One of the ideas that you come back to in the book is the tension between an artist making work that is reflective of their time, and an artist who rejects their time. He was alone, and painting was a way for him to connect with the world. He didn’t have children, and didn’t have a family. Did that loss mark him or define him? It’s easy to say that it was why he painted what he did, that he lost his trust in the world, maybe. Was there a connection between his art and his biography?Įdvard Munch lost his mother and his sister when he was very young. To answer that, you talk about his life and his motivations. It made me think about what it is to paint, what it is to write, what it is to do this, why we’re doing this. So I went down to the basement in the Munch Museum and just saw all these paintings. Most of the paintings from that time are completely unknown, really. Then he had a long, long life, nearly 50 years, where he painted every day. In 8 to 10 years, he made all the paintings that made him famous. He had a very interesting life and a very interesting career. about who Edvard Munch is in the culture today, and who he was then. The only way to do it was to go to the unknown paintings that aren’t as good as The Scream, but are still expressing the same ideas, and painters who are influenced by Munch. The exhibition, the book, and the film try to get back to seeing Scream for the very first time-the shock of seeing that, and how radical it was. In a conversation during his last American tour, Knausgaard spoke of his affection for the difficult painter, his thoughts about what visual art can teach writers, and the turbulent time of the Modernists.
So Much Longing in So Little Space is an explanation of Munch’s inner life and, naturally, his own. But the writer saw something to sympathize with and even admire in the painter. In some ways, he was the opposite of Knausgaard, whose work has achieved nearly universal acclaim and who has written movingly of his connection to his now-ex-wife and children. But Knausgaard wanted to uncover another side of Munch, a lonely man who never married and didn’t achieve anything close to his current fame during his lifetime. Munch, who lived from 1863 to 1944, is most well known as the painter of The Scream, one of a handful of artworks famous enough to inspire pop culture parodies. Knausgaard curated an exhibition at Oslo’s Munch Museum as he wrote So Much Longing in So Little Space, which was released in English last week, and eventually decided to direct a documentary about Munch as well. In between wrapping up the final volume of his magnum opus and writing a cycle of four books about the seasons, though, he found time to write a book-length study of one of Norway’s most famous painters, Edvard Munch. Anyone who has read-or even looked at-the thousands of pages that make up Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume work, My Struggle, can tell that the Norwegian writer is prolific.
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