‘Scandinavian Dramatic Images’: Film Review | Hot Documents 2022

The stories of artists from outside are often shrouded in a certain romantic splendor: solitary pursuit, monotheistic vision, uncertainty and indifference to fashion. Sometimes the artist never sought recognition; Sometimes they knew and knew the cold side, giving a romantic glow to the shadow of rejection. For Axel Waldemar Johannesen, who died in 1922 at age 42 and appears to have succumbed to alcoholism, living in the shadows was one of the main themes of his work. He portrayed the proletariat, the street people, the prostitutes and the dipsomaniac, and he often became a subject, with brutal, unfiltered honesty.

scandinavian drama picturesTaking its name from the exhibition mounted after Johansen’s rediscovery in 1994, it refers to the drama conveyed by these powerful images, but its main focus is the drama that will envelop them more than 70 years after the artist’s death.

He returned to non-fiction for the first time, directed by Neil Gaup (whose feature debut, 1987). Guide, was nominated for an Oscar) is less interested in Johannesen’s biography – the film provides the foundations of his adult life, not always with clarity – than the screens themselves. But most of the documentary is about a man struggling to place the artist in the modern pantheon. Whatever the power of the drawings, and that power is important, the document is most vivid as an account of the politics and groupthink of an art institution that contradicts the creative and dissident essence of art.

“The Greatest Shock in My Life” describes writer and art collector Haakon Mehren’s first encounter with Johansen’s work, a small part of which was found hidden in a barn. He has spent over 30 years as a diligent promoter of the artist, leading the official law process and its guardians, specifically, the establishment of the art world in Norway. There are devastating revelations about how this upper class reacted to Johansen’s relentless campaign.

Gaup takes a keynote speaker approach, combining new interviews with writers and academics with clips from television news and other archival material. At the center of it all is Mehran, now 80 years old, passionate and adorable. (And it turns out that his conservative leanings extend beyond the art gallery.) His first triumph, after buying the paintings together and restoring them, was to organize a Joanne exhibition at Blomqvist, the same gallery in Oslo where the only exhibition of the artist was held. artist. The previous show was held after his death, hosted by his wife, Anna, who was dying of cancer.

This 1923 exhibition not only attracted praise, but so did Edward Munch, a noted Norwegian artist who has been endlessly compared to Johannesen, with praise and defamation. Johansen’s posthumous popularity was widespread: the paintings came under public scrutiny, and his children and orphans did not forget the acclaim his work received. Mehen’s detective work combined the artist’s story with that of his youngest daughter, who at age 80 was an invaluable source of information, and more drawings of her father.

The Blomqvist show, which Mehen staged in 1992, was just as successful as its predecessor. But while curators in other parts of Europe were given the opportunity to display the paintings, road blocks in Norway were lifted with a shocking cry, especially from the National Museum and, paradoxically, the Munk Museum. They argued that the paintings were simply not good enough, with the organization’s former director expressing his complete condemnation of Johansen’s art. With a report on Norwegian television about a show at the Doge’s Palace in Venice that gives the film its name, critics seem to like the refusal. “That,” says Mehren of all denials, “was, in short, Norway.”

But he eventually found an ally as director of the National Gallery in Daniel Hellend, Daniel’s art critic, during his short time. He would leave in less than a year, with Johansen’s defender being the main factor in his departure. In an interview for the film, he describes the impact of his paintings: “It’s like reading Hamsun; My stomach hurts, but you have to read.

Some of those who responded to the film will likely be familiar to Norwegian audiences, as will the historical aspects of the story; Gaup doesn’t have time to explain this to other viewers, holding the names of certain figures in the air as if they were talking about themselves. But what is universal scandinavian theater It is his striking appeal to the ways in which self-preservation and self-glorification can become the driving force of cultural institutions.

Noting the increasing role of private wealth in public art as a means of increasing that wealth, Gaup concludes the film on a note of victory for Mehen and Johansen, but not without irony. The documentary he makes sounds beyond Norway and the art world in general, especially at a time when questionable or different voices are being criticized and silenced. As Hellend says of the paintings that so affected him, “this must be taken seriously.”