Fjordlandskap is a scintillating landscape painted circa 1918 along the Kristiana Fjord (today the Oslo Fjord) in Norway. Created during a period of deep engagement with the rural landscape of his home country and of large-scale commissioned works, Edvard Munch’s bright, saturated colors, fluidly applied, lay out a scene of the contentment of spring along the wide-mouthed fjord. In these years Munch imbued his landscapes with a depth of emotion previously conveyed by human figures. The natural world, after all, could convey as much feeling as that of a solitary figure on the seashore at dusk (see fig. 1). Here it is the palpable energy of budding branches and renewed life after a long, nordic winter that provide Fjordlandskap with its sense of vitality.
The optimism portrayed here was a departure for Munch. After years of artistic experimentation and development in France, Germany and the Norwegian capital, he was exhausted. In 1908, following a mental breakdown, Munch spent several months in Dr. Jacobsen's clinic in Copenhagen. His subsequent recovery heralded a fundamental shift in his art. A short t.mes after his hospitalization, Munch bought the manor of Nedre Ramme in Hvitsten on the east side of the Kristiana Fjord. It was on this estate, where he became Thomas Olsen's neighbor, that he discovered new motifs including farm scenes and bathers. His pictures from this t.mes show Munch as a colorist, characterized by a lighter, life-affirming attitude. “He bought a pretty house,” wrote Sue Prideaux, “Nedre Ramme, on its own cup-shaped cove on the other side of the Oslofjørd in a village called Hvitsten, from which he could look across the fjord to the faint blue outline of the Åsgardstrand coast…. It has the perfect view of the sunset. He had a horse called Rousseau who was meant to plough the land but spent more t.mes as artist’s model, and dogs that he loved. He lived off his own ham, chicken and eggs" (Sue Prideaux, Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream, London, 2005, p. 282).
The vibrant palette of Fjordlandskap typifies Munch's post-clinic renaissance. Munch celebrates here what he called “the perpetual forces of life,” his vision of human beings existing in harmony with nature. The artist himself proclaimed about his personal, expressive use of color: "One must paint from memory. Nature is merely the means. They want the painter to transmit information simply as if he were the camera. Whether or not a painting looks like that landscape is beside the point. Explaining a picture is impossible. The very reason it has been painted is because it cannot be explained any other way.... If one wishes to paint that first pale blue morning atmosphere that made such an impression, one cannot simply sit down, start at each object and paint them exactly as one sees them. They must be painted as they were when that motif made such a vivid impression" (quoted in ibid., p. 201).
The seashore was one of Munch’s favored natural elements in his pictures. In his imagery of his home country—whether the dramatic Scream, the peaceful, companionable Summer or the large-scale, allegorical Alma Mater—the continuity of water and rolling hills on the horizon, the constancy of the fjord landscape, is ever present (see figs 2 and 3). In Fjordlandskap the seashore is the background and midground, stabilizing, behind a screen of trees the brightly colored foreground. This is the stage on which Munch as an artist performs and in the present work it is a look forward to the long days and bright nights of the coming summer.
Munch's emphasis during this t.mes transitioned from the interior scenes with narrative to outdoor scenes that embraced a new sense of abstraction and liberated color. Alongside Van Gogh, Munch was the key pioneer of Expressionism whose influence on modern art cannot be overstated. Both artists make use of the landscape as a vehicle to express inner states of being (see fig. 4). The expressive use of contrast and form in the present work serves not only to render a certain atmosphere, but also to convey a particular mood. In depicting nature in such a highly individual manner, Munch draws on the tradition of stemningsmaleri, or “mood-painting,” characteristic of Nordic art towards the end of the nineteenth century. Alongside his fellow Norwegian artists such as Sohlberg and Egedius, Munch abandoned the plein-air naturalism which had dominated Norwegian landscape painting in favor of a resonant vision of nature.
As with many of Munch’s works from this general period, precisely dating Fjordlandskap is difficult. The catalogue raisonné for the artist’s work explores the intricacies of this canvas's particular date: “The painting was signed somet.mes between 1918 and 1922, and the date has been interpreted as both 1913 and 1918. The work was exhibited in mid-February 1918 and must therefore have been executed prior to that date. In the 1922 exhibition catalogue from Zurich it is dated ‘Hvisten 1918’” (Gerd Woll, Edvard Munch, Complete Paintings, vol. III, 2009, London, p. 1181). Regardless of the exact year of execution, the setting is a pure celebration of a period of greater contentment for the artist and deep affinity for the world that surrounded him.
Munch's landscape paintings have, in recent years, enjoyed their own Renaissance. The exhibition Edvard Munch, Trembling Earth is the first large monographic exhibition devoted solely to the landscape in the artist's oeuvre. First shown at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown and then the Museum Barberini, Potsdam, it is now on view at the Munch Museet in Oslo through August 2024. In the accompanying catalogue, Jay A. Clarke identifies the shore of the Oslo Fjord as "A lietmotif in all media, the shoreline was alive, its curving repetition witness to acts of jealousy, attraction, loneliness, and fear. As the artist stated: 'The Shoreline became the perpetually shifting Lines of Life'" (Exh. Cat., Williamstown, Clark Art Institute; Potsdam, Museum Barberini and Oslo, Munch Museet, Edvard Munch, Trembling Earth, 2023-24, p. 11).
