Detail View: Visual Resources Teaching Collection: Old Woman Cutting Bread

aahi0000611

Old Woman Cutting Bread

full view

1879

creation

Christian Krohg (Norwegian, 1852-1925)

male

Painter, draughtsman and writer. While studying law at the University of Christiania (1869–73), he attended both Johan Fredrik Eckersberg's private art school (1869–70) and then the drawing class of Julius Middelthun at the Royal School of Drawing (1870–71). Having taken his degree in law, he went to the Kunstschule in Karlsruhe, where he studied under Hans Gude and then Karl Gussow (1843–1907). In 1875 he followed Gussow to the Akademie at Berlin. He remained there until 1878, becoming a close friend of Max Klinger, a fellow student, and also getting to know the Danish philosopher and writer Georg Brandes (1842–1927), who introduced him to contemporary French writers such as Emile Zola and did much to sharpen his awareness of social and political problems. The experience of Berlin, where Krohg lived in great poverty, complemented Brandes's arguments and gave a somewhat bitter and critical turn to Krohg's interest in the realistic recording of the city. Krohg also embarked on his career as a portraitist at this time. While his portrait of Lucy Eyeberg (1876; Oslo, N.G.) reveals an acute realist interest in costume, especially its varying textures, the portrait of Georg Brandes (1878–9; Skagen, Skagens Mus.) shows Krohg also capable of responding to a forceful and fascinating personality with a penetrating study of character. Krohg left Berlin in early 1879 and in the summer of that year made his first visit to the artists' colony at the Danish fishing village of Skagen. There he turned his realist interests to recording the daily life of the local community of fishermen and their wives. He also experimented with new formal arrangements, notably abrupt cropping and the introduction of sudden spatial juxtapositions. In The Net-menders (1879; Oslo, N.G.) he refused to romanticize his subjects, recording their ungainly appearance, their mundane occupations and the spiritual and cultural bleakness of their lives. He responded, however, to the more dramatic sides of Skagen fishermen's lives in Port a Bit! (1879; Oslo, N.G.), a snapshot-like record of a moment during a fishing trip in very rough weather, in which a pilot is seen shouting orders to the crew of a steeply keeling ship. During the 1880s Krohg developed his treatment of both rural and urban life by bringing insights acquired in one setting to an understanding of the other. The boldly unsentimental presentation of the people of Skagen finds a counterpart in the viewer's almost shocking confrontation with the Sick Girl (1881; Oslo, N.G.), which concentrates all attention on the single pathetic figure wrapped in a blanket and achieves a painful intensity of feeling that contemporary critics found distasteful. Further emphasis on the individual figure is to be seen in Krohg's portrait of the Swedish artist Karl Nordström (1882; Oslo, N.G.), painted while both were working at the artists' colony at Grez-sur-Loing and prompted by a picture of similar composition shown by Gustave Caillebotte at the Impressionist Exhibition of 1882 in Paris. As he had done before, Krohg contrasted the figure sharply against a distant background—here the garden and landscape beyond, seen through a window. However, this portrait is distinct from his earlier work in its sensitive use of colour. This was an aspect of painting in Paris that Krohg had especially noticed during his stay there from October 1881, and its impact on his subsequent work is seen in the use of colour in further pictures painted at Skagen. In Sleeping Mother (1883; Bergen, Meyers Saml.), the richness of the warm reds and yellows almost compromises Krohg's emphasis on the squalor of the scene. The anecdotal strain, never quite eradicated from Krohg's critical and realistic approach, came to the fore in a series of pictures on a theme he eventually also treated in the form of a novel, Albertine (Christiania, 1886), the story of a seamstress forced into prostitution through social and economic pressures. The subject reflected the very grave problems faced by the overworked poor in Christiania—indeed in most big cities at this time—where the forces of law and order often colluded with those of corruption, rather than protecting the weak. Krohg traced the fate of Albertine in several scenes, starting in 1880 with Daybreak (Copenhagen, Stat. Mus. Kst), which shows the exhausted seamstress asleep at her sewing machine, having still not finished the work from the night before. The final scene, Albertine in the Police Doctor's Waiting Room (1887; Oslo, N.G.; see Oslo, fig. 2), was painted after Krohg's novel had been published and banned. Although the painting caused an uproar when first publicly exhibited in Christiania, its shocking subject-matter is not matched by boldness in formal terms. Krohg fell back on several rather artificial devices associated with genre painting, for example the deflection of immediate focus on to subsidiary characters such as the prostitute in the foreground. Krohg's genuine compassion for the plight of the prostitutes in Christiania and his interest in their often complex and contradictory personalities is suggested in some of the studies he made in preparation for the waiting-room scene, such as the portrait Jossa (1886; Oslo, N.G.). The final, full-scale work, however, panders to the vulgar, voyeuristic strain in his secure, wealthy public. Another example of social criticism from this period, in which content and form are better reconciled, is the Struggle for Life (1888–9; Oslo, N.G.), in which a crowd of impoverished women and children is seen queuing for stale bread given away by a baker's shop on a bleak winter's day. The composition exploits the contrast of the foreground group against the bleak, snow-bound city street receding directly into the picture, just as it compares their pitiful struggle to the cruel indifference of the few individual passers-by. A reflection of the international bohemian life lived by Krohg himself is to be seen in some of his portraits from this time. His portrait of Gerhard Munthe (1885; Oslo, N.G.; see fig.) is typical of these in showing Krohg's fellow Norwegian painter in a characteristic setting, here a Copenhagen café that both artists frequented. The dominating foreground figure familiar from Krohg's earlier work is emphasized by the extensive use of black for the overcoat, which suggests the influence of Edouard Manet, in contrast to the rich blur of grey and gold in the background. In 1890 Krohg embarked on a period of continuous journalism and teaching: from 1890 to 1900 he was a regular contributor to the Christiania newspaper Verdens gang, and from 1910 to 1916 he wrote for Tidens tegn. His lively interviews, essays on art and artists, and concise and witty description of travels illustrated with his own drawings are observant, but on the whole far more positive than balanced criticism. From 1902 to 1909 Krohg taught in Paris at the Académie Colarossi, and in 1909, on his return to Christiania, he became Director (and a professor) at the newly founded Kunstakademi. Krohg's portraits of the 1890s preserve the style established during the previous decade, as in the elegant Sigurd Bodtker (1890s; Oslo, N.G.), who is shown seated at one end of an ornate sofa. Krohg's many self-portraits from this time onwards often show the painter at his easel or looking out of a window and are very painterly in execution, revealing in particular an enhanced response to colour values. Related changes are to be seen in later pictures from Skagen. The Seal Bank (c. 1897; Göteborg, Kstmus.), perhaps his finest sea painting, shows the return of a more aesthetic approach and an eye for the use of shades of blue and green. Also significant among Krohg's later works are his lively paintings of nudes, often seen in unguarded moments, as in the girl looking in a mirror in Toilette (1912; Oslo, N.G.). (Grove Art Online accessed 2007-10-19)

Realist (modern European fine arts styles)

19th century

women (female humans)

bread

social classes

elderly

paintings (visual works)

paintings

paint

80 cm (H) x 66 cm (W)

signed

Bergens billedgalleri

repository

Bergen, Norway

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