Thursday, February 14, 2013

Kroyer's Great Love

Midsummer's Eve Bonfire on the Beach at Skagen,1906,150x257 cm

Whenever I hear the “Swedish Rhapsody” played on WQXR, New York City’s classical music station, I am reminded that Hugo Alfven, the composer, stole the most beautiful painter’s wife who ever lived away from Peder Severin Kroyer, one of the finest painters who ever lived.  God knows it is hard enough for great painters to find true romance, since most of their time is spent painting pictures, talking about art and planning their next masterpiece. So it seems, from my distant vantage point, that Alfven committed one of the most despicable acts imaginable. 
 
But Kroyer was first and foremost a painter.  He tore this painful story from his heart and set it down on canvas.  The result was a masterpiece of personal narrative that is unrivaled in the history of art.  One critic likened it to a “theatrical ensemble…with all the requisites for an Ibsen or Strindberg psychological drama.”  I’ll endeavor to explain.

Kroyer was born in Stavanger, Norway in 1851, but raised in Copenhagen by an uncle’s family because his unwed mother was declared mentally unfit to raise him.  He started his art studies at age 9 and developed into a remarkable painter with a prodigious talent, a bon vivant nature and, it seems, a sturdy ego.  He once said that he was the fastest painter around, only Zorn was faster.  The plein air paintings of the two Scandinavians made a deep impression on the Spaniard Sorolla, another master of bravura painting.

Himself in 1897

Summer Evening with Marie on the Beach at Skagen, 1899
 Kroyer’s most famous paintings were created in Skagen, a remote Danish fishing village and one of the enchanted art colonies that arose in Europe in the 19th Century.  He first visited Skagen in 1882, and right away alienated Michael Ancher, the resident painter who had invited him there, because he painted a scene or two that Ancher considered his territory.   Their differences were soon sorted out, and for several years, this colony of artists and poets was one big happy family.  The paintings of Ancher and his equally talented wife, Anna. were good, solidly painted works.  Kroyer’s were brilliant.  Kroyer remained a traveling, cosmopolitan artist of great reputation, but spent his summers in Skagen. 

Marie in 1890


Marie in 1891

Her's and His Portraits on a 5 7/8 x 7 1/2" canvas,1898
In 1892

In Paris in 1888, Kroyer fell in love with the beautiful Marie Triepcke, 16 years his junior, an art student he had briefly instructed a few years earlier in Copenhagen.  They married at her parents’ home in Germany on July 23, 1889 after a whirlwind romance.  She was his “great love” and the inspiration for some of his most famous paintings.  They had one child, Vibeke, born in January 1895.  But the marriage soured due to Kroyer’s growing manic depression, believed to have been inherited from his mother.   Much more seriously, Kroyer had been diagnosed with syphilis in 1886, a killer disease in the 19th Century that eventually led to his dementia, total blindness and early death in Skagen at the age of 58 in 1909. 

In 1902, Marie met Alfven, a notorious womanizer, who became enamored with her after seeing one of the many pictures Kroyer had painted of his beloved muse.   Marie was exhausted from dealing with Kroyer’s mood swings and thus was susceptible to Alfven’s practiced advances.  In 1905, Marie won the divorce that Kroyer had bitterly contested.  She had written her lawyer that her relationship with Kroyer had become “a living hell…all humanity and compassion has been ripped out of him.”  Years later, Marie, who died at the age of 73 in 1940, reportedly recanted, asking herself how she could have left that “good, kind-hearted, loveable man.”  Marie had been sharply criticized for deserting Vibeke, who stayed with Kroyer while she ran off with Alfven.  Marie gave birth to a second daughter in 1906 and eventually married Alfven in 1912. 

Kroyer had tried desperately to hold on to Marie.  When Alfven arrived on the scene, this highly regarded painter was an emotional train wreck about to happen, already suffering from dementia and only a few years away from his horrible death.  Painting was his only salvation, so of course he got right to it.  First he did a preparatory oil sketch in 1903, one year after Alfven’s appearance.  Then he stretched a 5 by 8 foot canvas and, in 1906, one year after the divorce, unveiled his huge masterpiece showing a great crowd of the artistic and influential Skagen community gathered around a large bonfire.  The painting, “Midsummer’s Eve Bonfire on the Beach at Skagen,” is now in the collection of the Skagens Museum, as are many other Kroyer paintings. 

Most of the more than 40 figures in the painting are identifiable from numerous preparatory drawings, pastels and oil sketches Kroyer made for his marvelous and seemingly innocent depiction of the nocturnal celebration of the summer solstice.  But Kroyer has placed Vibeke, his fragile 11-year-old daughter, standing in the extreme lower left hand corner of the picture, dressed in a white summer frock, her hair neatly braided.  Vibeke's rapt gaze is focused on the bonfire, but she must also see to the left of the bonfire a man and woman standing together in the background, leaning against a boat, their eyes cast downward in stark contrast to the animated mood of revelry depicted throughout the scene.  The man, his hands in his pockets, is Hugo Alfven.  The woman is Marie Triebcke Kroyer, the mother who had abandoned her to the care of the doomed father.

Happy Valentine’s Day!