Gerhard Munthe (painter)

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Gerhard Munthe painted by Christian Krohg (1885)

Gerhard Peter Frantz Wilhelm Munthe (born July 19, 1849 in Skansehagen , Elverum , Hedmark ; † January 15, 1929 in Bærum , Akershus ) was a Norwegian painter, graphic artist and designer.

Life

Bondehagen (1885)

Gerhard Munthe was the third child of Christopher Pavels Munthe (1816–1884) and Christine Margrethe Pavel Abel. His father was a district doctor . In the year he was born, his family bought a second farm, Alfheim, in Elverum . There he grew up with his twelve siblings. His sister Margrethe later became a well-known author.

He graduated from school in 1869. He wondered whether he should become a doctor like his father, but this encouraged him to follow his artistic talent. When he made a trip to his uncle in Sogndal in the summer , he taught him to observe nature and the landscape. That was an important basis for his later work as a landscape painter.

Training and beginnings in painting

The following year he went to the painting school in Christiania , which was run by Johan Fredrik Eckersberg . He made friends with Eilif Peterssen and Frits Thaulow , who were also students there. Eckersberg died three months later and the school was taken over by Morten Müller and Knud Bergslien . Munthe stayed at the school until 1874 and then switched to the royal drawing school. He later reported that the lessons of the sculptor Julius Middelthuns had been of great benefit to him.

In autumn 1874 he went to Düsseldorf to see his distant relative Ludvig Munthe , who was an admired landscape painter at the time. Munthe did not paint many pictures during his stay, but he took up the landscape painting of Ludvig Munthes, with whom he took private lessons as well as with Andreas Achenbach . From 1876 to 1878 Munthe was a member of the Malkasten artists' association .

Between 1874 and 1876 Munthe commuted between Christiania and Düsseldorf. Then he asked the government for a travel grant for further education. His declared destination was Paris and he learned French. A studio and suitable models were so expensive in Paris that he spent 1877 to 1882 in Munich . Many of his colleagues were also in town or had already visited it. He also made friends with Erik Werenskiold . Munthe became a leading figure in the Munich cultural scene and was chairman of the Nordic Association from 1878 to 1879. Although he did not attend any courses at the art academy , he orientated himself in the city's museums and painted over 70 oil paintings . Initially, the pictures were composed according to Norwegian studies. They had an elongated format, were dark and had a poetic undertone. A typical example of this is the oil painting Forstadsparti from 1879. The painting Nevlunghavn from 1880, on the other hand, represents a strikingly colorful experiment by Munthes.

Protest movement of Kristianias students

Back in Kristiania in 1882, Munthe got caught up in a controversy between the student association and Kristiania's established art association. There was currently no art academy in Norway, and art students came back home with new ideas and ideas for art from Europe, especially Paris. The student association, headed by Christian Krohg , Fritz Thaulow and Erik Werenskiold, organized a protest against the Kristianias art association and accused them of their exhibition and purchasing policy. In addition, only civil servants and citizens sat in the association, but no artists. The student association then organized the first autumn exhibition based on the model of the Paris Salon . Munthe supported the protest, although he actually thought the move was too radical. From 1884 the annual autumn exhibition received state support. Munthe was a frequent exhibitor during the 1880s and was also a member of the jury from 1882 to 1890. It received mostly good reviews and the art historian Andreas Aubert highlights Munthe's work in his reviews.

The years 1886 to 1890

In 1886 Munthe spent the summer in an artists' colony in Fleskum on Lake Dælivannet. All participants, including Eilif Pettersen, Harriet Backer and Erik Werenskiold, had spent a year in Munich and many of the participants were inspired by Japanese art . But the neo-romantic tendencies in the work of his colleagues did not appeal to Munthe. The event went down as Fleksumsommer in Norway's art history, as it marked the beginning of neo-romanticism in the country.

Sigrun Munthe, née Sandberg, pictured in Idyll (1886)

On December 21, 1886, Munthe married Sigrun Sandberg (1869–1957), who was 20 years his junior, and moved to Sandvika in Bærum. The marriage remained childless and was divorced in December 1919. Sandberg then married the polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen , who lived in the neighborhood.

In the 1890s, anti-naturalist tendencies developed in Europe and the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch became famous. Munthe made annual trips to Østlandet , with Ulvin near Mjøsa and Røisheim in Bøverdalen being one of his favorite places. He kept his naturalistic style, even if it was no longer modern by the 1890s. But Munthe also developed new views and his main interest is no longer in landscape painting.

