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    So Much Longing in So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munch
    So Much Longing in So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munch
    So Much Longing in So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munch
    Audiobook5 hours

    So Much Longing in So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munch

    Written by Karl Ove Knausgaard

    Narrated by Matthew Waterson

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    A brilliant and personal examination by sensational and bestselling author Karl Ove Knausgaard of his Norwegian compatriot Edvard Munch, the famed artist best known for his iconic painting The Scream

    In So Much Longing in So Little Space, Karl Ove Knausgaard sets out to understand the enduring and awesome power of Edvard Munch's work by training his gaze on the landscapes that inspired Munch and speaking firsthand with other contemporary artists, including Anselm Kiefer, for whom Munch's legacy looms large. Bringing together art history, biography, and memoir, Knausgaard tells a passionate, freewheeling, and pensive story about not just one of history's most significant painters, but the very meaning of choosing the artist's life, as he himself has done. This utterly original and ardent work of criticism will delight and educate both experts and novices of literature and the visual arts alike.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateMar 26, 2019
    ISBN9781684570690
    So Much Longing in So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munch
    Author

    Karl Ove Knausgaard

    Karl Ove Knausgaard was born in Norway in 1968. My Struggle has won countless international literary awards and has been translated into at least fifteen languages. Knausgaard lives in Sweden with his wife and four children.

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    Reviews for So Much Longing in So Little Space

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    • 4/5
      Predictably, this turns out to be a book about writing a book about Munch. Or, to be more precise, it's more multimedia than that: it's a book about writing a book about giving a lecture, curating an exhibition and making a film about Munch. And even there we get into trouble, because Knausgård wants us to be able to distinguish between at least three different ways of using the name 'Munch' in his text - Munch the artist who painted more than 1700 pictures over a career spanning some seventy years; 'Munch' the subject of biography; and 'Munch' on the label of a small number of images so iconic that they have become impossible to look at critically. Of the three, it's the first who interests him most, and who at times seems to risk being abstracted even further, into a test case of what it actually means to work as a creative artist. How do you move on from what you learnt at school to develop a style of your own? And how do you go on from that to do something different again? And again? How do you resolve the limitations of observation, memory, technique and formal reduction? And how do you know if what you are doing has any value?We're often left swinging back and forth between "Knausgård's diary, 2013-2017" and "Aesthetics 101", neither of which is really what we came here for, but in between times Knausgård has discussions with some interesting people - several distinguished contemporary artists, Norwegian and foreign, a film-maker, an art historian who has written about Munch's technical limitations, and so on. And it is also quite fun to hear about the less successful parts of Knausgård's exploration of Munch, like the correspondence with David Hockney that came to nothing, and his growing self-doubt after many of the pictures he had picked out for the exhibition were dismissed as failures by the experts. And the experts who disapproved of each other.I often watch art documentaries on BBC Four, and I've come to enjoy one of the best visual clichés of such films, where the presenter has been given privileged access to the store-room of a gallery, and we watch the curator pulling out sliding walls loaded with obscure pictures the public don't normally get to see. It was fun to discover that Knausgård obviously loves this image as well, so much so that he takes us into the basement of the Munch Museum to experience it twice: once by himself, once with Munch-expert Stian Grøgaard. You can't beat a good sliding-wall shot...I wouldn't really recommend this as a place to learn about Munch, or even about formal aesthetics, but it might be a thought-provoking starting point before you commit to launching into a critical biography. And it is an enjoyable read in its own right, with some interesting and provocative things to say about artists and how we think of them.It's also worth saying that the paperback, under the Harvill Secker imprint of Random House, is very nicely produced, on good quality paper, with a nice cover, and includes fourteen colour reproductions of paintings discussed in the text.
    • 5/5
      So Much Longing in So Little Space by Karl Ove Knausgard is part art criticism, part simply art appreciation, part biography, and part memoir. I wasn't sure how I would feel about this book when I started but I was quickly caught up in every distinct aspect of the work.Knausgard, by his own admission not an art critic or historian, takes an approach to Munch's entire artistic output that makes more sense than it might initially seem. Because he is simply interested in Munch and not in promoting a particular school of thought, he looks at the things that many people who enjoy art might also think about. Of course he looks at Munch's life and circumstances and how these play into his art. But he looks also at where and how art is viewed and produced. He does this by looking, such as is possible, at where Munch worked but also by interviewing contemporary artists about their work and work environments.As a guest curator for a Munch exhibit, he has the opportunity to arrange a selection of paintings along thematic strands that he sees running through the works. Would someone "trained" in art history or an experienced curator made the same decisions? Likely not. We walk with him through the process of pondering the works, thinking about similarities and differences, and about how best to display the works to bring these things to the fore.If you're looking strictly for either a biography of Munch or a critique of Munch heavily steeped in art theory, you may well be disappointed. But I think even if you're disappointed on those points you'll still find a lot to appreciate about Knausgard's unusual approach to art appreciation as it applies to Munch. And I think his perceptive comments about the arc of Munch's life give the already known facts of his life a new perspective and meaning. Plus there are some wonderful prints of Munch's work.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via Edelweiss.