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Henrik Ibsen and Edvard Munch
Henrik Ibsen’s literary production was one of the most central sources of inspiration for Edvard Munch’s art. In this essay Lars Roar Langslet closely examines the connections between these two great pillars of Norwegian art

There is a unique ‘relationship of reciprocity’ between Ibsen’s literary work and Munch’s pictorial art. This exchange between them was obviously connected with their fundamental aesthetic viewpoints and uniqueness as artists.
   In Ibsen we find a number of statements about the interplay between painting and literature. Both Ibsen and Munch interpret ‘what in the mind flashes’ – the painter’s visions are ‘poetic visions’ and his pictures are ‘colour poetry’ (the cycle of sonnets ‘In the picture gallery’), just as the poet for his part ‘paints poet’s pictures’ (‘A birdsong’). We must not forget that Ibsen did have ambitions about becoming a painter, and later in life he considered himself to be a connoisseur of pictorial art. But even more important than such preludes to an aesthetic theory with synaesthetic implications is the fact that Ibsen was such an essentially visual writer. We know that he had a very clear picture in his head of his own stage characters, how they were dressed, how the space around them was furnished and coloured – often it was painful for him to see his own plays on stage, because so much had been changed. Ibsen’s stage directions are unusually precise and richly detailed, almost ‘like a painting’. Ibsen’s use of the actual stage space never involves needless background or decor, but the detailed descriptions communicate a series of meaning-bearing visual suggestions, which constitute an important ‘subtext’ in the process of the action. This too may be implied in Ibsen’s famous statement in a letter to Georg Brandes in 1871: ‘A writer’s task is essentially to see, not to reflect.’
   Edvard Munch for his part felt an urge to write, and his many memoranda, which have now been published, reveal what skills he possessed as a writer. In an interview he gave in 1897 concerning the exhibition that was being shown at the time, Munch says that ‘almost everything you see started as a manuscript’ (Arne Eggum: Livsfrisen fra maleri til grafikk, Oslo 1987, p. 16). But a lot of his famous pictorial motifs had their source in important impulses from his reading – inter alia from Ibsen, indeed one may no doubt say: particularly from Ibsen. Here we see the ‘reciprocal relationship’ in action: The pictorial impression that had etched itself into Munch’s consciousness – from his childhood, or from important moments since – could suddenly acquire new meaning when Munch made them into elements in the theatrical world of Ibsenian tragedies. Or the reverse: Outlines that were originally visualisations of scenes in Ibsen were later reborn as central motifs in Munch’s own, very personal pictorial world.
   Edvard Munch has been called a literary painter – but not because he illustrates literary texts or prefers to seek his motifs in books; it is rather the ‘literary’ motifs that haunt him. They seek him out and strike him because in a mysterious way they call forth – and melt together with – the material of his own experience, they uncover threads in the destiny of his own life, and bear them to fruition in pictorial expressions in which his impressions from reading and his personal experience ascend into a higher unity.
   In this sense Ibsen’s writings became one of the sources from which Edvard Munch’s pictorial imagination drew throughout his life. It is characteristic that in the collections of the Munch Museum we find a total of roughly 500 works that are considered to be related to Ibsen themes – everything from a wealth of rapidly executed sketches to lithographs and large paintings; and a host of Munch’s works in other collections are connected with the same thematic area. Indeed, there have also been a series of exhibitions dealing with ‘Munch and Ibsen’.
   Ibsen and Munch met on just a few occasions in little Kristiania after Ibsen’s return from his long exile – Ibsen was at that time 65 years old and internationally renowned; Munch was only 30, fighting to be recognised with his controversial poetic expressionism. Munch returns time and again to these episodic meetings, and his admiration for Ibsen shines through in his valuable fragments of memoirs. What was most important was their meeting in the autumn of 1895, when Munch’s ‘scandalous exhibition’ of pictures from the ‘Frieze of Life’ was being shown in Kristiania. He was now being attacked from all sides for his ‘sick’ pictures; at a public meeting at which his pictures were debated, Munch and the Munch family’s ‘insanity’ were even analysed by a famous psychiatrist, and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson had suggested the same diagnosis in a newspaper. It was at this point that Ibsen came to the exhibition and let himself be shown round by the young artist, taking his time and showing Munch interest and sympathy. This made an indelible impression on Munch. Such support compensated for everything he was now experiencing in the form of adversity and hatred. Ibsen’s parting words were something Munch was never to forget: ‘Things will go with you as they did with me: The more enemies, the more friends!’ And on that point his prediction was absolutely right!
