THE FRUSTRATED SWEDE
Werner, Alfred
The Frustrated Swede by ALFRED WERNER ON A RECENT trip through Scandi navia I discovered, largely in the museums of Stockholm and Goteborg, Oslo, and Bergen, the genius of a Swedish painter...
...Distinguished by spontaneity, economy of means, and complete freedom, they bring to mind the elegant line of Modigliani, Matisse, Picasso...
...Anyone who dropped in to see the artist was welcome to them...
...His work often reminds us of Ensor, or of Nolde...
...Minneapolis...
...The dominant red is like dried-up blood...
...As Rolf Soederberg put it in Modern Swedish Art, "the 'healthy' work of Josephson illustrates the conflict between a romantic disposition and a compulsion to paint in keeping with the naturalistic spirit of the times...
...Even while he was an admirer of Courbet, Josephson was attracted by religious thought, Jewish as well as Christian...
...Josephson, whom his compatriots have called the "first Expressionist," the "greatest Swedish painter of his generation," and even "one of the very few who can seriously claim a place among the truly great ones in the history of art," was the great-grandson of a humble Jewish immigrant...
...Ernst Abraham Josephson (1851-1906) is still not known here, despite a recent attempt made to bring his work to art lovers on this side of the Atlantic: fine samples of it made the round of museums at Portland, Oregon...
...Uncouth, almost wild, the painting was far different from the slick, often insipid work of the professors who won all the gold medals...
...their relationship remained platonic, and her marriage to another man only deepened his already existing feelings of rejection and bitterness...
...Though Josephson assiduously made copies of the works of Raphael in Florence and Rome, of Velasquez in Madrid, and of the painter whom he loved most intensely, Rembrandt, in Amsterdam, the work of his early years is not really a pastiche...
...One of his finest works is an oil, The Holy Sacrament, owned by the National Museum in Stockholm...
...What emerged from my recent experiences there was the image of a northern Van Gogh, who might have long been counted among the major Post-Impressionists and known as an unconscious pioneer of Expressionism and even Surrealism, had not his work been "buried" in museums rarely visited by non-Scandinavians, and had any major book about him been available in German, French, or English...
...He was only in his late thirties when he found that the ground was slipping under his feet...
...Until he reached thirty, he was an eclectic, though one with great gifts...
...Josephson was also "misguided" in admiring Manet...
...And in the same way the eyes should be trained to think purely of painting...
...One might admit candidly that once in a while a work has psychotic characteristics, noticeable even to one who is not a trained alienist...
...luckily, his family soon realized that a commercial career was not for him, and permitted him to enroll at the Royal Academy of Art...
...The previously scorned paintings were now a full success...
...I longed to see as many of his works as possible, and that meant that I would have to go to Sweden and Norway...
...He had one friend left, his colleague Oesterlind, with whom he traveled in France...
...It consists in this—that I shall have been able to create a work be fore which, after I have gone to sleep for eternity, an artist would stand and say: 'He was an artist.' " In the six decades that have passed since Josephson's death, many people, artists and laymen alike, have stood before his pictures in awe, saying just this: "He was an artist...
...As long as he adhered to traditional painting —dim interiors, historical costumes, acceptable subject matter—his talent was appreciated by both the Academy in Stockholm and the Salon in Paris...
...Decades earlier, William Blake also had thought he was in direct communication with "spirits" who revealed to him his visions and inspired his poems...
...But finally even the Paris Salon did not want him any longer, after he had thrown overboard the insipid belle peinture acquired at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts...
...Miraculously, he regained some of his strength and mental balance, and was finally able to live in a private home at Stockholm with two elderly spinsters who treated him with great kindness and understanding up to his death...
...Josephson spoke "thrillingly and beautifully about the human spirit which should be freed from the false dogmas that have prevailed through centuries of suffering...
...Unfortunately, Oesterlind was not the sane, balanced companion needed for so moody and vulnerable an individual as Josephson...
...His poems found a publisher...
...In one of his novels, August Strindberg—who himself had some talent as a painter, and who also was often on the verge of insanity—movingly described the lonely man who looked much older than his years, as he saw him sitting in a cafe, rolling his cigarette and gazing "far off into space as if he were alone with dreams and visions he could not communicate...
...For there were two Josephsons: a somewhat eclectic painter, whose realistic and subsequently nearimpressionistic portraits and genre studies, though fine and accomplished, would not justify the above-mentioned show—and the subsequent creator of fantastic and religious compositions which, while sometimes tinged with touches of madness, make one wonder whether they really had been drawn or painted around 1893, and not twenty or more years later...
