This blog starts with our Thursday September 21 visit to the Munch Museum.
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| Outside of the Munch Museum in the Bjørvika Harbour |
We started our visit with a fabulous temporary exhibit entitled: Alice Neel, Every Person is a New Universe. It was a very comprehensive exhibit with many works we had never seen before. We also learned a lot more about her fascinating life. Neel's raw, expressive portraits were inspired by Edvard Munch, Goya and Diego Valázquez.
Alice Neel (1900-1984) worked as an artist her entire life but did not receive broad recognition until the 1970s. She painted "people from all social classes and environments, including artists, queer icons, mothers and children in New York's Spanish Harlem (she lived for years on 107th Street), kindred spirits in the Communist Party, sex workers, and cultural elites". Her portraits are superb, as she exhibits a keen psychological insight into the people she was painting. She said: "Every person is a new universe", which became the title of the Exhibit. Neel was never able to afford her own studio. Instead, she invited the people she wanted to paint to her apartment where she entertained them with stories.
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| Exhibition poster: Every Person is a New Universe |
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| Alice Neel at age of 29, unknown photographer in 1929 |
Neel had a number of relationships with men over the years. A number of them were painted by her.
In 1924, she met Carlos Enriquez at the summer school of the Pennsylvania Academy. The following year they married. He was an upper-class Cuban. She moved to Cuban with Enriquez to live with his family. In Havana, Neel was embraced by the burgeoning Cuban avant-garde where she developed her lifelong political consciousness and commitment to equality. Enriquez is the father of Neel's two daughters who were born in 1926 and 1928. Her first daughter died of diphtheria just before her first birthday. Enriquez left her in 1930, but the couple never divorced. Her second daughter, Isabetta returned to Cuba with Enriquez and lived with his family. Neel only saw her daughter three times after 1930. Tragically, Isabetta committed suicide in 1982.
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| Carlos Enriquez, 1926 |
During the Depression, Neel was one of the first artists to work for the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Her subjects were mostly Depression-era street scenes and Communist thinkers and leaders. Neel's affiliation and sympathy with the ideals of Communism remained constant.
She met a sailor, Kenneth Doolittle, through mutual friends. She writes that in the winter of 1934, "Doolittle cut up and burned about 60 paintings and 200 drawings and watercolours in their apartment at 33 Cornelia Street". She noted that he was a drug addict. She said that "I had to run out of the apartment or I would have had my throat cut." It took her years to get over the destruction of some of her best works.
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| Kenneth Doolittle, 1932 |
In the 1930s, Neel moved to Spanish Harlem and began painting her neighbours, especially women and children. Alice had an affair with José Santiago, a Puerto Rican jazz musician with whom she had a son, Richard, in 1939. She then met Sam Brody (1907-1987), a Russian born in England who was raised in London, Paris, Richmond, Virginia, and New York City, whom she said "had a terrific intellect but was rather a wild, mad creature. He was very cultured." Brody was a founding member of the Workers Film and Photo League founded in 1931. Neel had a 15 year relationship with Sam Brody which ended in 1955. They had a son, Hartley in 1941.
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| Sam Snow (How like the Winter), 1945 |
Neel painted a number of portraits of fellow members of the American Communist Party.
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Harold Cruse, c. 1950 (Cruse was an active member of the American Communist Party,
who later became a professor at the University of Michigan |
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| Art Shields, 1951-- another member of the Communist Party and journalist for The Daily Worker |
Neel met James Hunter in 1965 when he had just been drafted to serve in the Vietnam War. Neel sketched his body directly onto the cavas and coloured in parts of the head and hands. Hunter only had one week left in New York and never managed to return to her apartment. Neel decided that it would be interesting to abandon an ongoing project. The painting became a powerful metaphor for the uncertain fate of all the young men who were sent to war to fight against their will.
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Black Draftee (James Hunter), 1965) - there were indications that he returned safely home in 1967
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Frank O'Hara, No. 2, 1960-- Neel did a quick second painting as she thought that when he came to the door he looked beat and she felt that it expressed his troubled life more
than the first painting she had done. |
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| Geoffrey Hendricks and Brian, 1978 - Neel painted artist Hendricks, one of the leading figures of the Fluxus art movement and his partner, artist Brian Buczak. Buczak died of an AIDs-related illness in 1987. |
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| Gus Hall, 1981. Hall was the leader of the American Communist Party from 1959-2000. |
Neel writes that " The first time I joined the Communist Party was about 1935. But I was never a good communist. I hate bureaucracy. Even the meetings used to drive me crazy. I didn't participate in the meetings because I was too timid. I didn't dare to speak up. But it affected my work quite a bit."