   Munch says that Ibsen was particularly interested in the painting ‘Woman in three stages.’ He stood for a long time, looking at it. ‘I said: The dark one, standing between the tree trunks by the naked woman, is the nun – woman’s shadow as it were – sorrow and death. The naked one is the woman who loves life. Beside them again is the light woman walking out towards the sea – towards infinity. That is the woman of longing. Between the trunks on the far right stands a man – in agony and uncomprehending.’
   When Munch read When We Dead Awaken four years later, he ‘discovered’ that the three female characters in Ibsen’s ‘dramatic epilogue’ had been based on the painting, and for the rest of his life he was convinced that Ibsen had received inspiration from it. In his many drawings for the play (a good 40 altogether) he used this picture as an important motif. Most Ibsen experts have probably taken Munch’s words with several pinches of salt – but both the Munch researcher Gösta Svenæus and the Ibsen researcher Daniel Haakonsen are of the opinion that here ‘Ibsen reveals his knowledge of Edvard Munch’s paintings’ – the stylised use of colour in Ibsen’s last play corresponds completely with the colours in ‘Woman in three stages’ (Haakonsen: Henrik Ibsen – mennesket og kunstneren, Oslo 1981, p. 258).
   A group of its own is constituted by Munch’s portraits of Ibsen. The first of these was a poster from 1897, for a production of John Gabriel Borkman in Paris. The playwright’s powerful head dominates the picture, and on the right we can see a rapidly sketched coastal landscape, where a lighthouse is casting its beams of light into space. The symbolism is simple, as befits a poster: Ibsen is the bearer of light, the lighthouse illuminating the hidden zones in human life. Ibsen’s eyes are portrayed in the same way as a number of people described them in words: One eye is narrowed, the other is wide open. We notice that Ibsen sees us, but at the same time he sees beyond us, into unknown worlds.
   The en-face portrait was developed further both in lithography and paintings. Now Ibsen is sitting at the Grand Café, against a dark, undulating curtain that lets in a fleeting glimpse of life in the street outside in the dreary rainy weather. He has turned his back on it. It is a lonely, introspective human being who is staring in front of him with his psychic eyes. His face has a phosphorescent shine, as if it were illuminated by a source of light from within.
   It is interesting to note that one of Munch’s last self-portraits, ‘By the window’ (c. 1940), has a pictorial arrangement that echoes the Ibsen picture: en face, with his back to the window which allows a glimpse of a snow-covered ‘Borkman landscape’. Here too part of the face is illuminated by a red glow from within.
   Munch [often] gives his own facial features to a number of Ibsen characters. In The Pretenders it is King Skule who becomes an alter Munch – ‘God’s stepchild on Earth’, the doubter who was chosen to be the victim of an all-powerful destiny. But it is clear that he also identifies with Peer Gynt – the artist with the shining visions and excessively tall stories – who goes into spiritual decline and ends up in the wilderness, the madhouse, a shipwreck and the burnt-out pine-barren, as his own visionary abilities gradually dry up.
   It is also fascinating to see how Munch designs the interiors for use on stage in the case of Ghosts. He is faithful to Ibsen’s stage directions but goes into them in depth and supplements them with elements that were completely his own. The other play that triggered particularly important pictures from Munch is John Gabriel Borkman. Ibsen had given him advance notice of the play while they were wandering around the exhibition in 1895: ‘As usual there will be something diabolical coming from me again, something for you.’ The book came the following year, and Munch was enthralled. He must have experienced the ruined bank manager as an artist in disguise – the self-assertive artist who rides roughshod over other people’s lives to achieve his ends, and who is broken down and ruined because he has betrayed love.
   More important in the context of Ibsen are the drawings of Borkman wandering restlessly upstairs in the hall, like a caged animal: ‘Back and forth, – back and forth goes the wolf,’ says Mrs Borkman. Afterwards Munch painted several self-portraits in a Borkman posture, including ‘In internal revolt’ (1919) – a picture of caging, tension and angst. ‘Even so I must go around feeling like a John Gabriel Borkman,’ he had said to Ravensberg.
   It may seem strange that this relationship of reciprocity became so intense – on the face of it they represented two different forms of art with radically different expression registers, and they belonged to two different periods of time that were soon to have a gulf of separation between them. However, we must remember that they met in the 1890s, a period when poetry and mystical symbolism were once again making their impression on art, with elements as well from psychological examinations in depth and philosophical and religious renewal. Both the ageing Ibsen and the young Munch gained nourishment from this spiritual climate for the ‘pictorial poetry’ they were each in his own way developing. When they met, it was therefore in a context of mutual understanding and sympathy, cutting across the distance in age and circle of activity.
