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Edvard Munch, The Dance of Life, 1925. Photo: Munch Museet, Oslo. |
Ibsen and Munch. What's the connection? Besides being two giants of Norwegian culture when Scandinavia was a hotbed of artistic ferment, I never really thought about it until I saw the promotional image that BAM marketing is using to promote the current production of The Master Builder, directed by Andrei Belgrader.
It was mistakable, at least to me. The arresting black-and-white
photograph of actors Katherine Borowitz, John Turturro, and Wrenn Schmidt had
all the weight, psychological insight, and similar composition to several
of Edvard Munch’s familiar works—among them Woman from 1925 and more
specifically The Dance of Life from 1899—1900.
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Katherine Borowitz, John Turturro, and Wrenn Schmidt in The Master Builder. Photo: Graeme Mitchell |
Ibsen’s plays call for realistic settings and his stage directions are
precise. He was a visual writer insofar as he knew what his characters
looked like, how they were dressed, and what kind of rooms they
inhabited. Munch’s compositions are similarly precise, laden with
psychological insight, as with Death in the Sick Room (1893), in which the
viewer has entered the room of a dying young woman whose family members’
placement and posture detail specifically their response to the unfolding
grief.
Munch's intensely evocative treatment of psychological themes was built
upon the main tenets of late 19th-century Symbolism and greatly influenced
German Expressionism in the early 20th century. He was familiar with Ibsen’s
plays, having designed a poster in 1897 for a production of John Gabriel
Borkman, later designing sets for Ghosts. Some of his works were directly
inspired by scenes from Borkman. If anything, Ibsen was more of an
influence on Munch than the other way around. Perhaps it is enough to say
that the two artists worked along similar themes.
BAM employees Cynthia Lugo and Patrick Morin engaged the photographer
Graeme Mitchell for the photo shoot. When asked about what inspired them
for the look of the piece, they said “we used Munch as a visual touchstone, but
more for mood and ambience. We actually tried to mimic the placement of
figures in The Scream [Munch’s best-known work], but that photo didn’t
make the cut.” They went on to say that they were thinking of the work of Sven
Nyquist, Ingmar Bergman’s longtime cinematographer, as well as some images for
Irving Penn. They chose the photographer because of the way his work evokes the
arresting images of Diane Arbus, whose work displays her subject’s
abnormality.
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