Väntan (Waiting)

Martina Müntzing is a practitioner of the classical figurative tradition, and few other Swedish artists command the art of painting with the same subtle skill and meticulousness. Müntzing takes great care when reproducing details from life. She lavishes so much attention on most details, and has such high regard for them all, that any single one, easily, could be removed from its original context and form a new picture (in its own right, with its own meaning). Art critic Clemens Poellinger drew attention to this in his review (published in Svenska Dagbladet 15 December 2020) of Müntzing’s exhibition I gemenskap och tystnad at CFHILL, Stockholm, 2020 – 2021: “Martina Müntzing’s realistic style is extremely detailed. Every groove in a corduroy trouser, every hole in a Stan Smith shoe and every hair in the eyebrows seems to be there, carefully accounted for as in a Renaissance painting”.

It’s worth pointing out, however, how the suggestion of reality in Müntzing’s work, often is offset against sketchily rendered backgrounds, which creates a fascinating interplay between precision and vagueness, in works like Sista snön / The Last Snow (2020, oil and pencil on canvas, 206 x 230 cm, Moderna Museet, Stockholm). The recognizability and representationalism of her paintings, somewhere between reality and illusion, often leaves the viewer with a multitude of, sometimes conflicting, impressions of closeness and distance, familiarity and surprise, fascination and amazement.

Müntzing’s exquisite painting is based on a familiarity with, and deep knowledge of, the Old Masters of previous generations. Her Resan till Cythere efter A. Watteau / Voyage to Cythera after A. Watteau (2009, gouache, 70 x 100 cm), for example, directly references Jean-Antoine Watteau’s (1684 – 1721) Pilgrimage to Cythera (c. 1718 – 1719, oil on canvas, Charlottenburg Palace, Berlin), Watteau’s second version of the same theme (Pèlerinage à l’île de Cythère, 1717, oil on canvas, 129 x 194 cm) in the Louvre, Paris.

Müntzing has also paid tribute to Hans Holbein (c. 1497 – 1543) in her famous double portrait (of her husband and herself) Ambassadörerna, efter Hans Holbein / The Ambassadors, after Hans Holbein (1998, oil on canvas, 205 x 209 cm, Helsingborg Museum of Art, Helsingborg, Sweden), which, obviously, is based on Holbein’s masterful double portrait The Ambassadors (1533, oil on oak, 207 x 209.5 cm, National Gallery, London), depicting Jean de Dinteville (1504 – 1555, French ambassador to the court of Henry VIII) and Georges de Selve (1508/1509 – 1541, Bishop of Lavaur) with its legendary example of painterly anamorphosis in the foreground’s vanitas theme.

Watteau makes another, albeit less obvious, appearance in Müntzing’s I morgon är en annan dag / Tomorrow is another day (2016 – 2018, oil on canvas, 165 x 300 cm, private collection). This large canvas (details of which grazes the cover of Martina Müntzing’s and Fredrik Sjöberg’s book of the same name from 2019) relates, as pointed out by Sjöberg, to Lotte Laserstein’s (1898 – 1993) masterpiece Abend über Potsdam / Evening over Potsdam (1930, oil on panel, 110 x 205 cm, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie). Even though the Berlin skyline has been exchanged for a distant view over Västberga industrial estate, south of Stockholm, the composition is similar and both paintings are characterized by a certain kind of bitter-sweet melancholy mood.

The studio interior with a group of seated youngsters also, however, echoes Lucian Freud’s (1922 – 2011) celebrated canvas Large Interior, W11, after Watteau (1981 – 1983, oil on canvas, 185.4 x 198.1 cm, formerly in the Paul G. Allen Collection, USA) which, in itself, references Watteau’s Commedia dell’arte-inspired Pierrot Content (c. 1712, oil on canvas, 35 x 31 cm [cropped in the 19th century], Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid). Ever since Müntzing, in her late teens, saw one of Freud’s exhibitions in London (at the Hayward Gallery) she’s been a great admirer of the artist, “I always return to Lucian Freud”, as proven by her recollection of the Hayward Gallery exhibition (in the radio program ‘Kulturlivet med Gunnar Bolin’ on SR, Sweden’s national public broadcasting company, 19 February 2022): “I was completely floored. It just hit me, the portraits, the presence of all those people”.

I morgon är en annan dag / Tomorrow is another day is a substantial genre painting, portraying a scene of everyday life, albeit with a psychological depth that is characteristic of Müntzing’s work. The viewer is presented with a room in which a group of individuals are gathered in an informal setting. The subjects themselves are rendered in a manner that captures their individual personalities as well as the underlying tension of the scene. The figures are distributed across the composition in a manner that suggests a casual, yet intimate gathering (however with a sense of invisible barriers). Müntzing’s painting is illustrative of her ability to explore the psychological dimensions of her subjects, providing viewers with an intimate glimpse into the human condition.

