Tag / Norway

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Over Wintering

Jørn Lier Horst, Closed for Winter (2011, Vinterstengt, translated by Anne Bruce, 2013)

ClosedNorwegians seem to have summer homes. Or perhaps it’s just the middle class ones. They seem to be in the middle of nowhere and are perhaps a symbol of their relationship with isolation. In this case, we have Ove Bakkerud, seeking out isolation from a break up, who finds that his hytte has been broken into in his absence. And it gets worse: there is a murder victim at a nearby cabin, a cabin owned by TV personality Thomas Rønningen. Continue reading →

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My Left Foot

Jørn Lier Horst, Dregs (2010, Bunnfall, translated by Anne Bruce, 2011)

DregsThere’s a kind of detective work in coming to this, the fifth in the Wisting novels, after the television adaptation of books nine and eight of the sequence.

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Iced Blondes

Wisting (Directed by Trygve Allister Diesen and Katarina Launing, 2019)

I stumbled across Wisting a couple of months ago in the nether regions of iPlayer and downloaded the first episode a couple of months ago. I confess I’ve never seen The Bridge (soon to be a Radio 4 programme), nor Wallander, nor the original version of The Killing (but most of the American version). I did see Modus (possibly in reverse order) and Svartsjön (ultimately silly, but verging on the Todorovian fantastic, if I recall correctly), so my scandinoir experiences are thin (I think I gave up after the second film in The Girl with the Increasingly Passive Character trilogy). Continue reading →

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Munch’s Oslo

I’m scrambling down a granite and grass hillside, increasingly realising that whilst this is path, it isn’t the path. I’m wary of checking the phone, because I’m at 70% of battery life and the cable is dying. Frankly the phone is dying. Somewhere to my right is a music festival, and I see cars and people passing by on the road I’m aiming for.

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Norwegian Blue (and Red)

Harald Sohlberg: Painting Norway (Dulwich Picture Gallery)

Everyone knows The Scream, but Norway’s favourite painting is a remarkable nighttime mountainscape, by Harald Sohlberg. I’d been struck by his incredible yellow skies in paintings either side of doorways in Kode 3, just before the French Impression era Munch room, and again by his work at the Oslo National Museum, but he was still at number five in my top five Norwegian artists. Dulwich — who made me take notice of Nikolai Astrup — now brings Sohlberg to the UK, making it two Norwegian exhibitions at once.
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Etches at an Exhibition

Edvard Munch, Love and Angst (British Museum)

img_7864This is a slice of Edvard Munch’s career — one of my top five favourite Norwegian artists — between about 1890 and 1910, which perhaps doesn’t make sense without knowing the rest of his career. For a start, there is a Norwegian habit of repeating the same motif in a way I’ve not seen with other artists other than Picasso. Munch has several paintings of Puberty or The Vampire, for example, and this raises questions about whether he is obsessively exploring a theme, seeking out the perfect version, displaying artistic unity or exploiting the design for maximum revenue. Or all of the above.

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It’s a Scream

I didn’t go to Oslo just to see The Scream (1893), but it would have been worth it. I’ve seen a pen and ink version at Bergen, but this was the first time I’ve seen this version in the flesh – there’s a later, probably 1910, version supposedly at the Munch Museum (but it wasn’t on display) and the one owned by Petter Olsen and sold for $120,000,000 but we take this to be the original.

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Morning Munch

Eventually I’ll write about characteristic Edvard Munch, but I’m very struck by this (to my eyes) French-flavoured portrait, Morning (1884), in the Rastus Meyer Collection. We have a young woman, sat on the edge of a bed, mid dressing, gazing towards the window. The sitter is Thora Emilie Dalen (b. 1868) and she was painted by Munch when he was renting a room in Haugfoss. This was the painting that Munch was to exhibit in Paris and marks a breakthrough.

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Three Views of Karl Johans Gate

A couple of years ago I had about half an hour in the Rasmus Meyer Collection (aka KODE Three) to look at the Munchs. I knew The Scream, of course, which if memory serves is the painting destroyed in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (unless it was Melancholia) and of which I had an inflatable version. The collection — assembled by one of Munch’s first collectors — has a lithograph version, and it was great to see that. There were three other rooms, exclusively Munch.

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Trolling the Uncanny

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I seem to be constructing a history of Norwegian painting, in part because I’ve failed to find a decent book. In part this is so I can understand Edvard Munch and Nikolai Astrup’s better. There’s a list of names in Øystein Loge’s Nikolai Astrup: Betrothed to Nature I need to follow up, but it might be interesting to see what I can construct myself.

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