The years 1890 to 1893

The art movement of Aestheticism , also known as the Aesthetic Movement, had existed since the 1870s . It was based on Japanese ideals and propagated beauty in everyday life. The Norwegian professor of art history Lorentz Dietrichson started the “Beauty at Home” program and set up the Art Industry Museum in Kristiania. In addition, the Swede Ellen Key shaped Munthes views with an article and the book Skönhet för Alla (Beauty for All) and Carl Larsson , who published the book Ett Hem about his own house in Lilla Hyttnäs. Other representatives of the "Skönvirke" movement, as it was called in Denmark, were Thorvald Bindesbøll and Georg Jensen . In a letter to Carl Larsson, Munthe wrote that he would like to be compared to the French Eugène Grasset or the Dane Thorvald Bildböll. Since 1886 he became more and more familiar with Japanese art. At Christmas 1890 he received a book on Japanese art from Bernt Grønvold , probably the book Japansk Malerkunst by Karl Madsen from 1855. Munthe thanked him and wrote: »You couldn't have found anything that I would have appreciated more, nor was it mine aware of this aspect of Japanese art. «A short time later, the Arts and Crafts movement came to Norway, which at the turn of the century changed into Art Nouveau .

Title frieze of the saga Magnus Blindes
Illustration in the saga Halvdan Svartes

In November 1890 Munthe began to deal with ornaments and designed patterns. He dealt with peasant art and read Landstad's folk songs from the Middle Ages and modern symbolic literature. In addition, he is developing a “national Norwegian” color palette with reference to nature and colors based on old Norwegian folk art. The color palette includes bright red, reddish purple, indigo blue, bluish green, and rich yellow. The motifs of his pictures are borrowed from Norwegian sagas and stories, medieval tapestries and wood carvings. Nature also plays a major role with the flora and fauna. His wife asked him to draw something for her that she could weave later. She then turned pictures of Munthes into tapestries . From 1894, the picture weaving was implemented in the weaving school of the Nordenfjeldske Art Industry Museum in Trondheim under Augusta Christensen and Ulrike Greve. A small number of carpets were also produced by Frida Hansen and Kristine Johannessen. The director of the Museum Jens Thiis made efforts to make Munthe's work accessible to the international public, and so it happened that Munthe's pictorial works were shown at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1900 . The carpets showed motifs from the legend of Sigurd the Crusader . Among them was the large carpet with the motif of King Sigurd's entry into Constantinople . After the exhibition, the tapestries were brought to the royal palace in Oslo.

In the spring of 1892 Munthe made a short study trip to Paris. There he was guided by the Swedish painter Georg Pauli and looked at the monumental works of the French painter Puvis de Chavannes . He bought Japanese ceramics in Samuel Bing's La Maison de l'Art Nouveau shop . The shop also carried arts and crafts of the then contemporary Art Nouveau.

In the same year Munthe became a member of the management of the Norwegian National Gallery , of which he was also chairman from 1905.

In 1893, Munthe made his final breakthrough with the Sort og Hvidt exhibition in Kristiania. There he turned eleven watercolors from among themselves Fiere , De tre prins eater , Mørkredd , Helhesten , Blodtårnet , Trollebotn and the onde Stemor were. The media were enthusiastic and the Morgenbladet newspaper reported in the preview of the exhibition that the works would usher in the future of ornament. Further exhibitions followed in Paris and Chicago (1893), Stockholm (1894), Berlin (1896) and St. Petersburg (1897).

Illustrations of ancient sagas and fairy tale motifs

Title page of the royal saga (Heimskringla)

Together with Erik Werenskiold he worked from 1896 to 1899 on a new edition of Snorri Sturluson's royal saga Heimskringla . Werenskiold was first commissioned by the publisher, but Munthe took over the management of the decorative design. He made drawings, chose fonts and paper, and bound the work. He also designed title friezes and vignettes for the Ynglinga saga , which is a central part of the book. He was also responsible for the illustration and binding for the Draumkvedet ballad collection from 1904, but also for hand-drawn texts. He even developed his own medieval font.

