MUNCH'S IBSEN – A Painter's Vision of a Playwright

Inbunden bok. –– FÖRLAGSNY! –– Museum Tusculanum Press. 2008. 184 sidor.

Nyskick. Skyddsomslag i nyskick. –– FÖRLAGSNY! –– Se fler bilder! ––

This is the first comprehensive scholarly and critical account of the relation between the two great Norwegian modernists Edvard Munch and Henrik Ibsen.
• Drawing on Norwegian social and cultural history, Munch's extensive unpublished writings, and the interlocking careers of Munch and Ibsen, Joan Templeton demonstrates Ibsen's primordial importance for Munch as a pioneering modernist voice.
• Munch made more than 400 illustrations of Ibsen's plays, one of the greatest homages a painter ever made to a writer. In addition to locating these illustrations in Munch's life and work as a whole, Templeton also studies them as depictions of Ibsen's plays.

"Edvard Munch is mainly famous for his painting 'The Scream of Nature'. Joan Templeton's new book draws attention to another part of his work that deserves to be better known - the images and set designs he produced for the plays of his friend Hendrik Ibsen.
You can look at these works simply as 'art' with no purpose beyond itself. The image the painter produces can stand on its own independent of the plays. But a knowledge of the plays and the characters in them deepens the experience.
Considered solely as paintings some are superb -for example the wonderful freely painted swirling lines and abstraction of 'Oswald and Mrs Alving' (1906). The quiet subdued yet elegant 'Young woman on the beach' (1896), is manifestly a version of a small sketch made in 1891. The sketch and the painting both look like a study inspired by Swanhild in 'Love's Comedy'. That thought imbues both works with an almost unbearable pathos.
Other images record Norwegian interiors of the kind Ibsen intended for his plays - Munch prepared these to assist German directors. Some show key scenes in performance and the way light was used to enhance dramatic effect. These will be of great interest to practical theatre people and theatre historians.
And then there are many informal sketches that show Ibsen caught informally in social situations. All these pictures are important and worth a thousand words in understanding Ibsen, his plays in performance and the milieu out of which they grew. But they are invaluable in giving us a direct view of the personal interaction of two very great artists. Joan Templeton's restrained and judicious commentary guides us through the works without ever getting between us and Ibsen and Munch. We are very much in her debt. This book is a wonderful concept brilliantly delivered."

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