Episode 61: Under the Midnight Sun

A few years back, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston mounted a landmark show – like, all the galleries in their newly renovated exhibition space.  And it was on an American painter named William Merritt Chase.  You’ve heard of him, right?  No?  Yeah, neither had I.  Neither had most people.  Okay, maybe if you happened to be an expert in American Impressionism and early 20th century American painting, you’d have seen his name.  Maybe. 

But, here’s the thing, you have seen his work.  Just not necessarily by his own hand, even though that hand was exceptionally gifted.  You just might not have necessarily his own work.  But you’ve seen him in the work of so many other painters you have heard of: George Bellows and Georgia O’Keeffe and Joseph Stella.  Why?  Because he was their teacher.

There’s a perfectly noxious truism that those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach.  And okay, I’m not going to say that it’s never the case.  But the worst part of that way of thinking is that it completely undermines the unique skill it takes to be a teacher, a good teacher.  In fact, the skill of being a teacher is often at odds with the skill of being an artist in the first place; honestly, I’ve never met a “those who can’t” who can teach. Because good teachers have learned to set aside their own ego, to allow their prodigious skills to be reflected in the work of their students.  And it makes me think about episode 31, when I extolled my undying love of the C.S. Lewis quote about how he knows there’s a God like he knows the sun has risen, not because Lewis sees the sun, but because that by the sun, he sees everything else.  And I think there’s an equivalent there to good teachers.  You don’t necessarily know the impact of an artist like William Merritt Chase just because of his own rich, buttery brushstrokes, his perfect streaks of light, his empathic sitters who are both so beautifully finished and unfinished.  But because by them, by all these things, you see what underlies the skills of some of the most famous American artists of the early 20th century.

So today let’s redirect that sunlamp.  Let’s explore the teacher.  And not just the William Merritt Chases of the world who actually got whole gallery exhibitions at world class museums, eventually.  There are plenty of teachers who were even quieter, who stand in the oversize shadows of their much, much more famous students and acolytes, who are known simply through them.  Did you know, for example, that Edvard Munch, Norway’s most famous artist, had a cheerleader, a champion, who also happened to be an extraordinarily gifted teacher for artists throughout Norway and Germany?  Now you do.  And his name was Adelsteen Normann.

Paintings by Normann, they just feel familiar, even if his name isn’t.  They’re largely monumental canvases of beautiful, realistic landscapes of the waterways, steep mountains, and fjords that characterized his island home town of Vågøya, just outside of what is now Bodø.  Imagine a kind of a Norwegian Albert Bierstadt or Thomas Cole: an artist who loves a place so deeply that he wants to paint it again and again, both as it is in reality – every rock and ripple – and as it is in the mind of someone who loves it.  Normann’s paintings of Bodø, even if you’ve never heard of it, just make you feel like you’re there, sitting on a dock in the early morning mist, the water lapping beneath your feet.  Bodø is a 539-square mile Norwegian municipality, with a population of around 53,000, located just north of the Arctic circle, meaning that from June 1st to July 13th, there’s an average of 24 hours of daylight, that is, the presence of what is colloquially called the midnight sun.  So much has been written about these distinctive, haunting Scandinavian skies, their beauty and their psychic disruption, from Sondheim’s A Little Night Music to that Christopher Nolan movie about Insomnia to a truly weird Billy Joel song.  But capturing them is another story.  What does the sky become when the sun never sets?  It’s like it never fully goes to sleep.  Instead, it sits in this eternal warmth, where the deep pink of a sunset merges with the orange of a sunrise.  And you can imagine, as so many have, what that lack of sleep does to your head, day after day.  It’s not such a surprise that the most famous Scandinavian painting is Munch’s “The Scream”, where the red and orange and blue streaks in the sky undulate and swirl, where sky and water and landscape morph into one another, like it’s all reflected in a warped piece of glass, and where our central figure holds his skull-like face in a primal scream.  The painting is about psychological torment and distortion, what Munch describes as “an infinite scream passing through nature,” and what modern scholars have described as “the universal anxiety of modern humanity.”  And we lose sight of how disturbing this image is simply because of how iconic it is – I mean, it was the model for the Ghostface mask in the Scream movies for God’s sake.  It’s meant to tap into something really frightening. 

And while I should of course clarify my terms by noting that The Scream is meant to take place in Oslo, which is considerably south of Bodo, and that he was more interested in describing the anxiety of modernity and urbanism on the psyche than the effects of the midnight sun and its counterpart early darkness in the winter.  But the reason I conflate the two is because the background of The Scream is largely what this anomalous Norwegian sky and its psychological angst has been to the rest of the world: too much light, too much darkness, the colors too unnaturally bloody, the circadian rhythms of anyone who visits blown unrepentantly to smithereens. 

