Munch.
Munch and the Spirit of the North

PASSARIANO DI CODROIPO (UD) VILLA MANIN

September 25th 2010  march 6th  2011

Scandinavia in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

Villa Manin presents the second important exhibition in its multi-year project entitled European Geographies, following the first event that investigated the relationship between French painting in the second half of the nineteenth century and painting in Central and Eastern Europe during the same period. The overall project is aimed at studying some of the greatest works of European art produced between the mid-nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth.
For the first time in Italy, "Munch and the Spirit of the North. Scandinavia in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century" aims to piece together a story that identifies the spirit of the North in painting in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark. The exhibition, composed of approximately 120 paintings on loan from Scandinavian museums in particular, but also from several other European and American museums, focuses chiefly on landscapes, although it also features a good number of portraits and figural works. It is divided into five sections: the first four are dedicated to the national schools of the respective countries, while the final section concentrates on Edvard Munch, with approximately 35 works. It is thus a major exhibition within the exhibition, which examines Munch's early works, influenced by the painting of the Norwegian artist Christian Krohg, from 1882-83, and his output over the subsequent two decades - the last of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth - which decreed his universal fame and created the "Munchesque" signature that characterises and confirms the same act of surrender to the endless space of the North that occurred in literature.
However, returning to the national schools that preceded Munch, the so-called Danish "Golden Age" is represented by several paintings dating from before 1850, including works by Lundbye and P.C. Scovgaard. Similarly, the Norwegian section comprises a brief introduction to Dahl, Balke and Guide; the Swedish one to Larson Berg and Wahlberg; and the Finnish one to Von Wright and Holmberg. These sections thus illustrate the sense of discovery of true naturalism that occurred around 1850. It was a movement that cut itself free from what was still a post-eighteenth-century notion of landscape that - with the exception of several extraordinarily high-quality works by artists such as Friedrich and Turner - endured in the various European nations during the first part of the 1800s.
The exhibition then proceeds chronologically into the second half of the nineteenth century, in a brand-new direction for Italy, and the choice of paintings strives to pinpoint the vision that made the North a place that is not only geographical, but also spiritual. Munch is thus its logical and inevitable culmination. First, however, the candour, luminosity, silence and clangour of the Northern landscape offer an interpretation that sometimes veers towards a complexity that transforms natural locations into an arcane and almost primordial sentiment. This sense of underlying time, the lightness of summers, the depth of winter nights, the mossy velvet of the grass, the white flowers beneath the pale summer moon: this is what the exhibition aims to show the Italian public. This has been made possible by the generosity of the foremost museums and art galleries in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark, whose large-scale loans have allowed the construction of an exhaustive pictorial panorama that has recently fascinated the large public of art lovers, with several exhibitions in both America and Europe. In this sense the exhibition catalogue, featuring contributions by the greatest scholars of these countries, is an essential tool.
The exhibition obviously also includes some of the leading artists, commencing with Ring Philipsen, Syberg, Gottschalk and, in particular, Hammershoi, in Denmark. An entire room is dedicated to Hammershoi, whose extraordinary life was revealed several years ago by a successful exhibition staged in Paris. The works include several landscapes, but above all the artist's enchanting interior scenes. On display for the first time in Italy, Hammershoi's works represent the culmination, at the turn of the twentieth century, of a path that arose from the ashen light of seventeenth-century Dutch interior scenes, but which was transformed by infinite nuances of grey, sometimes shading into pale blue. This palette confers the sense of solitude of these figures, which never move within the spaces, but are suspended, as though time could stand still for ever.
The other artists featured in the exhibition are Nielsen, Backer, Thaulow, Krohg and Skredsvig in Norway; Larrsson, Nordström, Zorn, Jansson, Prince Eugen and Strindberg in Sweden; and Edelfelt, Gallen-Kallela, Järnefelt, Churberg, Halonen and Thesleff in Finland. All of their works share pictorial characteristics that place man at the centre of image in the huge and practically immeasurable space of unspoilt nature, juxtaposing the Romantic sentiment with a certain Symbolist mood, as is well exemplified by the work of the great Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela.
The final part of the exhibition dedicated to Munch, which also comprises about ten drawings that provide the necessary contrast to the artist's pictorial work, reaches its apex in the careful choice of paintings that allows the viewers to understand the relationship between the Scandinavian painters and the Norwegian master. Taken together, they form the great chorus of nature and its complexities that finally reveal the exhibition's true and complete meaning, and make Scandinavia a land that is simultaneously radiant and nocturnal: the quintessence of both light and night.

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