Spring on Karl Johans gate

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Spring on Karl Johans gate (Edvard Munch)
Spring on Karl Johans gate
Edvard Munch , 1890
Oil on canvas
80 × 100 cm
Art Museum, Bergen

Spring on Karl Johans gate or Spring on Karl Johann Street (Norwegian: Vår på Karl Johan ), also Spring Day on Karl Johans gate or Spring Day on Karl Johann Street (Norwegian: Vårdag på Karl Johan ) is a painting by the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch from 1890. It shows a street scene on Karl Johans gate in Kristiania, today's Oslo , and in his pointillist and light-flooded painting technique, Munch deals with the artistic movement of Impressionism .

Image description

The picture shows Karl Johans gate , Kristianias main and boulevard. The image section extends from the Grand Hotel with the Grand Café on the ground floor on the right-hand side of the image to the trees and bushes of Løvebakken Park on the left-hand side, behind which blue-green poplars soar high into the sky. In the vanishing point of the street is the light blue “building block” of the royal palace . Several blue lines run towards it, one formed by the roofs of houses, the other by the stream of pedestrians on the right side of the road.

According to Anni Carlsson, it is a “colorful train of people” who promenades on both sides of the street. A horse-drawn carriage drives on the road. Several groups of figures give the composition depth: In the right foreground, two girls with sun hats are cut off in profile from the edge of the picture. Three women with parasols stroll directly above them. They hardly stand out from the background of the picture. From the left, two shadows protrude into the picture, the figures of which cannot be seen.

As a “central counterpoint” (according to Ulrich Bischoff ), which stands out from the atmosphere of the rest of street life with its strong, contrasting colors, Munch has painted a blue-clad woman with a red parasol in the foreground. Their rigid, immobile posture contrasts with the movement of the other figures; their central position makes them stand out from the street scene that was captured by chance. According to Rodolphe Rapetti, their silhouette is geometrically simplified. It is also cut off from the lower edge of the picture, but only just above the dress hem.

Munch applied the oil paint to unprimed canvas that shimmers through in some passages in the foreground. He experiments with the stylistic device of pointillism , the dissolving of a motif into geometric elements, but his style remains inconsistent and repeatedly breaks through the system. For example, some passages disintegrate into flowing lines, while the sky, for example, is designed in broad horizontal lines. The resolution in complementary colors is also only partially designed, for example in the orange-blue colors of the trees. Overall, according to Franziska Müller, the result is such a bright, light-flooded effect on the viewer as if they were blinded by the bright spring sun.

interpretation

Anni Carlsson describes spring on Karl Johans gate as a “cheerful, carefully composed street scene ” that shows Kristianias main street as a meeting place for strollers from the town tower and the bohemians . She dates the picture around noon, the hour "in which especially the ladies with their umbrellas come together". For Ulrich Bischoff, two compositional principles are balanced: the cheerful genre painting with the street scene captured as if in a snapshot and fixed structural elements with a symbolic charge: the lines leading into the depths and the figure from behind in the foreground.

In particular, it is the foreground figure that falls out of the composition for Franziska Müller and gives the study experimenting with impressionistic techniques a symbolist character typical of Munch , in line with his frequently repeated maxim: “I don't paint what I see, but what I have seen. “There have been various attempts to link the character with a real person from Munch's life, be it his former lover Milly Thaulow or his mother. In this case, the picture should be understood as a key work in which Munch depicts different time levels in different groups of people in order to trace the process of his growing up. In any case, it is the figure's rigidity that has fallen from its surroundings that creates a “dreamlike timelessness” of the motif for Müller.

Work context

Munch painted spring on Karl Johans gate in 1890 immediately after his second stay in Paris. The Karl Johans gate , according to Franziska Müller, the only representative Boulevard in Oslo, which deals with the great boulevards could measure in Paris was a frequent motif in Munch's work, see the list of paintings by Edvard Munch . Regardless of the direction in which Munch was facing the street, the striking facade of the Grand Hotel with its café, where the Kristiania-Bohème met, a group of younger artists that Munch was one of in the 1880s, can always be seen.