...Illness, while not "producing" his final greatness, rid this descendant of a bourgeois background of the inhibitions he had been unable to shake off earlier...
...This ancestor, a teacher of religion, migrated in 1780 to Stockholm from a small town in Prussia...
...like Blake, the recluse of Stockholm came to feel that drawing and painting were closely related to poetry and music...
...The Opponents cooled towards the overly ardent, uncompromising Josephson, and selected for a new leader a more conciliatory, more prudent man...
...He became a full-fledged Expressionist twenty-odd years before the term was coined...
...But the new Josephson was no longer a follower of the rationalist Courbet who, asked to paint angels, challengingly retorted that he would do so only if angels were shown to him...
...Unable to buy paint and canvas, the artist swallowed his pride and promised to paint three pictures that would please Fuerstenberg, but the banker refused to extend a helping hand...
...The legacy which Gustava Josephson had left her beloved son had dwindled to nothing...
...Josephson ardently hoped that he did not labor in vain, that he would not be forgotten...
...The Frustrated Swede by ALFRED WERNER ON A RECENT trip through Scandi navia I discovered, largely in the museums of Stockholm and Goteborg, Oslo, and Bergen, the genius of a Swedish painter who is rarely listed in histories of art, although his creations foreshadow Kokoschka, Klee, Matisse, Modigliani, and even Picasso, artists widely known everywhere...
...Nobody...
...There is no doubt that his was a truly fascinating "case...
...Study of the Old Masters did not stifle his ardent yearning for originality (though he often failed to achieve it), a burning desire that was to bring him into conflict with the more conservative circles of his native city and of Paris, the seething cauldron of modern art, where he settled after journeys through Norway, Denmark, Germany, and Belgium...
...The frustrations he suffered as an artist were even greater...
...This conviction is borne out by much of the painting of his final eighteen years...
...Of the pictures he painted in his "healthy" period, more than two hundred and fifty—mostly oils—have survived, along with numerous drawings...
...Yet, while he would walk in the streets and even frequent cafes, he avoided close contacts with people...
...Everything seemed to go well at first...
...Later, Josephson lived with Oesterlind and his wife on Brehat, a desolate, windswept island off the coast of Britanny...
...The group would not have been what it was without the indefatigable, dynamic Josephson: "He wished to see art liberated from conservative ideas," a friend was to recall...
...On the whole, however, Josephson's late work does not appear any madder than that of the German Expressionists...
...Most of his drawings were done on cheap paper, even wrapping paper...
...Who demands speculative thinking in music...
...Yet the "sick" man did communicate—through a stupendous production which included over a thousand pen-and-ink drawings, and about a hundred watercolors and oils...
...This picture has been compared to Gruenewald's celebrated altarpiece in Colmar...
...In Amsterdam he fell in love with a young woman...
...Indeed, Josephson, who had musicians among his friends, stressed the affinity of painting to music in words that would have won the applause of Kandinsky and Klee: "What music is to the ears is what creative painting should be to the eyes...
...Josephson had hallucinations, became obsessed with the idea that he was Saint Peter, keeper of the gates of Heaven, and that Oesterlind was Christ...
...Josephson, who was born in Stockholm, was only ten when he lost his father...
...He was persuaded by Oesterlind to participate in experiments with spiritualism which lessened the tenuous hold on reality left to Josephson, who was now unable to conquer the deep depression from which he had, on earlier occasions, been able to extricate himself...
...when they saw the picture in the Salon (this was a reference to the bloody Commune uprising, still fresh in the memory of many...
...The gay young man, who loved to talk, to sing and to drink, and, above all, to agitate in behalf of his artistic and social ideas, had turned into a weird, unsmiling, anti-social creature, looking more dead than alive...
...Through sheer neglect a good many drawings may have disappeared...
...He had such a close and intense relationship with his strong-willed mother that her death—when he was a full-grown man of thirty—left him disconsolate and on the verge of a breakdown...
...the best of the vital, non-posed portraits he produced before 1888—the year of his breakdown —have the suggestive sketchiness of Edouard Manet's portraits of women— light yet firm, tenuous yet emphatic...
...Much closer to his heart than the French realist and agnostic Courbet was the deeply spiritual master of chiaroscuro, Rembrandt...
