Into the Void: Text and Image in Nordic Art 1890-1915

Abstract

Into the Void: Text and Image in Nordic Art 1890-1915 Kerstina Mortensen Illness, Death, and the Psychological Self; fuelled by European pessimism and the perceived degeneration of society at the turn of the 20th Century, Nordic Symbolist artists gravitated to the darker depictions of modernity. A depressive exhaustion of the nerves, diagnosed as neurasthenia, was commonly associated with artists and writers in urban centres. Spurred on by the rise of the individual in fin de siècle society and break from academic conventions, from 1890 to 1915 Nordic artists looked inwardly at the psychological landscape, using potent symbols as motifs of the self and of mortality. The aim of this thesis is to evaluate and assess the ‘translation’ of Illness, Death and the Psychological Self as themes connecting visual and written forms of representation in the context of Nordic art from 1890 to 1915. Artists such as Edvard Munch (Norwegian, 1863-1944), Vilhelm HammershøI (Danish, 1864-1916), Ejnar Nielsen (Danish, 1872-1956) and the sculptor Niels Hansen Jacobsen (Danish, 1861-1941) explored the themes of Illness, Death and the Psychological Self in their artistic work. However, text and image interact in three significant ways in the respective oeuvres of these artists: artwork titles, texts written by the artist, and lastly, literary sources for artworks, which collectively form the basis of this thesis. Nielsen appended the title And in his Eyes I saw Death (1897) to the surface of the painting itself, while HammershøI’s disinterest in titling his work manifests as ‘metatitles’ which reflect the pictorial content of his interior scenes of the early 1900s. Texts written by the artist can be termed ekphrastic: Munch frequently accompanied his visual work with literary sketches such as Scream (1893), while Hansen Jacobsen wrote poetic texts for a number of his sculptures, including The Shadow (1897-98). Literary sources by writers other than the artist place a degree of distance between the artist and the textual component: Nielsen illustrated Karl Larsen’s short story The Old Man’s Child (1900), and Hansen Jacobsen was inspired to create the sculpture Death and the Mother (1892) in response to Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale Story of a Mother (1847), ensuring the final lines of the story were included in exhibition catalogues. The methodological approach is centred on the relevant artworks and their associated texts as the primary sources of material, which are analysed in the context of Nordic Symbolist art and an array of theoretical texts which fully explore the potentialities of visual and verbal representations of the same idea. Thus, this approach is concerned with text and image tensions within the artwork-object, granting specific focus to narrative and atmosphere. Thematically, the work of these four artists is entrenched in the fin de siècle themes of Illness, Death and the Psychological Self; the artworks cited above have been selected for this thesis because of the exceptional way in which text and image interact and invade the other’s plane. The objective is therefore to examine these works as representations of the central themes and as examples of text and image interactions in the Nordic sphere of Symbolist art. These artworks are examined contextually as representations of burgeoning modernity, associated with the movements of Symbolism and Modernism in an era marked by the shifting dynamics of the urban centre and the countryside, mass production and industrialisation, and the lone urban flâneur.