Prominent portrait painters often hone their skills (between commissions) by painting self-portraits. This, well-known, fact is supported by the production of artists like Jan van Eyck (c. 1390 – 1441), Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 – 1669) and Lucian Freud whose works Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?) (1433, oil on panel, 25.5 x 19 cm, National Gallery, London), Self-Portrait with Two Circles (c. 1665 – 1669, oil on canvas, 114.3 x 94 cm, Kenwood House, London, Iveagh Bequest) and Reflection (Self-Portrait) (1985, oil on canvas, 56.2 x 51.2 cm, private collection) bear witness to their greatness. An alternative to self-portraits, however, has often also been the depiction of family members and close relatives. Van Eyck, famously, depicted his wife (Portrait of Margaret van Eyck, 1439, oil on wood, 41.2 x 34.6 cm, Groeningemuseum, Bruges, the Netherlands), Rembrandt his son (Titus as a Monk, 1660, oil on canvas, 79.5 x 67.5 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) and Freud his daughter (Bella, 1981, oil on canvas, 30.5 x 35.5 cm, private collection).

Adhering to this established tradition in pictorial art (famously favoured by earlier Swedish artists like Carl Larsson [1853 – 1919]) Müntzing often depicts her own children in portraits or genre compositions. Two, out of four, models (if you exclude the adorable dog Lily) in I morgon är en annan dag / Tomorrow is another day, for example, can be identified as Müntzings son Olle (born 2003), sitting with his head in his hand on the back of the sofa, and Müntzing’s daughter Elsa (born 2005), in a striped sweater on the far left. Olle and Elsa recurs, as mentioned, in several of Müntzing’s paintings. Apart from I morgon är en annan dag / Tomorrow is another day, they also make up half the group in the poignant, and melancholic, family portrait Jag tänker på det i morgon / I Will Think About it Tomorrow (2013 – 2014, oil on canvas, 200 x 230 cm, Moderna Museet, Stockholm). This seemingly pastoral painting is reminiscent of similar scenes by Thomas Gainsborough (1727 – 1788), like The Gravenor Family (c. 1754, oil on canvas, 90.2 x 90.2 cm, Yale Center for British Art, USA, Paul Mellon Collection), albeit with the significant difference that Müntzing’s composition is psychologically charged (with brooding clouds darkening the, otherwise sunny, skies in the upper left corner of the canvas).

Other appearances by Olle and Elsa are to be found in Sista snön / The Last Snow where they, together with their parents, appear as eerily transparent figures in the borderland between then and now, dream and reality, with just their contours made out in pencil against the white background. Müntzing’s production allows, the attentive, viewer the opportunity, from a suitable distance, to follow Olle’s and Elsa’s coming of age. A journey stretching from childhood, via adolescence, to incipient adulthood. Canvases like Elsa (2013/2019, oil on canvas, 100 x 130 cm, whereabouts unknown) and Pojken / The Boy (2015, oil on canvas, 165 x 200 cm, Uppsala County, Uppsala, Sweden) lovingly depicts interiors with children in everyday situations. When Müntzing executed the suite Nära ögat (2020, oil on canvas, five individual paintings each measuring 206 x 108 cm) two of the canvases, Nära ögat, Elsa and Nära ögat, Olle, captured (against the background of a forested Nordic landscape) the likenesses of two teenagers, on the brink of adulthood, seemingly contemplating life from the vantage point of their isolated individual spaces.

Firestorm Foundation’s Väntan / Wait (2022, gouache on paper, 55 x 75 cm) and Imago (2024, oil on canvas, 205 x 205 cm) both demonstrate Müntzing’s continued painterly dialogue with her children. In Väntan / Wait we, once again, encounter the likeness of her son Olle. This time in the form of a (habitually) realistic and intimate depiction, fragmentarily focusing on his upper body and head, captured in three-quarters profile. The headphones that rest around his neck indicate that the artist has depicted him in connection with listening to music (thus thematically linking the composition to Pojken / The Boy from 2015). The scribbles, or graffiti (where the name Olle can be discerned), of the somewhat undefined background vaguely indicates a wall in an undisclosed setting. Müntzing’s depiction can be likened to a piece of pictorial poetry illustrating the love and affection that exists between artist and model, mother and son.

Imago presents the viewer with a completely different kind of composition. The overall impression generated by the canvas is a sense of dynamic movement, generated by the six different poses struck by daughter Elsa. The artistic concept of one and the same figure appearing several times, caught in movement, in a single image (what art historical image analysis refers to as “simultaneity succession”) traces its roots back Egyptian art of antiquity and is used by Müntzing to create an interesting scene that focuses on movement and balance, based on the shifting positions of hands and feet. This preoccupation, paired with the model’s T-shirt (a souvenir from a stay in Paris?), subconsciously recalls Parisian painter Edgar Degas (1834 – 1917). Dega’s celebrated renditions of, often white clad, ballet dancers like Répétition d’un ballet sur la scene / Ballet Rehearsal on Stage (1874, oil on canvas, 65 x 81 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, bequest of comte Isaac de Camondo, 1911), exhibited at the 1st impressionist exhibition in 1874, demonstrated his masterly depiction of bodies in movement. Here Müntzing does the same whilst updating the theme and giving it a contemporary look. As is sometimes the case with Müntzing’s works the background gives the impression of being “unfinished” with unpainted areas. An interesting exception is the flowering twig of, what appears to be, Rosa dumalis visible to the right.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation