AUGUST STRINDBERG
PAINTER, PHOTOGRAPHER, WRITER
Tate Modern
“LIKE art in general, the theatre has long seemed to me a Biblia pauperum, a Bible in pictures for those who cannot read,” explained August Strindberg in the opening of his seminal Preface to Miss Julie. The psychotic Swedish writer is well known for his powerful sense of the visual. “If you would learn to know the invisible, observe the visible with open eyes,” says the Talmud. The aphorism was, apparently one of Strindberg’s favourite quotes.
A passage from his novel The Open Sea captures the acuity of his vision. “A dark cliff came into view on the headland of the last island,” he writes. “It was coal black, made of the volcanic rock diorite, and as he drew near it he became depressed. The black crystallised mass seemed to have been spewed up from the bottom of the sea and then, as it began to petrify, had been involved in a fearful struggle with the water or some thundercloud.” Strindberg ‘s gaze drills into the world, searching out some deep relationship between appearance and meaning, between outer surface and hidden soul.
Now Tate Modern brings to Britain for the first time a display of paintings and photographs by the polymathic literary pioneer who, though he began his career intending to become a doctor, went on not only to become a playwright, novelist, short-story writer, historian, poet and autobiographer, but also to explore interests in anything from alchemy through hypnotism to theosophy. Painting for him became yet another means to examine the pathology of the human condition.
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But can Strindberg be considered important as a painter? His visual interests were certainly deeply rooted. Tiny oils, mostly on cardboard, show him in his early twenties finding first his artistic feet and then his subject matter as he depicts the elemental drama of a storm mustering over a crimson-streaked sea.
The sea and the sky were to remain Strindberg’s principal subject. But it is the emotional intensity of his engagement that is most striking. Like his plays, his pictures present a reflection of this self-obsessed self-dramatist — sometimes quite literally, as a cliff face carves out his profile, sometimes metaphorically, as a lone tree or lighthouse stands in for the lonely iconoclast poised bravely upon the brink of fearful boundaries, gazing over the vastness to bare horizons.
Strindberg painted in prolonged bouts that tended to coincide with his periods of emotional turmoil: when his domestic life was in ruins, when he found he couldn’t write, when his unstable temperament was breaking down into real mental illness. And this psychotic intensity is translated straight into paint, into the choppy impasto trowelled on with a palette knife, into darkness whipped up into a bituminous maelstrom. “Miss Julie’s quite crazy again tonight” his most famous play opens. Written at a time when his paintings were influencing the development of his writing style, it plunges the reader directly into an emotional storm.
The playwright and the painter are inextricably linked. The literary innovator who strove for an air of immediacy is the artist who would thicken his medium with other materials, then burn its surface to heighten the effect, charring the pigments to make a black cloud look even blacker. The young writer who was interested in naturalism and observed characterisation so keenly is the painter who, with botanical precision, will pick out the detail of a clump of purple loosestrife. And the man who, for all his bleakness, could be so darkly funny — think of the scene in The Dance of Death when the Captain, asked why he pushed his wife into the sea, replies: “She was standing there on the jetty and it just seemed the obvious thing to do” — shows a brighter side in landscapes infused with light.
But if Strindberg’s works command attention in their own right it is only with hindsight. The truth is, if you found these pictures in your attic, you would probably dismiss them as mere amateur dramatics. It’s not surprising — even a Swedish museum once did.
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The importance of this Tate Modern show lies not in appreciation of any individual piece but in a heightened perception of a truly exploratory and expansive vision that sought reflections of everything in everything else. And a visit certainly won’t be in vain if it leads you back to the plays.