   Munch felt kinship on the personal level as well. ‘Ibsen I understand, we had sympathy for each other,’ he said to Ravensburg. ‘He perhaps felt just as shy and lonely as I did … He felt lonely, abandoned, kicked …’ Both had experienced to the full prejudices, small-mindedness, lack of understanding and hatred. Both were recognised late – later in Norway than in other countries. Both sought loneliness and chose art rather than life. Both saw their calling in seeing into the depths of existence and gathering what they had seen into artistically completed expression. For both of them the path of art became a lonely struggle, through bitter wrestling with themselves, in passion and agony. But both for Ibsen and Munch that path was the only possible one.
   Translation: Patrick Nigel Chaffey
   This is a shortened version of Dr Langslet’s lecture given at the Rome conference ‘Ibsen and the Arts: Painting - Sculpture - Architecture’ in October 2001. Dr Langslet has given a more detailed presentation in a book with Norwegian and English text: Henrik
   Ibsen – Edvard Munch (Oslo 1994)

When my friend called me up and said that he had the video cassette of Satyajit Ray’s film Ganashatru in his hand, I thought he was simply teasing me because he knew I had read Henrik Ibsen’s play The Enemy of the People decades ago and that I was keeping track of the progress of Ray’s project ever since the maestro had expressed his desire to adapt the classic play for his next film. The film, made after his recovery from a major heart ailment in 1989, was to be named Ganashatru, with his favourite actor Shoumitra Chatterjee performing in the lead role of Dr. Ashoke Gupta, the character of Dr. Stockman in the original play by Ibsen.
   So, when my friend called me up I was overjoyed at the prospect of seeing the movie after a long wait. Remember, I am talking of 1990.
   Though impeded by the ravages of heart ailment, the touch of the master was discernible in every department of the film—in the selection of artistes (Shoumitra, Shubhendu, Mamata Sankar, Satya Banerjee, Dipankar Dey, Ruma Guha Thakurta et al), in the creation of the sets, in the selection of shots and in the penning of the dialogues. Dialogue was the most important part of the story. Remember, the movie was an adaptation of a play that was set in the realm of Europe having defined scenes and measured dialogues. Therefore, Ray did not have much space to introduce anything new, like playing around with metaphors or do experimentation in other areas, etc. The crucial task was to fit the story within the context of Bengal, and that no doubt he did with superb adroitness. As he was not hundred percent physically, he depended mostly on indoor shooting for the film. His son helped him do the outdoor shooting on locations. The indoor sets, however, were absolutely realistic. At the end he was not too unhappy that he had to remain confined to indoor shooting only.
   In an interview with his biographer Andrew Robinson, Ray commented:
   I found that for once one could play with human faces and human reactions, rather than landscapes, Nature in its moods, which I have done a lot in my films. Here I think it is the human face, the human character which is predominant.
   As for the cast, Shoumitra, as usual, fitted effortlessly into the role of the protagonist, that is, Dr. Bose. It is in the doctor’s chamber that most of the drama unfolds from beginning to end.
   
   The story in brief
   The carefully publicised story that the water of the village Chandipur had a mysterious health-giving quality proved good for business for the local residents and business community. People from far and wide started to visit the place to bathe in the water. With affluence comes people’s thirst for spiritual enlightenment. So, a temple came up soon to add divinity to the whole scam. People are ready to pay any amount to take the water from the well of the temple as a panacea for all diseases. Business continues to thrive until one day Dr. Bose starts to suspect that the water of the well and ponds is contaminated with bacteria that was causing diarrhea, typhoid and other intestinal diseases among the people of the village. He discusses this with his brother Nishith who is also the local municipal chairman and suggests closing down the well until the source of contamination is found and repaired. But his brother is not ready to take the risk of antagonising the temple authorities as they were earning handsomely by selling the ‘holy’ water. He also has to keep the thought of their support at the next election in mind. He tries to talk the doctor out of this. Undeterred, Dr. Bose sends a sample of the water to a nearby town for laboratory test. The test confirms his suspicion regarding the presence of bacteria in the water. He tries to talk sense into everyone he meets in the village. But his benign words of wisdom fail to soften the cold hearts. After a lot of argument and counter argument, and surfacing of some more cases of affliction, Dr. Bose decides to publish the story in the local newspaper. But here again the editor refuses to comply fearing public wrath and closing down of his paper. Dr. Bose’s concern soon crescendos to the level of frustration. There he is, trying to help the people of his own village but they are not ready to listen to him! Dr. Bose decides to go to the people directly and explain the health hazard lurking in the water they are drinking. He organises a public meeting, but the local goons sabotage it. Not only that, from the same venue they brand the doctor as a heretic and hence a ‘ganashatru’—a public enemy, and demand his ouster from the village. With almost all the elderly people in the village either going against him or keeping away for fear of their own life, Dr. Bose is faced with a predicament he little knew how to circumvent. It is at this stage that a group of young people of the village who come and stand beside him. They revive faith in him and pledge to fight for the truth.