Judging by pictures on postcards, one would think that the great musicians had been gods, not men. But now I learned that the world’s greatest composers have been the most wretched outcasts of humanity. Schubert was considered by good-class people in Vienna nothing but an uneducated boy who did not know anything about music; and he revenged himself, indeed, by composing a cheap tune like Ave Maria that even country people in the north know; and died of malnutrition at about the age of thirty. Beethoven did not even get a rudimentary petit-bourgeois education; he could only just use a open, no better than a farm hand; and he wrote a ludicrous letter which he called his Testament. He fell in love with a few countesses, rather like an old hack falling for stud-mare. In the eyes of good-class people in Vienna he was first and foremost just a deaf eccentric, badly dressed and dirty, not fit for decent company. But these two outcasts stood high in society compared with some others of the world’s greatest composers. Many of them were employed by comic-opera kings and were kept to play for them while they were feeding – including Johann Sebastian Bach, who, however, wasted even more years quarrelling with the bourgeois riff-raff of Leipzig. Haydn, the world’s greatest composer of his time, was frequently beaten by the Eesterhazy family, for whom he was a workman for thirty years; he was not even allowed to eat at their table. Mozart, the man who most nearly reached the celestial heights, stood lower in the hierarchy of society than the lap-dogs of kings and bishop-oafs who used him as a drudge. He died of misery and wretchedness in the prime of his life, not a living creature followed his coffin to the grave except for one mongrel; people made the excuse that it had been raining; some said they had influenza . . .
The next day I stood in the middle of the room beside two domestic animals – an electric floor polisher and a vacuum cleaner – and began to study the pictures in the house. I had often looked at these ten or twenty-centimeter mountains which seemed to have been made sometimes of porridge, sometimes of bluish sago pudding, sometimes a mash of curds- sometimes like an upturned bowl with Eiriks Glacier underneath; and I had never been able to understands where I was meant to be placed, because anyone who comes from the north and has lived opposite a mountain cannot understand a mountain in a picture in the south.
In this house there hung, so to speak, mountains and mountains and yet more mountains, mountains with glacial caps, mountains by the sea, ravines in mountains, lava below mountains, birds in front of mountain; and still more mountains; until finally these wastelands had the effect of a total flight from habitation, almost a denial of human life. I would not dream of trying to ague that this was not art, especially since I did not have the faintest idea what art is; but if this is art, it was first and foremost the art of those who had sinned against humanity and fled into the wilderness, the art of outlaws. Quite apart from how debased Nature becomes in a picture, nothing seems to me to express so much contempt for Nature as the painting of Nature. I touched the waterfall but I did not get wet, and there was no sound of cascade; over there was a little white cloud, standing still instead of breaking up; and if I sniffed that mountain slope I bumped my nose against a congealed mass and found only a smell of chemicals, at best a whiff of linseed oil; and where were the birds? And the flies? And the sun, so that one’s eyes are dazzled? Or the mist, so that one only saw a faint glimmer of the nearest willow shrub?. Yes, certainly this was meant to be a farmhouse, but where, pray, was the smell of cow dung? What is the point of making a picture which is meant to be like Nature, when everybody knows that this is the one thing that a picture cannot be and should not be and must not be? Who thought up the theory that Nature is a matter of sight alone? Those who know Nature hear it rather than see it, feel it rather than hear it; smell it, good heavens, yes – but first and foremost eat it. Certainly Nature is in front of us; but most particularly it exists in time, always changing and always passing, never the same; and never in a rectangular frame.
A farmhouse with a turf roof is not what it looks like from a distance some sunshine night in July; nothing is further from being a farmhouse. I had spent all my childhood in a farm opposite a mountain; it would be of no use for anyone who wanted to paint my farm to state from the turf roof, he would have to start from the inside and not the outside, start from the minds of those who lived there.
And a bird, I know what a bird is. Oh, those dear divine birds! It may well be
that this picture of a bird cost many thousands of kroner, but, may I ask,
could any honorable person, or any person who appreciates birds at all, justify
to his own conscience painting a bird sitting on a stone for all eternity, motionless
as a convicted criminal or a country person posing for the photographer at
Krok? For a bird is first and foremost movement; the sky is part of a bird, or
rather, the air and the bird are one; a long journey in a straight line into
space, that is a bird; and heat, for a bird is warmer than a man and has a quicker
heartbeat, and is happier besides, as one can hear from its call – for there is
no sound like the chirp of a bird and it is not a bird at all if it does not
chirp. The soundless bird on a stone, this picture of no movement, no long journey
in a straight line, might have been meant to represent the dead stuffed bird
that stood on top of a cabinet in our pastor’s house at home; or the tin birds
one could buy at Krok when I was small. But a picture of a dead bird is not
that of a bird, but of death; stuffed death; tin death.
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