So Much Longing in So Little Space
The Art of Edvard Munch
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- ¥2,000
Publisher Description
A brilliant and personal examination by sensational and bestselling author Karl Ove Knausgaard of his Norwegian compatriot Edvard Munch, the famed artist best known for his iconic painting The Scream
In So Much Longing in So Little Space, Karl Ove Knausgaard sets out to understand the enduring and awesome power of Edvard Munch’s work by training his gaze on the landscapes that inspired Munch and speaking firsthand with other contemporary artists, including Anselm Kiefer, for whom Munch’s legacy looms large. Bringing together art history, biography, and memoir, Knausgaard tells a passionate, freewheeling, and pensive story about not just one of history’s most significant painters, but the very meaning of choosing the artist’s life, as he himself has done. Including reproductions of some of Munch’s most emotionally and psychologically intense works, chosen by Knausgaard, this utterly original and ardent work of criticism will delight and educate both experts and novices of literature and the visual arts alike.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Norwegian modernist painter Edvard Munch, whose masterpiece The Scream is one of art's best-known depictions of an unhinged psychological freak-out, is a prosaic yet mysterious figure in this knotty aesthetic-biographical study. Norwegian novelist Knausgaard (My Struggle) ponders many Munch paintings (he includes reproductions), delves into his lonely life the deaths of family members in early life left him gun-shy about relationships and perpetually alienated, Knausgaard writes and conducts lengthy interviews with artists about Munch's influence and legacy. The results are uneven, by turns illuminating and obscure. Knausgaard's analysis of The Scream shows how it evokes a world subsumed in a crazy, distorted perspective without any sane vantage point to shelter viewers, an example of Munch's ability to visually capture emotions. Often, though, Knausgaard lapses into murky art-crit pens es, as in his assessment of The Sick Child as "a picture which at one and the same time comes into being and is destroyed." Knausgaard inserts his own droll, hang-dog psychic travails asked to curate a Munch exhibition, he feels like a failure for showcasing subpar paintings as a much-needed relief from high-falutin' theory. Unfortunately, his sometimes turgid and baffling passages on the art exemplify how difficult it is to convey in words the visceral impact of images. Photos.
