Evening on Karl Johans gate

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Evening on Karl Johans gate (Edvard Munch)
Evening on Karl Johans gate
Edvard Munch , 1892
Oil on canvas
84.5 × 121 cm
Art Museum, Bergen

Evening on Karl Johans gate (also evening on Karl Johans street ; Norwegian: Aften på Karl Johan ) is a painting by the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch from 1892. It shows a crowd of people approaching the viewer on Karl Johans gate in Kristiania, today's Oslo , and is one of the earliest works of Munch's life frieze .

Image description

The picture shows Karl Johans gate , Kristianias main and boulevard, in a nocturnal mood. On the right in the background you can see the Storting building and two towering poplars, on the left there is a row of houses, the windows of which are illuminated. On this side of the street, the viewer is met by a tightly packed crowd. The men mostly wear top hats, the women light straw hats with ribbons. Their faces are expressionless, literally frozen in a grimace, their eyes wide. The phosphor yellow or poison green complexion contrasts with the blue-red sky. On the right side of the street, a single black shadow goes in the opposite direction.

interpretation

According to Franziska Müller, the perspective on Karl Johans gate in the evening arouses a feeling of threat. In the evening, the viewer faces the crowds on Karl Johans gate , as if he were looking into an abyss or into his own reflection. Anni Carlsson reads fear, horror and hostility in the faces of the “head to head” approaching masses . Only one individual goes against the current. Reinhold Heller recognizes a "threat to the individual from the anonymous crowds advancing", Nic. Stang the "dead faces of the philistines". Carlsson interprets the picture as a “confrontation of the artist with the group ghost of the citizen”, Müller as a juxtaposition of “crowds” and the individual, whereby the individual figure excluded from the people is an image of Munch.

Evening on Karl Johans gate is a direct counterpart to the earlier spring on Karl Johans gate from 1890 , which was still painted in the Impressionist style . It shows the street in the opposite direction and in a darker evening mood. The single figure walking in the direction of the picture takes up the back view from the spring picture. For Jean Selz, evening at Karl Johans gate heralds a new expressionist style in Munch's work, in which an excitement or shock is captured without revealing the background of the event to the viewer. In this sense, the picture is a direct forerunner of Munch's best-known work The Scream , the first version of which was created the following year. In contrast to this, fear is not screamed out on people's faces, but remains "mute and therefore all the more terrifying". A synthesis of the mask-like faces of evening on Karl Johans gate and the surroundings and perspective of Der Schrei is the painting Angst from 1894.

Arne Eggum reminds the suggestive tree formation in the evening on Karl Johans gate , which is similarly found in The Kiss from the same year, of Arnold Böcklin's island of the dead . On the other hand, he attributes the mask-like pale faces of passers-by to the mask motif of the Belgian painter James Ensor , whom Munch may have met on an earlier trip to Brussels. Müller refers explicitly to Ensor's best-known work Christ's Entry into Brussels from 1888, in which a number of the city's citizens reacted in a similarly negative and hostile manner. A comparison to the dramas of Henrik Ibsen and the contours in Paul Gauguin’s pictures also suggests itself . Matthias Arnold sees a relationship between Munch's “fearful visions” and those of Goya or Kafka .

background

The first notes pointing to the motif of the evening on Karl Johans gate can already be found in Munch's literary diary from 1889. In his notes he described an experience of his own: “Everyone - people who passed by looked so strange and strange, and it seemed to him as if they were looking at him - staring at him - all those faces - glances in the evening light - he tried to hold onto a thought but couldn't - he had the feeling of complete emptiness in his head - then he tried his Fixing a view of a window high up - then the passers-by bothered him again - he was trembling all over and the sweat ran down him. ”A similar experience has been passed down from his time in Paris :“ I was outside again on the blue Boulevard des Italiens with the thousand strange faces that looked so ghostly in the electric light -. "

Munch spent the summer of 1892, still full of inspiration from his recent trip to Paris, in Kristiania and Åsgårdstrand . From evening on Karl Johans gate speaks Arne Eggum as the "perhaps the most idiosyncratic paintings this summer." Munch exhibited the picture for the first time in September 1892 at his second special exhibition in Tostrupgården in Kristiania. Morgenbladet magazine responded with the phrase "A downright insane picture". The audience insulted paintings and painters alike as "sick". Munch himself, on the other hand, valued the picture so much that he included it in the frieze of life , a collection of his central motifs about life, love and death. In 1909, the Norwegian art collector Rasmus Meyer acquired the painting as part of his collection in Bergen, which was made public in 1924 .

literature

  • Anni Carlsson: Edvard Munch. Life and work . Belser, Stuttgart 1989, ISBN 3-7630-1936-7 , p. 38.
  • Arne Eggum : The meaning of Munch's two stays in France in 1891 and 1892 . In: Sabine Schulze (Ed.): Munch in France . Schirn-Kunsthalle Frankfurt in collaboration with the Musée d'Orsay, Paris and the Munch Museet, Oslo. Hatje, Stuttgart 1992, ISBN 3-7757-0381-0 , pp. 146, 150.
  • Franziska Müller: Evening on Karl Johann Strasse, 1892. In: Edvard Munch . Museum Folkwang, Essen 1988, without ISBN, cat. 27.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Matthias Arnold: Edvard Munch . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1986. ISBN 3-499-50351-4 , p. 45.
  2. ↑ a b c d e Anni Carlsson: Edvard Munch. Life and work . Belser, Stuttgart 1989, ISBN 3-7630-1936-7 , p. 38.
  3. ↑ a b Arne Eggum : The meaning of Munch's two stays in France in 1891 and 1892 . In: Sabine Schulze (Ed.): Munch in France . Schirn-Kunsthalle Frankfurt in collaboration with the Musée d'Orsay, Paris and the Munch Museet, Oslo. Hatje, Stuttgart 1992, ISBN 3-7757-0381-0 , p. 150.
  4. ^ A b c d e Franziska Müller: Evening on Karl Johann Strasse, 1892. In: Edvard Munch . Museum Folkwang, Essen 1988, without ISBN, cat. 27.
  5. ↑ a b Reinhold Heller: Edvard Munch. Life and work. Prestel, Munich 1993. ISBN 3-7913-1301-0 , p. 86.
  6. ↑ Nic. Stang: Edvard Munch . Ebeling, Wiesbaden 1981, ISBN 3-921452-14-7 , p. 46.
  7. ^ Jean Selz: Edvard Munch . Südwest, Munich 1977, ISBN 3-517-00536-3 , p. 47.
  8. ↑ Arne Eggum: The meaning of Munch's two stays in France in 1891 and 1892 . In: Sabine Schulze (Ed.): Munch in France . Schirn-Kunsthalle Frankfurt in collaboration with the Musée d'Orsay, Paris and the Munch Museet, Oslo. Hatje, Stuttgart 1992, ISBN 3-7757-0381-0 , pp. 146, 150.
  9. ↑ See Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889 ( memento of February 6, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles .
  10. ↑ Arne Eggum: The meaning of Munch's two stays in France in 1891 and 1892 . In: Sabine Schulze (Ed.): Munch in France . Schirn-Kunsthalle Frankfurt in collaboration with the Musée d'Orsay, Paris and the Munch Museet, Oslo. Hatje, Stuttgart 1992, ISBN 3-7757-0381-0 , pp. 145-146.