This is quite a reputation to overcome, ask anyone from the area.  Because most people who live beneath the midnight sun are far less tortured than Edvard Munch, and Adelsteen Normann surely was one of those people.  He was born in Bodø in 1848, the son of a prosperous tradesman who focused on the fishing industry, and was therefore well-acquainted with the docks and ports of his coastal home.  He was a little boy among the ships, the rigging and the smokestacks, the mountains framing the coast, the quality of the changing light throughout the day.  And he loved to draw early on, always with a sketchbook in his hand, and actually turned down the family business after his father died to pursue art in Germany, where he ended up staying for the rest of his life, first in Dusseldorf and then in Berlin.  But no matter how far flung he was, Bodø was always deeply in his heart; his daughter was fond of saying that if you blindfolded him, he could always point in Bodø’s direction.  And hold onto this particular finger-point, and the larger idea of nostalgia, because we’ll come back to it.

It was while Normann was in Berlin later in his life, that, in 1892, he, on behalf of the Union of Berlin Artists, invited an irascible young upstart named Edvard Munch to exhibit in the society’s first-ever one-man show.  This is where the paths cross between the artist you’ve heard of and the teacher you haven’t, although Normann was enormously well-established at this point in his career: a sought-after, nurturing teacher, and painter of highly admired and profitable paintings across the gamut of prestige: his work was purchased by hotels and other like-minded institutions who valued both their beauty and the specificity of their place – I mean, even today, Normann is credited with helping create the Norwegian tourist industry).  They were exhibited across the continent and even adored by the German emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II, who bought several of them.  Munch, meanwhile, had been a bit of a failure, tramping between Oslo and Paris, continually experimenting therefore struggling to gain a foothold in the European art establishment.  His brushstroke, his palette, and his technique ranged widely as he was experimenting with naturalism and the avant garde: a curious mix of Impressionism, pointillism, and what would ultimately become the Symbolist brand of Expressionism that would make him famous.  So when Normann reached out to Munch, it was fairly shocking to the younger painter to have someone so representative of the establishment pay him this kind of attention, to offer him this kind of opportunity, and to do it so flatteringly, “may I therefore take the liberty of asking you,” Normann wrote, “if you have no already made any previous arrangements about your pictures, whether you would be willing to show them in Berlin, and under what conditions?”  Remember this establishment kindness when we get to what happened.

Although, I will say that kindness, more than anything, is the operative word throughout this story, because Normann just seems, throughout this story, like a really solid dude, bringing Munch into his circle and basically anticipating that this younger artist would be accepted, no matter how ill-prepared Munch was for how ill-prepared Berlin society was for his work.  You can see the nurturing teacher come through, even with a young person who wasn’t even his direct student.  “Adelsteen Normann is very friendly,” Munch wrote in a letter to his aunt, “a few days ago he took me to an artists’ get-together.” In the same letter, he gets quickly to the point, which is that he expects acceptance into the art establishment, and needs his aunt to send him a cheap frock coat as soon as possible, “because they mind a lot about the correct clothes here – and it’s reasonable to expect I shall be invited to parties once the exhibition opens.” 

It turns out she didn’t need to rush that coat. The exhibition did open on November 5, 1892 – and imagine the night before.  Munch walking around the quiet hall of mounted paintings, the consummate creative with his paintbrush in hand, just himself and his work, making final strokes and subtle dabs, the faint smell of linseed oil in the air.  Then it’s night of, the doors open, and the Berlin art scene comes pouring in.  And the meteor hits.  This deeply felt work became the property of the world – and worse, the critics.  “Art is in danger!” according to the Frankfurter Zeitung hysterically on November 9th.  “All true believers to raise a great lament!  Call forth the rescue squads …to battle against that Nordic dauber and poisoner of Art, Edvard Munch…An Impressionist, and a mad one at that, has broken into our herd of fine, solidly bourgeoisie artists.”  Another critic, meanwhile, both helpfully and condescendingly drew attention to Munch’s birthplace, writing that the artist had “stirred a storm in Berlin compared to which the Norwegian snows were merely a little local piece of weather.”

But don’t feel too bad for Munch.  This veritable shitstorm, which forced the exhibition to close within a week, and has been christened by history as the “Munch Affair,” was essentially what launched his career, and is the reason he, and not anyone from that herd of fine, solidly bourgeoisie artists, is the only Norwegian painter you’ve ever heard of.  To his credit, even Munch seemed to realize this at the time, writing to his aunt that the show closure, far from destroying him, was “the best thing that could have happened to [him].  A better advertisement [he] couldn’t have wished for.”  And given where we know this notoriety took Munch, who painted “The Scream” only a year later, he clearly wasn’t wrong.

But where did this kerfuffle leave Normann?  To his immense credit, at least I think, their relationship remained quite friendly, probably because older Normann, more wisdom than ego at that stage in his life, admired the younger Munch so damn much.  Where the critics and artists of Normann’s generation were scandalized, Normann himself seemed as impressed as ever with Munch’s fierce independence and willingness to experiment with the craft, the very traits that led Normann to invite Munch to Berlin in the first place.  After all, it stands to reason that Normann, a respectable, card-carrying member of the Berlin art scene, had to have known that he was courting controversy by inviting Munch at all, and the argument has in fact been made that Normann was intentionally trying to split the scene in two, to suss out the avant garde artists and critics from their fuddy duddy establishment brethren.  If this is the case, it speaks to some truly impressive, and progressive, foresight.  But even if the move wasn’t as calculated as that, it does line up with the kind of modernist sensibilities that Normann was employing in his work, both aesthetically and intellectually.  I know, he doesn’t seem like that modern of a painter.  So let’s take these elements, the aesthetic and the intellectual, one at a time.