Image weaving: Beilere, including table and chair of the Eventyrrom

In 1896, the patron Axel Heiberg Munthe secured the Eventyrrom (German: Märchenraum ) project in the Holmenkollen Turisthotell. From then on he dealt with interior design and room installations. The first Holmenkollen Turisthotell, designed by the architect Holm Hansen Munthe , burned down a year after it was built. The new hotel was designed by the architect Ole Sverre in a dragon style like the previous one . The art nouveau interior also took up elements from folk art and legends, as well as flowers and animal motifs. Munthe should now transform an 8.12 meter by 5.17 meter room into a fairy tale room. The room with a ceiling height of 2.80 meters had two doors on the long sides and a window on one of the front sides. He designed the ceiling with two overlapping ring ornaments. The top pattern showed black rings 150 centimeters in diameter and the outside red, gear-shaped rings 75 centimeters in diameter. This pattern was bordered with a 28 centimeter wide border of zigzag lines, which were probably black and yellow. Drawings show pear-shaped ornaments that were supposed to be screwed under the border, but they were not realized, as were the eight rosettes that were supposed to break through the ring pattern. The walls had a 130 centimeter high plinth area, which was lavishly decorated and divided into many sub-elements. A 20 centimeter wide frieze with a yellow star pattern formed the upper end of the walls . This was also used to outline all the reliefs . The window is flanked by two relief panels depicting a landscape scene with two trolls and stars. It is a smaller version of the picture To Gygrer (German: two troll giants ). There was a scene near the window with an old, hidden lock. To the right of this was a revised version of Blodsporen (German: blood traces ), which showed the bloody footprints of a polar bear that came from the castle. The picture was painted with strongly contoured areas of color, almost without perspective, and made the strong Japanese influence clear. A tree with playful curved lines was a concession to Art Nouveau. On the face opposite the window was a carved and simplified version of the Trollbotn picture . The writing "Bjerget det Blaa" (German: the blue mountain ) was incorporated above the scene . The scene showed a frightened princess with a crown being kidnapped by four little trolls on a boat. You are rowing towards a mountain in front of which a stylized swan is waiting. The motif probably came from the folk song Åsmund Frægdagjævar in which the princess Ermelin is kidnapped by trolls into the mountain. As a result, Åsmund Frægdagjævar was sent by the king to save his daughter. One saw such a scene next to the door to the hotel, which was shaped like a rock. The prince rides towards an iron-framed door with ominous icicles hanging over it. At the same time he is fighting a dragon . But several troll women are already waiting behind the door. Munthe presented her clothes as ornamental surfaces carved into striking contours. The same ornamental surfaces can be found in the picture Beilerne . This scene was shown on the other side of the rock-shaped door, but modified from the original version. Instead of the three sisters, there is only one woman and she is not an earthly princess, but the princess Aurora borealis, with flaming hair. The polar bear in the scene, of which there were three in the original work, symbolizes the prince transformed in the night. The words "Nordon under fjöllo djupt under hello der leikar det" were written above the door. It is the refrain of the folk song Liti Kersti . The French-style door opposite had a large, almost semicircular window. In it was an owl with outspread wings. Owls are a common element of Art Nouveau. Munthe also designed furniture for the room that was emphatically asymmetrical. They could be compared to the Anglo-Japanese furniture of the French Émile Gallé . The chairs were adorned with peacocks , which are a central symbol of the Aesthetic Movement for beauty, but also play a major role in Japanese art. In the Eventyrrom, Munthe created a free interpretation of old legends and folk songs. Its symbolism related to both Nordic traditions and Japanese symbols. The Japanologist and representative of Art Nouveau Eugène Grasset also saw clear links between Munthes and Japanese. In the spring of 1897 the room was completed. However, in 1914 the hotel was destroyed by fire.

Since 1897 Munthe was a board member of the norske Husflidsforening (Norwegian artisans' association).

In 1898 and 1899 Munthe built his house in Lysaker . The house was destroyed in a fire, but a series of watercolors shows what it originally looked like. Based on the greenery-yallery movement, a movement that has its origins in Japanese and uses pale colors in combination with green and yellow, Munthe designed his entrance hall and living room. Werenskiold, who visited Munthe, wrote in a letter to Grønvold that it was beautiful and shone with colors, so that it was almost too much.

Room installations

In the following years Munthe took on several orders for interior fittings, including for some private houses and the Håkonshalle in Bergen (1910 to 1915), for which he made the first design in 1904. However, the decorations and furniture were destroyed by an explosion in 1944. He made two large paintings for the stairwell of the Oslo Stock Exchange . The starting point for his furniture designs were simple peasant furniture and traditional street furniture. He valued ingenuity, which he felt was lacking in contemporary design. He also wanted to create a Norwegian design and said: "Alt vi omgav os med i vore boliger tilhørte Fremdmed tankegang og Fremdmed oppfindsomhet, og gjorde oss derfor hjemløse i vor egen stue." (In German: "Everything we do with in our home." surrounds, belongs to a foreign mindset and a foreign invention and that makes us homeless in our own living room. «) He wanted Norway to develop its own thoughts with its own flora and fauna and create its own ornaments. His stylized or naturalistic murals often formed the starting point for his room creations. He worked with ceramics and silver to a certain extent, and designed wallpaper .