In Karl Johans gate (1889), Munch chose a completely different, strong application of paint than in the pointillism of the spring picture. Nevertheless, Arne Eggum sees the picture as a preliminary stage of the later work. It already shows the same compositional elements, especially the central female figure with the red parasol, only the view still leads in the opposite direction to the Storting building . Also music on Karl Johans gate (1889) is a confrontation with Impressionism, although here Artist more like Pissarro , Degas and Manet resonate. Evening on Karl Johans gate (1892) is a direct counterpart to the sun-drenched spring picture from 1890. It shows the street in the opposite direction and a darker, threatening evening mood. The single figure walking in the direction of the picture takes up the rear view of the woman with the parasol. In this early picture of his life frieze , Munch has already left impressionism completely behind and turns to expressionism .

In retrospect, Munch himself called his preoccupation with the French Impressionists “a brief flare-up of my Impressionist period”. It began in 1890 in Saint-Cloud, France, with some studies of the Seine , extended to the Parisian street paintings Rue Lafayette and Rue de Rivoli from 1891 and extended to open-air paintings such as In the open air from the same year, before Munch dealt with motifs such as melancholy finally broke away from impressionism. In spring on Karl Johans gate , according to Rodolphe Rapetti, it is above all the Neo-Impressionism of a Seurat that Munch grappled with. However, he also accounts for the influence of Monet in the design of the sky .

Munch later restricted his early attempts at Impressionism: "Only their subject matter was typically French." According to Anni Carlsson, the Impressionist technique turned out to be "a short transition phase on the way to oneself". When Munch presented spring at the Karl Johans gate at the autumn exhibition in Kristiania in 1890, the impressionist borrowings were particularly well received by the public, and the picture was rated as his best to date.

literature

  • Ulrich Bischoff : Edvard Munch. Taschen, Cologne 1988, ISBN 3-8228-0240-9 , pp. 20, 22.
  • Anni Carlsson: Edvard Munch. Life and work . Belser, Stuttgart 1989, ISBN 3-7630-1936-7 , pp. 37-38.
  • Franziska Müller: Spring on Karl Johann Strasse, 1890. In: Edvard Munch . Museum Folkwang, Essen 1988, without ISBN, cat. 21.
  • Rodolphe Rapetti: Munch and Paris: 1889–1891 . 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. 100, 104.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h Franziska Müller: Spring on Karl Johann Strasse, 1890. In: Edvard Munch . Museum Folkwang, Essen 1988, without ISBN, cat. 21.
  2. ^ Anni Carlsson: Edvard Munch. Life and work. Belser, Stuttgart 1989, ISBN 3-7630-1936-7 , p. 38.
  3. ↑ a b c Ulrich Bischoff: Edvard Munch. Taschen, Cologne 1988, ISBN 3-8228-0240-9 , p. 22.
  4. ^ A b Anni Carlsson: Edvard Munch. Life and work . Belser, Stuttgart 1989, ISBN 3-7630-1936-7 , pp. 37-38.
  5. ^ A b Rodolphe Rapetti: Munch and Paris: 1889-1891 . 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. 100, 104.
  6. ↑ a b c Rodolphe Rapetti: Munch and Paris: 1889–1891 . 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. 100.
  7. ^ A b Anni Carlsson: Edvard Munch. Life and work . Belser, Stuttgart 1989, ISBN 3-7630-1936-7 , p. 37.
  8. ↑ Music on Karl Johan Strasse in the Kunsthaus Zürich , myswitzerland.com.
  9. ^ Franziska Müller: Music on Karl Johann Strasse, 1890. In: Edvard Munch . Museum Folkwang, Essen 1988, without ISBN, cat. 20.
  10. ^ Franziska Müller: Evening on Karl Johann Strasse, 1892. In: Edvard Munch . Museum Folkwang, Essen 1988, without ISBN, cat. 27.
  11. ^ Jean Selz: Edvard Munch . Südwest, Munich 1977, ISBN 3-517-00536-3 , p. 47.
  12. ^ Rodolphe Rapetti: Munch and Paris: 1889-1891 . 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. 100-106.
  13. ^ Rodolphe Rapetti: Munch and Paris: 1889-1891 . 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. 104.