5/13/2023 0 Comments Munch knausgaard![]() ![]() Here we witness Knausgaard interviewing various artists and critics, fretting over a speech he must make on Munch because he cannot find a “unifying element” in the artist’s oeuvre, doubting his own curation of an exhibit of the painter’s lesser-known works for the Munch Museum, visiting Munch’s houses even though he is “not really much in favour of a biographical approach to art,” and filming a movie with Emil and Joachim Trier. Ostensibly “So Much Longing in So Little Space” is a book of art criticism, but it is as much about its author as it is about its subject. (Art criticism obviously can’t use the language of the thing it’s critiquing in a way literary criticism can, which is a problem Knausgaard recognizes in the book itself.) And yet, though the book fails in the ways it must, it succeeds where others have failed, in its ability to imbue its failure with its own blend of artifice and truth, cliche and possibility, openness and closedness, creating something that may prove to be classic. ![]() ![]() But it should not be expected to be a translator. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s treatise on the art of Edvard Munch, “So Much Longing in So Little Space,” fails - as art criticism is prone to do - to adequately “read” or “translate” Munch’s paintings for us. “Nevertheless Munch painted an oak.” This seems about as profound a thing as one can say about painting, which is wordless and beyond words. ![]() “Many had painted oaks before,” wrote poet Olav H. ![]()
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