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Rita and Hubert, 1954, painted eight years before the ban on interracial marriage
was lifted in the United States. |
The couple was author Hubert Satterfield and his partner Rita.
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Magistrate's Court (The Courtyard Scene), 1936. Neel painted this after she was arrested for going
on strike with The Artists' Union. She painted this from memory. |
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| The Spanish Family, 1943 |
The Alice Neel exhibit was excellent and a real eye opener. She was definitely a pioneer and her insightful portraits and other paintings provide a vivid picture of New York, including Spanish Harlem, and radical American politics of the 1950s-1970s. The exhibit ended with a 2007 film about her work, made by her grandson Andrew (son of Hartley Neel).
We then headed to the permanent Edvard Munch exhibit, as well as some temporary exhibits dealing with Munch on a number of floors. Edvard Munch was born on December 12, 1863, the son of a military doctor and his wife Laura. Munch spent his childhood in Kristiania, today's Oslo, where the family lived on his father's meagre doctor's salary. When Munch was five, his mother died from tuberculosis. His sister Sophie did of tuberculosis when he was just 14. Their aunt Karen moved in with them and took over the household. His aunt encouraged Munch's artistic endeavours and in 1880, he enrolled in the Royal School of Art and Design.
The Collection exhibit was entitled: Edvard Munch: Infinite. The pictures were exhibited under a number of themes, including the Outdoors; Alone; Portraits; and Self-Portraits. There was also a room where three versions of The Scream were exhibited, each one for a short period of time as they are fragile. The main painting of The Scream is located at the National Gallery which we will visit later in our trip.
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| Starry Night 1922-24 |
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| The Waves 1931 |
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| Elm Forest in Spring, 1936-37 |
A painting, a drawing and a print of
The Scream were exhibited in a separate inner room. Every version of
The Scream was created on cardboard or paper, which makes them more fragile than oil paintings on canvas. The story behind
The Scream is that in 1893, Munch was taking an evening stroll with friends when the sun was setting over the Oslo fjord. It was a bright red sky (our Free Tour guide said that a number of scientists have speculated that the red sky was caused by dust from the 1893 Krakatoa, Indonesia volcano). Munch said in his diaries that he suddenly stopped, quaking with fear, and felt a vast infinite scream passing through nature.
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| Self-Portrait with Hat, 1913-15 |
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| Self-Portrait with Bottles, 1938-42 |
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| Self-Portrait, 1895 |
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| Cupid and Psyche, 1907 |
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| Self-Portrait: Between the Clock and the Bed (1940-43) (one of his final works) |
There was also a gallery with some of Munch's larger pieces called Munch: Monumental.
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| The Sun, 1910-11 |
Another gallery featured a number of Munch's woodcuts.
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| Head by Head, 1905 |
In 1940, German troops invaded Norway and took control of the country. Munch became anxious about his artworks. He changed his will and bequeathed nearly all of his works to the municipality of Oslo. On December 19, 1943, one week after his 80th birthday, a giant explosion shook Oslo. Munch was woken by the blast and went outside and later captured the event in a watercolour. The next day he fell ill with a cold. He died on January 23, 1944.
Munch bequeathed more than 26,000 of his artworks, in addition to his diaries and writings to the City of Oslo. The City also owns 900 artworks donated by a close friend and art collector, Rolf E. Stenersen (1899-1978), which forms part of the museum's collection. The Museum is a fantastic place to explore all facets of Munch's creativity which went well beyond the iconic The Scream. We had seen a wonderful exhibit "Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed", at the Met in 2017, which featured 43 of his paintings including 16 self-portraits, some of which had never been seen in the United States before. A number were in the present exhibit at the Munch Museum, but there was so much more.
After our visit to the Museum, we wandered in the new residential and commercial neighbourhood behind the Museum and Opera/ Ballet House. Very interesting architecture and some lovely stores and cafés.
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Candles along the river
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| Backpacks in the rapids |
Luckily, we met someone who was stationed just near the place we turned to get to our street. He told us that this was an annual event in honour of the autumnal equinox that has taken place along the river for the past 20 years. They light approximately 4000 candles along the river, and there are cultural events and installations along the route. Unfortunately, it was really pouring at this point (around 7:30 p.m.) and it didn't look like many people were venturing out for the event. However, the event officially runs between 8:00 - 11:00 p.m. We chatted a bit and he told us that he was stationed there until 11:00 p.m.
We headed back to the apartment and Allan made a delicious meal of haddock, very tasty green beans and potatoes. It was a fabulous first full day in Oslo.
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