In terms of Normann’s aesthetics, it’s extraordinary how quickly you start to see modern painting techniques in his work once Munch came into his life.  His painting “Friedrichstrasse After The Rain,” from 1893, after the Munch affair and their budding friendship, is evidence of Munch’s influence setting free Normann’s tight, realistic style, at least for a little while – some have even questioned if Munch painted it himself, or at the very least helped.  The loose brushstrokes, the glistening lights reflected on the shining streets, a story told with just enough detail.  And while Normann’s trademark heroic seascapes of Bodø and greater Nordland are deeply recognizable and realistic – people often identify a mountain that’s close to their summer home or some sort of childhood memory linked to this or that fjord – “Friedrichstrasse After The Rain” brings you into the scene with all your senses: you can feel the dampness, you can smell the puddles.  The 19th century modernist technique of inviting you to step foot into the frame, to breach the barrier between you and the ages, is fully embraced here, with visible, sketchy brushstrokes that must have both pained and thrilled the middle-aged Normann in equal measure.

But this walk on the aesthetic modernist wild side didn’t last long, and Normann’s brushstrokes tightened up pretty quickly again soon after.  And so it’s interesting, too, I think, to consider what, beyond the painting technique, makes a painting truly modern.  I mean, we’ve already talked about how modern “The Scream” is.  It’s not just a painting that employs modern techniques – with its swirly, expressive, unfinished brushstrokes, a phantasmagoric color palette, and a jarring perspectival composition – it’s a painting about modernity, how the speed of technology and its subsequent urban anxiety will fundamentally knock you off your nut.  But the much gentler, warmer, softer painting by Normann, “Steamboat on the Fjords in the Midnight Sun,” I would argue, is pretty darn modern too.  And for two reasons.  Firstly, because Normann went out of his way to incorporate that steamboat, which was a real attempt to keep pace with the world that was modernizing his own childhood home.  This folding in of a technological element into nature is so similar to the beauty with which Monet’s exhaust from the modern city plumes into his swirling skies, like we see in his painting “The Gare Saint Lazare: Arrival of a Train” from 1877, where the same painting techniques that so beautifully and ethereally capture sunlight and poppy fields are afforded to smoke and steam.  Normann, even in middle age and beyond, wasn’t averse to allowing his landscapes to change as the world did.

And this brings me to the second element of modernity that he embraced: subjectivity.  It’s easy to look at a landscape that is so detailed and precise and imagine it’s a photograph taken from a drone, that it’s objective, and that it hasn’t passed through the filter of the imagination of someone who deeply loves it, who was formed by those fjords, who remembers them as much as renders them.  Granted, it’s to Normann’s credit that he allows a steamship to invade his childhood memories.  But they are still his memories.  And that means that there’s a modernist tinge to the way that his nostalgia softens the painting’s gaze, not unlike how the portraits painted by peak modernist painters like Vincent Van Gogh and Frida Kahlo are always kind of, a little bit, self-portraits.  They never claim to paint their postmen or their maids exactly as they were in reality, but as they were to them.  And this is how Normann paints Bodø.  Which, ironically, makes them all the more relatable to anyone from Bodø.  And all the more appealing to someone who’s never been.

This is what happens when a beautiful painter is also a devoted teacher.  There’s been a current running beneath this episode, or maybe it’s a glow coming from above, the light by which you see everything else.  Maybe we can say that Adelsteen Normann was like the midnight sun himself.  You can see how his warmth illuminated others without spite or competition – I mean, Normann really wanted to give Munch the platform that would end up entirely eclipsing, for lack of a better word, whatever legacy as a Norwegian artist of note that Normann figured he had.  And you can see, too, how the sunlight of his paintings illuminates his home, a town that can exist in both a sentimental memory and the reality of progress.  And when someone is a painter who both does and teachers, and you see how the teaching affects the doing.  Normann wasn’t so wedded to his ego that he couldn’t learn from other painters, that he couldn’t dabble in something new and then return to his roots—notably, without the psychological torment that plagued Munch, the artist who didn’t teach, who only did.  And people did actually respond to Normann’s work, repetitive and specific and somewhat passé though the motifs may have been: his paintings are scattered around Europe and the United States in world-class collections.  They were considered worth stealing by Nazis.  Most spectacularly, one of his paintings of a Norwegian fishing village was found in Michael Jackson’s Neverland estate when it was being disassembled, and was valued as the most expensive object in his collection.  If you’re only going to be seen by one person in the 20th century, it might as well be the King of Pop.

But as for the midnight sun himself, he did set, like many others before their time, in 1918, when Normann died of the Spanish Flu at age 70.  Not nearly as many people had heard of him as should have.  Almost no one has heard of him today.  But now you have.  So take this new name, to seek out his work, bask in his warmth, and appreciate the talent it takes to do.  And, if you’re good enough, to teach.