Jaget och världen speglade i förra sekelskiftets nordiska måleri: Bildkonstens människoskildring i en övergångsperiod

• Published in: Konsthistorisk tidskrift 1998-01, Vol.67 (4), p.269-286
• Main Author: Boström, Hans-Olof
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0023-3609; 1651-2294
• DOI: 10.1080/00233609808604473

The Representation of Self and the World in Scandinavian Painting Around 1900 While landscape painting in Scandinavian Realism and Symbolism has been widely discussed, paintings depicting human beings in the decades around the year 1900 have not received the same attention, although the differences in perception of life between the two periods are more clearly revealed in this kind of painting. In order to get a grip of the vast material and investigate the transition from Realist to Symbolist art, several strategies could be followed. One is to look at how man is depicted in relation to the elements, fire, air, water, earth. This study concentrates, to begin with, on how fire is represented during the two periods. In realistic paintings fire is almost always domesticated in the hearth, especially in cast iron fireplaces, i.e. represented as a utility and commodity. In Symbolism the fire is usually a log-fire, functioning as a catalyst of emotions, of inward, melancholic moods. Another strategy which is employed in the article is to examine how music is visualized in Realism vs Symbolism. In Scandinavian Realism there are many folk music scenes, documenting folk fiddlers and folk dancers in an ethnographical and anecdotal way, externally focalized. Theatricality in Michael Fried's sense, is typical of those pictures, whereas in Symbolism the individual is depicted as immersed in the music, spell-bound by its suggestive power, either as performer or as listener; Symbolism's interest in synaesthetics is documented in this kind of pictures, which are almost too obvious exponents of Fried's category absorption. Death is another focal point where the differences in outlook between Realism and Symbolism are manifested. In the 1870s and 1880s death is, in the tradition of Courbet, depicted in an "epic" or narrative way, without symbolic overtones. In a transitionary period Death is personified in physical form in paintings by, among others, the Swede, Richard Bergh, the Dane, Laurits Andersen Ring and the Norwegian, Edvard Munch. In Symbolism proper, however, the presence of death is intimated without its materialization, e.g. in the Dane, Ejnar Nielsen's gloomy "existence paintings" of death-marked young people. Not only in the iconography but also in the pictorial structure, the transition from Realism to Symbolism is evident. Art historians such as Rudolf Zeitler, Werner Hofmann and Wolfgang Kemp have demonstrated how the individual tends towards losing his aw