...Expressionists have been defined as men who reject the imitation of the outer world of reality for the expression of an inner world of feeling and imagination, and who avail themselves of spontaneous, free, intuitive distortion or exaggeration of the ordinary forms and color of nature in order to achieve an emotional or aesthetic effect...
...Josephson's robust rendering of ragged Spanish blacksmiths—grinning, virile, brutish—caused Parisians to shout "Communard...
...He received a gold medal at an international exhibition in Berlin...
...Whether or not Josephson knew the work of William Blake, like Blake he did not wish to be "confined to the sordid drudgery of facsimile representation of merely mortal and perishing substances," to quote the English maverick...
...The subject matter is often inspired either by Nordic history and mythology, or by the Holy Scriptures...
...San Francisco and La Jolla, California...
...They were, in fact, so bold and daring—though they seem tame to us now—that they carried their maker to the position of leader of a group of Swedish artists, The Opponents, in Montmartre...
...Eventually, even his "healthy" work was too radical to please his patron, Pontus Fuerstenberg, the Swedish banker, who finally withdrew his support...
...All that one asks for is: pure music...
...This was a crippling experience for him...
...Many years ago I had read about Josephson in Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art by Ernst Kris, who devotes two pages to him in the chapter, "The Change of Style in the Work of Psychotic Artists...
...and New York in 1964 and 1965...
...At twenty-four he contracted syphilis, for which there then was no real cure...
...There was conflict between his own craving for liberty, and his humility toward the great "fathers of art," his compulsion to render homage to figures of ultimate authority...
...His past admiration for the Great Masters, while exaggerated, was nothing unusual in a young man, but he now believed himself in communication with Holbein, Velasquez, Rembrandt, signing his drawings with the name of the great one under whose "dictation" he had produced it...
...The sick man was confined to a mental hospital for a while...
...Alas, he had become a follower of the rebel, Gustave Courbet, the inventor of realisme, whose simplification, firmness of brush and palette knife, rugged handling of paint, and choice of unusual subject matter appealed to this fervent young man...
...My ambition reach es beyond the grave," he wrote to his mother, when he was still a young man...
...The figure of Christ here resembles that of the artist, while the ghostlike form of the Madonna looks like his own mother, who often appeared in his countless ecstatic visions...
...Yet Josephson himself was not as free as he would have liked...
...A few biographical details must be given here to explain that the paranoiac schizophrenia, which was to hit Ernst Josephson when he was only thirty-seven and never entirely loosen its grip until his death, did not come like a thunderbolt...
...They are more original in their fervor and candor than anything produced by other young Swedish painters of this period (with the possible exception of Carl Fredrik Hill, another gifted man who fell insane at the height of his career...
...The pigments—brown, white, ochre, in addition to the deep red—are like lava that has cooled to a standstill...
...Not even the "wildest" of Van Gogh's last portraits is as "wild" as the portrait Josephson painted of his uncle, in 1893...
...Fortunately Oesterlind was sufficiently rational to real ize that his friend had become seri ously ill and took him back to Sweden...
...He had never stopped drawing and painting, and he had his first oneman show in 1893—he was then fortytwo...
...Again like Blake, in his last years Josephson was concerned not with visible appearances but with the eternal truth lying behind them...
...This group, dissatisfied with the aesthetic backwardness of their home country, sought far-reaching reforms, . and at one time even approached their king with a "Letter of Opposition," signed by eighty-four malcontents...
...Kris' book contained only two ex amples of Josephson's work, small reproductions in black and white...
...There are pictures in which the parts do not hold together, where there is fragmentation, and where the childish grimaces and gesticulations are reminiscent of art created in lunatic asylums...
...Yet his unbridled temperament rebelled against the conventionalism of the fashionable masters who drowned all originality in a brown sauce...
...henceforth, he would always look for "fathers," even in the realm of art...
...Sweden rejected, with the most abusive criticism, one Josephson portrait that had been well received in France...
...he was caught in his eternal search for a father, be it Velasquez, Rembrandt, Courbet, or someone else...
...In his teens he became a clerk in a business firm...
...He was to achieve this freedom, but under painful circumstances...
...He knew this, and in a poem (he was a prolific writer) about a violoncello one finds these yearning and prophetic words: "Oh Lord, if the string should break, Then my spirit would soar free...
...As one of his biographers, the Swedish art historian, Ingrid Mesterton, has written: "The line is pure and melodious, there is a sensitivity in the suggestion of volumes and a richness in the elaboration of decorative details which is unique...
Vol. 30 • October 1966 • No. 10
