So Much Longing in So Little Space
The art of Edvard Munch
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
In So Much Longing in So Little Space, Karl Ove Knausgaard explores the life and work of Edvard Munch. Setting out to understand the enduring power of Munch’s painting, Knausgaard reflects on the essence of creativity, on choosing to be an artist, experiencing the world through art and its influence on his own writing.
As co-curator of a major new exhibition of Munch's work in Oslo, Knausgaard visits the landscapes that inspired him, and speaks with contemporary artists, including Vanessa Baird and Anselm Kiefer.
Bringing together art history, biography and memoir, and drawing on ideas of truth, originality and memory, So Much Longing in So Little Space is a brilliant and personal examination of the legacy of one of the world’s most iconic painters, and a meditation on art itself.
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.