With Minder og Meninger , Munthe published a book in 1919 about his thoughts on art, lectures and collected newspaper articles. They make up the main part of the collection. In order to fully understand his conception of art, however, one should consult the letters to his colleagues, since the collection is listed without any connection to one another.

From 1891 to 1925 Munthe created 85 motifs, many of which were created in several versions, so that around 300 individual images were created.

Works (selection)

painting
Budeia (1890)
Page 7 of Draumkvæde (1904)
  • 1876 ​​Folk som rydder Nyland (Høstlandskap)
  • 1879 Forstadsparti
  • 1880 Nevlunghavn
  • 1883 Efter Regn
  • 1884 Høyonn
  • 1885 idyll
  • 1885 Bondehagen
  • 1888 Aften i Eggedal
  • 1889 Husmansplass
  • 1889 Vår
  • 1890 Budeia
  • 1891 Blåveis
  • 1892 Blodtårnet
  • 1892 Trollebotn
  • 1892 Beilere (Nordlysdøtrene)
  • Freeze
  • Mørkredd
  • Helhesten
  • The onde stemor
  • Variety epler
  • Bloodspores
  • To gyrger
  • 1902–1904 Åsmund Frægdegjævar series
Illustrations
Room installations

Awards

Remarks

  1. ↑ old spelling of Oslo , valid until 1877, then renamed Kristiania and again Oslo from 1925
  2. ↑ oil painting "Forstadsparti" on Digitalt Museum - fetched (English) on 8 June 2013
  3. ↑ oil painting "Nevlunghavn" on Digitalt Museum - fetched (English) on 8 June 2013

literature

Web links

Commons : Gerhard Munthe  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Family tree of the Munthe family, accessed on June 8, 2013. (Norwegian)
  2. ↑ a b Gerhard Munthe in the Norske Leksikon store - accessed on June 11, 2013. (Norwegian)
  3. ^ Sabine Baumgärtel, Sabine Schroyen, Lydia Immerheiser, Sabine Teichgröb: Directory of foreign artists. Nationality, residence and studies in Düsseldorf . In: Sabine Baumgärtel (Ed.): The Düsseldorf School of Painting and its international impact 1819–1918 . Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86568-702-9 , p. 436
  4. ↑ History of the autumn exhibition ( Memento of the original from April 13, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at Staten's art exhibition - accessed June 8, 2013. (Norwegian)  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.hostutstillingen.no
  5. ^ Letter from Munthe to Grønvold January 12, 1891. Letters collection No. 90. National Library, Oslo.
  6. ↑ Bo Grandien: Rõndruvans Glõd. Uddevalla 1987, p. 311.
  7. ↑ Iduns julehefte 1897.
  8. ↑ Gerhard Munthe (Brudstykker) Min Vandring paa the decorative Vei, April 22 et brev af 1895. Christiania.
  9. ^ Gerhard Munthes notebook around 1895, Munthe Archive, National Library, Oslo, Ms 1058.
  10. ↑ Gerhard Munthes Notebook 1892–1908, Munthe Archive, National Library Oslo, Ms 1071 B.
  11. ↑ Applied arts sheet of the University of Heidelberg - accessed on June 11, 2013.
  12. ↑ Jens Thiis, Gerhard Munthe: en study. Trondhjem, 1903, p. 28.
  13. ↑ Gerhard Munthe ( Memento of the original from January 22, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in the history of Munthegaarden - accessed June 11, 2013 (Norwegian)  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.munthegaarden.no
  14. ^ Letter Collection No. 32, National Library, Oslo.
  15. ↑ Widar Halén, Christopher Dresser - A pioneer of Modern Design, London, 1990, pp. 45 and 79
  16. ^ Eugène Grasset, La Plante et ses applications Ornamentale, Paris, 1896.
  17. ^ Stephan Tschudi-Madsen: Sources of Art Nouveau. Oslo, 1955, pp. 207-208.
  18. ↑ Gerhard Munthe ( Memento of the original from January 22, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in the history of Munthegaarden - accessed June 11, 2013 (Norwegian)  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.munthegaarden.no
personal data
SURNAME Munthe, Gerhard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Munthe, Gerhard Peter Frantz Wilhelm (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Norwegian painter, printmaker and designer
DATE OF BIRTH July 19, 1849
PLACE OF BIRTH Skansehagen , Elverum , Hedmark
DATE OF DEATH January 15, 1929
Place of death Bærum , Akershus