Faith, Hope, and Love

We are not of night nor of darkness … be alert…. For those who sleep do their sleeping at night, and those who get drunk get drunk at night’ (1 Thessalonians 5:5–7 NASB)

In a journal entry early in his career Edvard Munch wrote, ‘I paint my soul’s diary’ (Tøjner 2003: 135). With this self-portrait, painted at the end of his life, we recognize that the artist’s soul is and has been a lonely one—and haunted by the spectre of death, the deaths of his mother and older sister, and the horrors of World War I.

Munch appears dishevelled and a bit disoriented. (In another journal entry he admits, ‘I stagger about amidst life that is alive’ (Tøjner 2003: 62).) He stands facing us in the doorway of two rooms that define his existence, his studio and his bedroom: where he works unceasingly and where he sleeps—or tries to sleep, since he suffered from severe insomnia.

Munch’s long gaunt body echoes the tall—faceless—clock and the bed, a bed in which time stops, where the finality of death is confronted, as Heidegger observed in Being and Time in 1927 (1962: 239). This is a painting about the disappearance of time, the imminence of death, and fear of The End. While time might stop for the clock, faceless as it is, the clock that ticks in Munch’s body doesn’t. (He died only a few months after he finished this painting.)

Death, what awaits us ‘on the other side’, and what we leave behind for others to pick through, destroy, or ignore, co-exist in this painting. The fear of death confronts us all, and it is thus also the fear of an artist. For Munch, who never married and had no children, painting was the shape of his life—how he kept time, marked time, and how he experienced the past and the future. His paintings are his progeny. They are the tangible, material, aesthetic evidence of his presence, his life, and its significance. What will become of them? How will they live on? Will they live on? And will anyone care?

Munch’s tired posture displays the fatigue of a long, difficult, and pain-filled personal history, but he remains alert, on guard. He still looks intensely at, and for, life.

References

Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time, trans. by John Macquarrie and Edward Schouten Robinson (London: SCM Press)

Tøjner, Poul Erik. 2003. Munch: In His Own Words (Munich: Prestel)

The day of the Lord will come just like a thief in the night.
(1 Thessalonians 5:2 NASB)

Swiss-born artist Paul Klee (1879–1940) painted hundreds of angels throughout his career. Their simplicity and directness; playfulness and seriousness; bringing of blessings and curses, comfort and judgement, redemption and damnation, were conjured from an imagination eager to create a sovereign transcendent ‘beyond’ whence these messengers were sent for his and our benefit.

But what makes this little angel, Angelus Novus, so extraordinary that it should have become an icon of the twentieth century? It has to do with the person for whom it suddenly appeared, seizing his attention at an art gallery in Munich in 1921 and becoming his companion, inspiration, and comfort for nearly twenty years.

This person is Walter Benjamin, one of the great cultural critics of the twentieth century. And Klee’s little angel served as an inspiration for numerous essays on modern art and culture.

‘There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus’.

So begins the most famous passage in his essay, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, written shortly before he committed suicide to avoid arrest by the Nazis in 1940. This ‘Angel of history’, with his face ‘turned toward the past … sees one single catastrophe…’

On view at the Jerusalem Museum, Angelus Novus is an artistic memorial to the suffering and violence of the twentieth century and the arrogance of modernity. But it also bears witness to the important role that art and literature played in addressing such suffering, violence, and arrogance, whose voice comes from somewhere where existence is not reduced to suffering, violence, and arrogance. Angelus Novus did not come into the world merely to condemn. From this ‘somewhere’, the painting offers the potential, if ever so slight and faint, of freedom, redemption. In this way it is an icon of hope. A painting for the faithful. Not unlike Paul’s letter.

References

Benjamin, Walter. 1968. ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books), pp. 253–64

‘For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation…’ (1 Thessalonians 5:9 NASB)

Hilma af Klint’s (1862–1944) painting is an imposing and overwhelming canvas, to say the least. It stands over nine feet tall and seven feet wide, consisting of circular and triangular forms made of grids and spheres of bright colour on a black ground, a colossal painted mosaic that represents nothing, and yet seems to possess the secret meaning of Everything. The cosmic, universal connotations of a transcendent origin—and a future destiny—are not directly represented or expressed in the content of the painting, but they are at work in this and hundreds of other similar canvases that Klint called ‘Temple’ and ‘Altarpiece’ paintings.

How does an artist like Klint, who enjoyed a modestly successful career as a portrait and naturalistic landscape painter after formal training at the art academy in Stockholm, come to paint such immodest paintings? And why? Their appearance in the world undermines everything we’re taught to believe about the history of art, which is a map of stylistic influences, of causes and effects that develop organically, gradually.

Klint renders this model useless as a means to interpret these mysterious paintings, which were painted nearly a decade before the art historical ‘birth’ of abstraction. How can that be?

Rather than a product of ‘art history’ per se, they are the result of Klint’s study of spiritualism, including her regular attendance at séances where she communicated with spirit guides, through which she recorded her philosophical insights into the universe. The result was thousands of pages of writings and over a thousand paintings.

Klint also refused to exhibit them in her lifetime, stipulating in her will that they could only be shown twenty years after her death (she died in 1944). Klint believed that she had learned secrets of the universe. Why the secrecy? Why wait to share them? Is it possible that these remarkable—even miraculously conceived—paintings were destined for an audience that would only be ready to receive them at a later moment? Perhaps Klint’s viewers of the future can be compared with the first departed Christians in Thessalonica, who would only come to a full appreciation of their ultimate destiny after waking from ‘sleep’ (1 Thessalonians 4:13–17).