angel of death. Grieving relatives stand on the shore and make their farewells, one cutting the thread securing the boat to the shore with a pair of traditional scissors.

Crane explained the theme of his Bridge of Life (1884) as “fortune and fame pursued and ever eluding the grasp; til the crown perhaps is gained, but the burden of the intolerable work has to be borne.” It was first shown at the Grosvenor Gallery, then toured venues in the East End of London during a period of social and labour unrest.

My final series is the second of two Friezes of Life assembled by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. He seems to have started thinking about this during the 1880s, but it wasn’t until the early 1890s that it crystallised in his personal notebooks. He talked about building them into a ‘symphony’ in early 1893, and by the end of that year exhibited his first self-contained series of images in Berlin, under the title A Human Life.

During 1893 and 1894, Munch painted most of the works that were to form his first Frieze of Life, exhibited in March 1895, in Ugo Barroccio’s gallery in Berlin. His own explanation is that “the paintings are moods, impressions of the life of the soul, and together they represent one aspect of the battle, between man and woman, that is called love” (Heller, in Wood, 1992).

Munch later assembled his second and mature version, titled Frieze: Cycle of Moments from Life, and exhibited it in Berlin in 1902. It then consisted of twenty-two paintings, arranged in four sections. Here I show a small selection of some of the better-known paintings from that.

The Boston version of Summer Night’s Dream (The Voice) (1893), included in the 1895 version of the Frieze, was here titled Evening Star. It shows Munch’s lover ‘Mrs Heiberg’ at the edge of the Borre Woods, to the north of Åsgårdstrand. This features a brilliant golden-yellow pillar of reflected moonlight on the fjord, forming a distinctive ‘i‘ that appears in other paintings. This work initiates a sequence in which Munch gives his personal account of the process of falling in love.

Evening on Karl Johan shows the crowd from his painting Anxiety in an autobiographical scene. During Munch’s affair with ‘Mrs Heiberg’, he had arranged to meet her on Karl Johans Gate, the long, straight main street in the centre of Oslo. As he waited for her, his anxiety grew, exacerbated by crowds of people walking towards him.

Munch’s later depiction of this greatly foreshortens the perspective of this section of the street from the Royal Palace towards the Storting (parliament building), a distance of around 300 metres. This packs the pedestrians together and, coupled with their nightmarish faces, enhances its troubling feeling of anxiety.

A later section closes with The Scream, showing the isolated figure of Munch before the distant city of Oslo, its fjord with ships at anchor, and the surrounding hills. As the artist’s notes explain:
I was walking along a path with two friends. The sun was setting. I felt a breath of melancholy. Suddenly the sky turned blood-red. I stopped and leant against the railing, deathly tired, looking out across flaming clouds that hung like – blood and a sword over the deep blue fjord and town. My friends walked on – I stood there trembling with anxiety, and I felt a great, infinite scream pass through nature.

By the Deathbed (1895) is Munch’s painting from memory of his sister Sophie resting in her deathbed in 1877, when she was 15 and the artist wasn’t quite 14 years old. She died of tuberculosis, an unfortunately common event at the time. Munch explained that, when painting from memory like this, he depicted only what he could remember, and was careful to avoid trying to add details he no longer saw.

Sophie is seen from her head, looking along her length to her feet, her figure compressed into almost nothing by extreme foreshortening. Her deathbed resembles the next step, in which her body will be laid out in a coffin prior to burial. More than half the painting is filled by the rest of the family, father with his hands clasped in intense prayer. At the right is the mother, who had died of tuberculosis herself nearly nine years earlier.

References

Janmot’s Le Poème de l’âme: Wikipedia (in French).
Janmot’s Poem of the Soul 1
Janmot’s Poem of the Soul 2
Janmot’s Poem of the Soul 3
Janmot’s Poem of the Soul 4

Munch’s Frieze of Life
The Munch Museum, Oslo.
Wood, Mara-Helen (ed) (1992) Edvard Munch, The Frieze of Life, National Gallery Publications. ISBN 978 1 857 09015 4.