Munch's Ibsen: A Painter's Visions of a Playwright (review)

Reviewed by: Munch's Ibsen: A Painter's Visions of a Playwright Tore Rem Joan Templeton . Munch's Ibsen: A Painter's Visions of a Playwright. New Directions in Scandinavian Studies. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008. Pp. 185, illustrated. $35.00 (Hb). This slim monograph undertakes a worthwhile investigation of the relationship between two great Norwegian artists, Edvard Munch and Henrik Ibsen. Munch made as many as 400 illustrations of Ibsen's plays – drawings, paintings, and graphics – and Joan Templeton pays detailed attention to a great many of them, discussing their value as interpretations of Ibsen, their merit as works of art, and their place within the painter's oeuvre. After a general introduction, Templeton uses the book's six main chapters to analyse Munch's mature Ibsen work, from the playbills of Peer Gynt and John Gabriel Borkman at the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre in 1896 and 1897 to the Starry Night series of oil paintings from 1922–24. The main virtues of Munch's Ibsen lie in its discussions of individual works of art and in the way in which Templeton brings out Munch's various and varied appropriations of Ibsen's plays with sensitivity and a wariness of making exaggerated claims. In his Ibsen work, Munch consistently avails himself of his own earlier work; to give only one example, the famous image "Melancholy" was recontextualized in woodcuts for The Pretenders. Even personal objects from Munch's childhood home, which he so often employed in his pictures, reappear in his depictions of Ibsen's living rooms, in what Templeton neatly labels, "Munch's accommodation of his own iconography" to Ibsen's plays (52). The traces of Ibsen in [End Page 506] Munch's still under-researched writing are also fruitfully brought out, and the book clearly documents how "the interdependence between word and image" was central to Munch's artistic sensibility (xx). On the whole, Templeton convincingly shows how these hundreds of Ibsen illustrations are, in the end, perhaps more interesting as new versions of Munch's own work rather than as illustrations of Ibsen's drama. The book's main problems, and they are not trivial, stem from a superficial and stereotyped treatment of Norwegian literary history and from a lack of distance from the romantic myth of the artist. The book's end is like its beginning: "Scorned in their own country, both artists left it, and, after difficult beginnings, found understanding and acclaim abroad" (156). In making such sweeping claims, Templeton reveals her ignorance of recent Ibsen scholarship, not to mention work by Norwegian cultural historians. For example, the new critical edition of Ibsen, Henrik Ibsens Skrifter (2005–), and the recent two-volume Ibsen biography (2006–07) by Ivo de Figueiredo not only complicate but to a large extent refute the old story of Ibsen's suffering in his native country. This is, of course, not to say that Ibsen was met with understanding in the Norway of the 1850s and 1860s, but he did, after all, have books published, was made director of theatres, and went into exile on a state stipend. It is, in any case, deeply anachronistic to assume that Ibsen had at this stage become "Ibsen." By being satisfied with such stereotypes, and there are more of the same kind, Templeton places her study within a tradition of Scandinavian "cultural radicalism" beginning with Georg Brandes. In a version of historiography akin to the Edwardian view of the Victorians, good stands against evil, light against darkness. Or, in two of the many examples of Templeton's colourful characterizations, Munch and Ibsen stand against "the hypocrisy and venality of the press" and "a repressed, life-denying culture" (4). In this world, artists "expose" and "explode" double standards and bourgeois morality, leaving "no hypocritical stone unturned" (6) – when not creating "revolutions" or "dropping . . . bombshells" (5). The first part of the book, "The Norwegian Culture Wars," is by far its weakest, but the premises established there have unfortunate interpretative consequences for parts of the analysis. Templeton is much more perceptive when she points out how Munch "rewrites" Ibsen's female characters in order to make them fit into his own "paradigm of 'woman...

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